This chapter discusses an important governance issue that has unfairly received little attention in higher education studies. It concerns the proliferation of agencies, commonly referred to as agencification. In higher education, research on system-level governance typically focuses on the (changed) relationship between government and institutions. Other key stakeholders such as agencies receive less attention, even though their influence on the system is clearly discernible. Agencies are (have become) key players in the complex and iterative interactions between internal and external stakeholders, which collectively help shape transformations in higher education. As the (empirical) HE studies on this topic are very limited, this contribution focuses on experiences from other public sectors to draw lessons from them for higher education, resulting in a research agenda for governance research in higher education to better understand the possible effects of the changing role of agencies

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