The Role of Governments and Institutions: the Portuguese and the Brazilian cases

The general trend of the higher education systems has been a large expansion associated with funding restrictions, while the attitudes of the governments changed from centralised control to autonomy of the universities and self‐regulation. At the same time evaluation systems became common practice. The universities from Portugal and Brazil are facing similar changes but they were able to implement successfully a strategy of starting their own evaluation procedures before the governments were capable of taking decisions about the evaluation systems. In this way they had significant starting advantage when subsequently negotiating the national evaluation system with the Ministry.