This paper is about development of academic culture through a doctoral education partnership program in Educational Sciences, a collaboration between an Ethiopian and a Swedish university, funded by the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida). Since the late 1990s, doctoral education has been seen by national and international aid organizations as a key component for locally relevant capacity building, poverty reduction and development. At the same time, such programs are shaped by global policy ideas about relevance, knowledge society, quality, and measurable results. Taking the partnership program as an analytical point of departure, the paper investigates Sida’s governing rationales in relation to international policy shifts and in particular the World Bank’s evolving framings of higher and tertiary education. We ask: What forms of academic cultures are produced and shape the formation of doctoral education, in the tension between locally defined relevance and global policy ideals? The paper draws on historical institutionalism (Thelen, 1999) to trace agents and processes in the formation of doctoral education design. We pay attention to epistemic and geopolitical asymmetries in North South academic relations (Connell, 2017), and to how university governance and donor political economy can shape academic work (Mamdani, 2016). The analysis is based on reports and meeting minutes from Sida’s planning and review meetings with the partnership program, interviews with stakeholders, Sida evaluations and strategy documents, and World Bank reports. In the 1990s, Sida’s sandwich model was consolidated as a template for partnership cooperation that combined studies at the home university with periods at a partner university abroad. Over time, Sida’s cooperation shifted from producing PhDs and strengthening supervision capacity in the 1990s to building academic cultures in the 2000s through peer review routines and research management. As the World Bank’s policy framing shifted from a crisis and efficiency-oriented agenda to knowledge society rationales, Sida increasingly aligned doctoral education support with relevance, quality and measurable results. In the 2020s, Swedish policy added stronger emphasis on sustainable research environments, including conditions for academic freedom. Overall, the findings point to the making of hybrid academic cultures, where doctoral education strengthens locally defined relevance (Connell, 2017; Mamdani, 2016) while simultaneously internalise global Mode 2 rationales for societal usefulness and accountability (Nowotny, Scott, and Gibbons, 2003). An implication is that “academic culture building” depends on how external policy ideas are translated into local institutional arrangements and knowledge norms, and on whether complementary post-graduate career structures can stabilise change.

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