Transnational turn and national models of higher education - The case of Finland

The purpose of the article is to problematize the relationship between the Nordic democratic public higher education tradition and transnational market-driven knowledge economy policies. The article illustrates this development with two cases: quality assurance and internationalization policies, where external demands, based mostly on market ideologies, have been introduced with apparently transnational incentives but having national implementations. These transnational pressures are related to a kind of soft governance of higher education policy, characterized by networked decision-making and use of expert consultants, which possibly promotes flexible decision-making and efficiency, but may simultaneously produce adverse outcomes to transparent and democratic decision-making. Keywords higher education policy outsourcing of policy internationalization of higher education quality assurance English as medium of instruction