Many policy makers and scholars consider higher education to be a key driver for states' implementation of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs); however, the impact of higher education in national SDGs adoption likely differs, based on features and characteristics of particular states. Hence, this study has two aims: (a) to analyse the public…

Within the scholarship on internationalisation in higher education, transnational networks are seldom mentioned and even less studied. However, recent EU policy initiatives have attempted to enhance this form of internationalisation in order to tackle issues of employability, skills and competences and innovative curriculum development. Within…

The 21st century has been called the "age of the city". The concentration of human activity is what makes cities such an important space of opportunity and challenge. This article views urban development challenges from an education perspective and argues that education must be viewed as an important intermediary for capitalising on the…

Education and lifelong learning are increasingly being mobilised to address the global environmental crisis and accompanying sustainability challenges. This article discusses the many roles of education about and for sustainable development, drawing on evidence and arguments put forward in the 2016 Global Education Monitoring Report,…

This is an edited version of 2 speeches given by Hywel Ceri Jones during 2017 which constitutes the story of the birth and development of the Erasmus programme to its present status as Erasmus +. In this text the place of education and training in the political and legal context of the development of the EU is highlighted. This presentation…

Recognising that the current paradigm of development which is fossil fuel based and high on consumption and waste is not a viable option for the future, developing countries need to take an alternative path towards sustainable development. All too often, they merely imitate solutions which are already being discarded in the West. The confidence…

This article aims at clarifying whether and how University Business Cooperation (UBC) can be expanded from knowledge transfer to the core field of education. Higher education institutions exert a decisive influence by teaching students to understand academic theories, methods and areas of knowledge, contributing to their cultural enrichment and…

Teaching and teachers have recently become the centre of attention of policy makers and researchers. The general idea here is that teaching matters. Yet the question that is either not asked or is only answered implicitly is why teaching matters. In this article I engage with this question in the context of a wider discussion about the role,…

This article briefly reviews the evolving role of major institutions thought to form, reproduce and transform individual as well as collective identities and values, with an emphasis on the impact of state vs market forces via educational systems. This is accompanied by a discussion of various pressures against the state to exert social control on…

There is a prime necessity to make a distinction between "education" and "learning." Learning is a human instinct. Education is not. Education is about learning processes designed by adults for the young. In the past two centuries in the industrial era, education has developed into society-wide "school" systems. Young…

This article evaluates the outcomes of the efforts of Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries to make their education systems more effective in enhancing broader social and economic goals. It focuses on those 11 Central and Eastern European countries which became members of the EU in 2004 or following this date. First, it presents a short…

This article provides an ethnographic account of the tensions arising from the different ways of building authority as teachers and the role of higher education in establishing teachers' legitimacy in Russia through the specific example of religious education. After state atheism was abandoned in 1991, an unprecedented demand for religious…

Whereas in 2000 the EU had heralded the knowledge-based society with as its motto "with more and better jobs and stronger social cohesion", the past decade has led to greater inequality and (at best) a status-quo in poverty. EU2020 seems to acknowledge this failure and aims to reconnect social inclusion with the knowledge-based strategy.…

Since its formal inception in 1976, EU cooperation in the field of education has known a number of major landmarks: the launch of the Erasmus programme in 1987, the inclusion of education for the first time in the Treaty (Maastricht, 1992) and, last but not least, the role given to education and training in the new EU 10-year economic and social…

How effective is EU cooperation in higher education? This article treats the issue as one of effectiveness in policy-making. What are the policy ideas which the EU wishes to feed into a policy domain where it has to operate largely through political cooperation and a modest degree of incentive funding? What outcomes are possible? The question is…