Piloting Policy Through Projects – How the European Universities Initiative Feeds into EU Higher Education Policy

of transnational alliances among HE institutions, but these alliances also ought to serve the development of further EU policy tools in the area of HE including a European Degree. The most recent launch of the FOREU4ALL project, which brings together 41 EUI funded HE institution alliances in a community of practice, could not be a better illustration that the EUI indeed serves as a tool to pilot prospective EU policies. It is not a novelty that the European Commission relies on EU funding beneficiaries to shape future policies. A prominent example is the area of EU regional policy where project beneficiaries are involved during the programming of the policy. What is striking about the EUI is this explicit set-up of participatory policy making which relies on project-based networks. Against this backdrop, this research provides a bottom-up perspective to the so far reactive perspective on projectification in EU public policy. Extending the so-far top-down focus of the projectification literature, I ask: How does the implementation of projectified policies feed into EU policy making? To answer this question, a theoretical framework is developed that combines a projectification perspective with policy feedback thinking and bottom-up Europeanization. The analysis yields that HE institutions do not only make use of the interactive governance of the EUI to re-use the opportunity structures that let them foster their cooperation, but also to shape prospective EU HE policy.