Future Scenarios for the European Higher Education Area: Exploring the Potential of 'Experimentalist Governance'

The launch of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) in 2010 posed many of the central questions already asked of the Bologna Process (BP) with a renewed urgency, reflecting a growing sense among participants of a possible exhaustion of the initial process. Taking as its point of departure the irrevocably “soft law” character of the BP as a pan-European process, the present paper seeks to develop an understanding of how the process might be re-energized with reference to a model of “experimentalist governance” derived from the work of Sabel and Zeitlin. The paper first maps the functioning of the BP to date relative to the strictures of this experimentalist model, particularly identifying the absence of a strong dynamic of iterative policy learning as a major shortcoming. Building on this diagnosis, four broad lessons are then drawn for the possible future development of the EHEA. These lessons concern the role of expertise (and experts) in the process; the representative function of European-level stakeholder groups; the higher education policy discourse of the European Commission; and the reframing of national higher education policy debates in a manner that overcomes an identified logic of “discursive closure”.