This article presents an assessment of the impact and implications of the international mobilities operating in the national public policy environment. In fact, patterns of transformations that take place in national higher education systems are generating diverse and complex outcomes in different countries, in ways that may preclude a simple relation between international policy prescriptions and communication and policy change in higher education. In this way, the different processes that constitute globalisation within local spaces demand recognition of the importance of specificities in their constitution. In short, the starting point to understanding these processes seems to require detecting the specificity of complex dimensions in which the dynamic interaction between global and local takes place. In order to illustrate this point, the author presents the case of policy developments related to the dramatic private expansion of Paraguay's higher education sector since the 1990s. (Contains 5 notes and 1 table.)