Policy Travel in Regionalisation of Higher Education: The Case of Bologna Process in Africa

There has been a growing interest among scholars of International Relations and Comparative Public Policy on issues of policy travel since the 1990s. Even though regional higher education policies are developed within certain intergovernmental policy settings encompassing shared interests among states of regional groupings, they tend to travel across continents impacting other regions, sometimes in quite different contexts. In this regard, the policy travel of the Bologna process of Europe into other regions could be a very good example as one of the pioneers of higher education policy harmonisation initiative. Since its inception in 1998, the policy has managed to attract the attention of other regions, including Africa, reshaping higher education policies at national sub-regional and continental levels. Explaining similar scenarios, a considerable number of literatures on the inter-regional movement of ideas and practices in social policy has been developed over the last twenty years through various concepts including ‘policy transfer’, ‘policy diffusion’, ‘cross-national attraction’, ‘policy borrowing’ and ‘policy convergence’. This particular paper explores the notion of policy travel through the conceptions of ‘policy transfer’ and ‘policy diffusion’ and addresses the underlying question of how the Bologna process of Europe travelled to the various sub-regions of Africa.