Towards reflexive governance in European higher education? The role of transnational communities of practice

This paper argues that contemporary European policy-making in higher education is increasingly organised around the production, transfer, evaluation and emulation of practices. The study explores these developments within the analytical framework of reflexive governance, by assessing to what extent the activities of the E4 group (European umbrella organisations representing major stakeholders) can be construed as a system of collective learning. Relying on a combination of theory-driven and inductive qualitative methodology, the analysis focuses on three definitional elements of the communities of practice literature: collective learning, reflexive capacity building and pervasive pragmatism. The findings indicate that communities of practice engage in an ongoing negotiation of meaning around common European frameworks for quality assurance and teaching and learning. Such negotiation takes place through the production of secondary interpretations in the form of “boundary objects”: policy frameworks, self-reflective tools, principles, toolkits and others. This allows stakeholder groups to actively build their roles simultaneously as experts and as advocates in transnational cooperation structures, while maintaining their distinct organisational identities. The study concludes that while this dynamic carries a potential to induce reflexivity in European higher education governance, its future sustainability remains precarious.