A new phase of higher education started since the 1990s in which a remarkable transformation took place in the higher education system in Bangladesh, largely based on market-driven economic forces. The move started with enacting the Private University Act 1992 on August 9, 1992 (Ministry of Education, 1992). Alongside this change that established the private university system, the state also initiated a number of reform programmes in this sector under the supervision and the guidance of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs). One of these reform policies is the introduction of a "Strategic Plan for Higher Education in Bangladesh: 2006-2026" (SPHE) (University Grants Commission, 2006) with the support of the World Bank. The state identified this plan as a ground-breaking initiative to address the current problems and issues of higher education and it recommended a set of prescriptions to the problems (World Bank, 2009). The preliminary review shows that the objective of this policy is to connect higher education with market-driven economic forces (Kabir, 2010).

Neoliberal policies of the IFIs have played a crucial role in reshaping socio-economic policies in developing countries since the 1980s (Steger & Roy 2010, p. 11). From the 1980s, it has been a worldwide trend for universities to adopt commercial models of knowledge, skills, curriculum, finance, accounting, and management organisation (Levidow, 2007). However, the spread of the neoliberal policy model across the globe is connected with policy borrowing argues Steiner-Khamis (2004, 2006). The emergence of globalisation provides the impetus to borrow policy from one context to another in the name of ‘best practice’ (Turbin, 2001). More importantly, polices are influenced by the imperatives of the global economy (Rizvi & Lingard, 2010). Consequently, in many ways, today’s policies are encircled by the “well-travelled” reforms, mostly known as the quasi-market, neoliberal, or hyperliberal reforms (Steiner-Khamsi & Quist, 2000). Thus, the analysis of the policy borrowing model is treated as a useful tool to explain the politics of adopting neoliberal policy in education sector from one context to another (Steiner-Khamsi, 2012). At the same way, the policy study model also helps to critically explore the processes of translation and recontexualisation of a policy in local settings (Ball, 1998).

However, the literature that has come out from two directions – comparative education and policy study – have been concerned with the transatlantic, transpacific and inter-European policy transfer (Steiner-Khamsi, 2006; Whitty, 2012). Little attention has been paid to explain the micro-politics of policy borrowing in the developing countries’ perspective like Bangladesh. I consider the global stage of neoliberal globalisation as macro stage, but how the varieties of local interests formulate neoliberal ideas in higher education policies at the state level in Bangladesh needs to be examined. This paper explores how policy-makers in Bangladesh deal with neoliberal ideas and shape them either by surrendering and taking them as complete panacea or by re-designing them keeping in mind the local contexts.

In particular, this paper broadly understands the processes in adopting the neoliberal ideas and thinking in the higher education policies at the state level in Bangladesh. In responding to this broad objective this paper develops three specific questions: what strategies are being used by policy makers to reshape and recontextualise neoliberal agenda in the higher education sector? How are the varieties of interest group contributing to the formation of the neoliberal agenda in higher education policies? Why neoliberal ideas and thinking have been incorporated in the higher education policies in Bangladesh?  

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