Education evaluation- a process different however relevant to quality assurance and accreditation- has been theorized as one of the most powerful governmental regimes for regulating education systems and their relations to the states and society today (Grimaldi, 2020). This is achieved through strong governance technologies of surveillance for accountability and improvement that transform power/knowledge nexuses (Dean, 2010; Foucault, 1991, 1995; Lemke, 2007) and re-regulate, as we argue, both the boundary relations between Higher Education (HE), the state and societies as well as relations within HE and internal rules of distribution of power (Bernstein, 2000).  Grimaldi (2020, p. 4) states that “evaluation contributes to and is constitutive of various political projects that work across national boundaries” ranging from the neoliberalisation of education, by governing it as an educational market, to the re-organization of public education along New Public Management rationalities. What these processes construct is “a commensurate space of measurement” (Lewis & Lingard, 2015, p. 621), that is a space rendered into outcome oriented, numerical, calculable, technocratic and managerial forms of exercising power in education internationally (Ball, 1998; Lewis & Lingard, 2015; Ball, Foreword in Grimaldi, 2020).

This kind of topological developments have been significant in literally manifesting “that power produces knowledge; that power and knowledge directly imply one another” (Foucault, 1995, p. 27) as legislation, guidelines, standards, criteria and reports have been gradually materializing a changing landscape of HE governance wherein new knowledge has been produced as an effect of power to govern/render intelligible (a)new subjects of a particular “quality” (e.g. institutions, social actors) and simultaneously be governed as per these subjects’ responses to their own and the evaluation agencies’ constant re-constitution. Constant re-constitution as the subjects and objects of evaluation has been theorized as the making and re-making of subjectivities immersed in the power/ knowledge relations enabled in this HE site of practice (Sarakinioti & Philippou, 2020).

From this perspective we problematise in the present study the changes of HE as a complex governmental site of practice undergoing processes towards its Europeanisation, mainly through the adjustment of national HE systems to the “standards” and “guidelines” of the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) as constituted in the Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance in the European Higher Education Area (ESG) (2015). Our analysis focuses on tworather newly established relevantnational HE QAA frameworks of two EHEA member states, Greece and Cyprus. The two cases are compared over a similar timeframe, from the early 2010s to 2020, that is the period when in response to Bologna Process, national policies on HE QQA had been implemented in both counties. In particular, through the comparative exploration of ESG implementation in the Cypriot and Greek HE systems, we raise questions on how the policy discourse on QAA of EHEA intervenes into the HE the systems of its member states operating for their reconstruction towards standardisation and “quality culture”. We utilise Foucauldian theoretical lenses (Foucault, 1991), to understand the policy processes of ESG implementation and how knowledge/power relations are constituting dominant discourses. Our approach to discourse analysis to HE QAA policy implementation is operationalised through Bernstein’s conceptualization on boundaries (2000) and the theoretical idea of policy recontextualisation (Roderston, 2011; Wodak & Fairclough, 2010). Our aim is to make sense of the dominant forms and the complexity of social relations through which power and knowledge are brought into play as regulative devices of state-based HE discourses (text and practices) in the two systems of HE in response to the principles and guidelines of ESG.

Our discourse analysis draws on official documentation on HE QAA at European and national level, as materialised both in texts and practices (Ball, 2015). In particular, we have analysed: a) the ESG (2015) and b) the two national frameworks of HE QAA; the national legislations (Laws 4009/2011, 4653/2020 for Greece and Laws 136(I) of 2015, 47(I) of 2016 for Cyprus) and the main accreditation technical materials produced by the two national agencies of QAA (HAHE (ex HQA) for Greece and CYQAA for Cyprus) to support and guide the implementation of the accreditation procedures at the institutional level of the universities. For conducting the analysis, we mobilize the concept of boundary as the foundational concept in Bernstein’s theory, representing his methodological efforts to describe systematically the demarcations that separate various fields of influence, the locus where meanings are constituted and reconstituted (Berstein, 2000). Following Robertson (2011) we utilise the boundaries for identifying the re-bordering and re-ordering processes which reconfigure, territorially and functionally, the state scale along spatial levels from global to local and through the production of legitimate knowledge/power distribution to the agents involved on the quality of HE. Such an operationalization of boundaries allows us to employ a form of critical discourse analysis that treats policy processes brought about by ΕΗΑΕ and ESG to govern the operation of HE systems in Greece and Cyprus through the institutionalisation of national systems of HE evaluation as a recontexualising process (Wodak & Fairclough, 2010; van Leeuwen 2008). We mobilise this understanding to trace the moves from the European context, in which the hegemonic discourse on HE QAA is produced, to the two state-based contexts of HE in which it is reproduced, disseminated and transformed. Analyzing how two member-states of the EHEA -Cyprus and Greece- respond to the ESGs as a European exemplar of HE QAA, we showed how a form of centralized decentralization of governmental control over the two HE sectors, exercised especially through the establishment of the national agencies of QAA, has been shaped in the legal/legislative field and how this bounds national agencies and universities within each national jurisdiction to particular modes of being governed as well as of governing others across the time and through the national reforms promoted. Our analysis is thus shedding light to the trajectories of these processes as well as to their often unpredictable courses, as an understanding of “power as productive” allows and indeed encourages.

A new complex landscape of HE is shaped through the de-centred regulative devices of the European HE QAA in Greece and Cyprus. Two modalities of relations between the states, the societies and the HE systems are found, helping us interpret striking differences in the recontexualisation of European discourse on HE quality assurance. The Greek case points toward “conflicting narratives of education change” (Zambeta, 2002, p. 638) that seem to have affected the development and outcome of HE reform on QAA. The commitment to implement the Bologna agenda has never been questioned at the level of official education policy in Greece. However, the official discourse on HE evaluation, as inscribed in national legislation, has been rather fragmented and blurred in terms of what is recognized as valid relations between the state and the agents involved, that is HQA and HE institutions. This results in instability in the processes of reform and seems to slow down the overall implementation of EHEA QAA guidelines in Greek HE. One the other hand, Cyprus is a case that manages to articulate a rather strong narrative on the need for strong relations between the state, HE, society and the economy. The dominant meaning that this articulation has taken, also at a time of “crisis”, connects education to the economic prosperity of Cypriot society. Currently, this is a strong narrative of the official discourse that operates as a regime of truth for Cypriot education and society, allowing the quick and without strong resistance implementation of policies such as HE QAA, and indeed as our findings for HE QAA indicate, in forms that recontextualize and relate quality assurance to measurability and performativity (Ball, 1998; Lawn, 2011).

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