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Higher Education Policy

, Volume 28, Issue 2, pp 215–234 | Cite as

Higher Education Reform in Italy: Tightening Regulation Instead of Steering at a Distance

  • Davide Donina
  • Michele Meoli
  • Stefano Paleari
Article
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Abstract

In December 2010, a comprehensive reform (Law 240/2010, or ‘Gelmini reform’) changed the institutional governance and internal organization of Italian state universities. This paper investigates the redefinition of the state role in the light of public management reform narratives, linking them to the Governance Equalizer Model to evaluate how the on-going reform process has affected the power sharing arrangement and coordination mechanisms in the Italian higher education system thus far. Rhetoric of reform was influenced by the New Public Management narrative; Law 240 was presented as a fundamental change to the traditional Italian governance regime, based on detailed state regulation and academic self-governance. In practice, contradictions between the rhetoric of the reform and the effectiveness of implementation are evident: Italian reform complies more with the Neo-Weberian narrative and it did not have any substantial impact on power distribution.

Keywords

university governance higher education reform public management reform narratives governance regime Italy Gelmini reform 
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Notes

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge support by Fondazione Cariplo. We are grateful to the two anonymous peer reviewers for their useful comments. We also thank the participants at the workshop ‘Policies for Science and Higher Education in Europe’, Bergamo (Italy), June 2013, specially Manuel Heitor; and the participants of the 10th International Workshop on Higher Education Reforms ‘Looking Back–Looking Forward’, Ljubljana (Slovenia), October 2013, where previous versions of this paper were presented.

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Copyright information

© International Association of Universities 2014

Authors and Affiliations

  • Davide Donina
    • 1
    • 2
  • Michele Meoli
    • 1
    • 3
  • Stefano Paleari
    • 1
    • 3
  1. 1.CCSE — Cisalpino Institute for Comparative Studies in Europe, University of BergamoBergamo — Città altaItaly
  2. 2.Department of Economics and ManagementUniversity of PaviaPaviaItaly
  3. 3.Department of EngineeringUniversity of BergamoDalmine (BG)Italy

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