Assuming that European coordination is a political system rather than a process of integration, the coordination of the interaction between EU processes and national policies come to the fore. This paper looks at ideas, interests and instruments from the perspective of European level actors to grasp the configuration of European governance to meet the political goals related  to the ‘Europe of Knowledge’. The European governance perspective is an alternative approach to understand the role of political discourses and practices in shaping the environment of higher education systems.

The emphasis of European governance is on interaction rather than on multi-level governance. Since the 1990s, governance has assumed a central position (A. Kjaer 2010, P. Kjaer 2010, Osborne 2010, Rosenau and Czempiel 2000, Salamon 2002) in public policies. Approaches such as New Public Management, New Governance and New Public Governance are often pointed out as illustrations of the shift from governing to governance. According to Rhodes, governance is about managing networks (Rhodes 1996). This notion pervaded the 2001 EC White Paper on Governance. While the Lisbon agenda corresponds to a strategic objective of the Union, the Commission envisaged reform of European governance as a strategic objective of institutional overhaul supposedly to allow better steering of networks and affect the member states.

Systems of governance established at the European, national and institutional levels develop as a result of the interaction of actors driven by different values, interests, strategies and power (Kennett, 2010). Governance reflects a shift from unilateral (central authorities or individual higher education institutions) to an interactionist focus emphasizing the complexity, dynamics and diversity of these processes (Kooiman, 1999, 2003, 1994). Ideas, interests, instruments and institutions pervade interaction, while being reflected on the capacity governing actors or institutions have to act, and on the contexts in which interactions come about.

Capano and Piattoni noted that Lisbon’s ‘governance architecture’ “has effectively led governments not only to reform their higher education systems, but also to interact with multiple stakeholders in a co-ordinative and communicative manner, in such a way as to consolidate and routinise the Lisbon ‘script’” (Capano and Piattoni 2011: 601) and that “the ‘Lisbonization of higher education has had diverse, unclear results in terms of policy implementation, within national policy arenas” (Capano and Piattoni 2011: 601). The crux of the matter is that Lisbon’s ‘governance architecture’, in Capano and Piattoni’s terminology, was not successful in producing policy outcomes. Policy outcomes entail a deeper transformation of national higher education systems.

However, European policies have been developing the Lisbon ‘script’ by supporting the coordination and communication of policy reforms (Capano & Piattoni, 2011), and promoting ideational and organizational components of governance architecture (Borrás & Radaelli, 2011). While the ideational component is made of political targets such as the establishment of EHEA, organizational requirements are to be found in policy instruments and in formal and informal organizational arrangements. In the context of education policies, the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) was the policy instrument used to ensure that policy goals are implemented and achieved. The OMC promotes change but hardly ensures convergence and national and institutional embeddedness of policy intents (Veiga & Amaral, 2006, 2009); on the one hand, due to the dynamic process of structural change and, on the other hand, due to the diffusion and dispersion of interpretation at institutional level (Neave & Veiga, 2013). The EHEA as a governance ‘script’ “is being developed by ‘coordination of coordination’, by the creation of a common grammar that provides model, concepts and resources, and influences national discourses and decision on higher education issues” (A. Magalhães, Veiga, Ribeiro, Sousa, & Santiago, 2013, p. 10).

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