University Governance in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Japan: Autonomy and Shared Governance after New Public Management Reforms

Comparing and contrasting reforms of governance arrangements in higher education systems in Europe (the United Kingdom and the Netherlands provide two very different examples) with those in Japan, the paper focuses on the consequences of state-level governance reform for shared governance in the university. It gives a systematic comparison based on the ‘autonomy scorecard’ and applies notions from the ‘governance equalizer.’ The paper considers major New Public Management (NPM) governance reforms in the three countries.’ It shows that universities remain mostly autonomous in the UK, while ‘post-NPM’ mixed governance predominates in Japan and the Netherlands, with each country affecting institutional autonomy differently. In all cases, institutional autonomy increased in some respects and diminished in others. Concise comparisons are made for four dimensions (organisation, finance, staffing and education) and per underlying indicator. Executive heads’ (Presidents’) appointments and quality control over education are taken as strategically important indicators for shared governance within institutions. Managerial and external guidance grew more strongly in the two European countries than in Japan, though academic self-governance declined in all three