Governing European University Alliances: The Hybridisation of Projects and Permanence

European University Alliances are both long term strategic partnerships and projects with deliverables and deadlines. This means Universities involved in these Alliances must come up with a way to organise between permanence and temporality. As a conceptual contribution, we propose Temporary Meta-Organisations (TMOs) and Permanent Meta-Organisations (PMOs) as distinct organisational types that capture these temporal dynamics. We then undertake a rubric-guided and discursive qualitative analysis on over 50 documents examining first cohort of seventeen European University Alliances. Empirically, by foregrounding temporality, the article shows how European University Alliances do not resolve the tension between project organisation and permanence, but in some ways, actively sustain it, revealing hybrid organisation as a distinctive governance response to contemporary European higher education policy.