The transformation of steering and governance in Higher Education: funding and evaluation as policy instruments.

This paper focuses on policy implementation in higher education (HE) to be analysed through the evolution and transformation of the policy instruments, namely those related to the Government funding and evaluation. The research questions are: to what extent instruments can reveal the evolution of policy rationales and justifications? How instruments emerged, and become institutionalised, affecting and being affected by the characteristics of national configuration of HE systems? Whether and how they produce desired effects or evolve in unpredictable ways, generating unexpected results, playing new roles and functionalities? The evolution of the instruments seems to be dependent on some characteristics of the context and some key features of the instruments. The development has been often inspired by NPM principles, which aimed at increasing steering capacity of the policy maker on one side, and university role and autonomy on the other. The common narrative is then declined in very different ways among countries, and instruments implementation reveals the extent to which it is adapted to the existing characters (dominant paradigm) of the HE system.