Governance challenges across sectors and globally, and their relevance to Higher Education

This paper describes emerging challenges and patterns of governance across a variety of sectors globally, in Europe and the UK, and examines critically the ways in which different fields of endeavour reflect on and respond to such trends in their theoretical models and research practices. The aim is to consider the extent to which the governance of universities and colleges should be considered within the larger context of governance within 21st-century societies. This derives from growing evidence that traditional patterns of governance are coming under strain in many other domains – in banking and financial services (where recent crises have been attributed to failures of governance); in multi-national, including energy companies (where similar concerns have been expressed about ethical and environmental abuses); and in government, at local, national, European and indeed international levels (with regard to issues of legitimacy and efficiency). Thus, the paper will explore the extent to which there are competing and/or complementary theoretical and methodological models of governance which are relevant to higher education governance regimes. It will ask whether and how can these other debates and experiences inform policy and academic debates that attempt to establish the best constitutional and organizational frameworks for the conduct of (collaborative) research, scholarship and teaching in universities