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This paper aims to ask how the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) has orchestrated a sustainable development (SD) agenda in its international policy since 2020.

By drawing on theoretical ideas around policy orchestration as a key UN governing strategy and applying them to the analysis of the progression of the SD agenda in the EHEA, the paper conducts a thematic analysis of six recent key EHEA international policy documents and 19 interviews with key Bologna stakeholders in France, Germany and Italy.

The resultant analysis uncovers three overarching key themes that show the EHEA has the capacity to mitigate pitfalls in the UN’s SD agenda; some weaknesses of the UN’s orchestration of SD are translated into weaknesses in the EHEA’s formulation of its SD agenda; and the further development of an SD agenda as an essential direction of EHEA’s work. The paper then goes on to discuss how EHEA policies only mention SD discourse, omit concrete plans for its implementation and keep the very meaning of SD ambiguous throughout international policy documents.

The authors offer three original recommendations that the EHEA should adopt in an attempt to mitigate the issues raised in the run-up to its 2030 deadline for implementing its policies: the EHEA should develop an explicit definition of SD; recognise the Euro-centredness of EHEA policies and open them up to other voices; and cite academic research when developing policy documents.

This article aims to address the response from the higher education (HE) sector in the United Kingdom (UK) to the full-scale war in Ukraine which started in 2022.

Relying on theoretical ideas of neoliberalism and the collection and thematic analysis of relevant official communications from six UK universities, the article uncovers three major ways in which these universities have been responding to the war.

They include (1) altruistic responses, (2) the promotion of equal treatment of all people and (3) the condemnation of the invasion and its implications for UK’s international cooperation in HE. These responses suggest the strengthening of the liberal ideals in the UK HE sector, heavily dominated by marketisation.

This analysis is significant not only for advancing a very limited scholarship on the topic of HE in the context of this war but also for understanding the development of the neoliberal landscape of UK HE and neoliberalism as a phenomenon in times of crises.

This opening chapter introduces the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) and the project for its development – the Bologna Process, and it explains the growth and current structure of the EHEA and the governance of the Bologna Process. It also explains the interest in Bologna beyond the ‘boundaries’ of the EHEA and introduces the idea that Bologna is linked to promoting social justice in higher education while operating in a neoliberal context. The structure of the book is outlined as well.

This book has brought together contributions which highlight two very important themes in higher education (HE) – neoliberalism and inclusion. These themes have been examined specifically within the context of the Bologna Process (BP), although the issues raised also speak to other education policy contexts beyond Bologna. These themes are discussed in seven chapters – at the international level and in six different national contexts. At the international level, attention has been paid to tracing the conceptualisation and the evolution of inclusion and neoliberalism in key BP policy documents at different phases of the process (see Chapter 2). At the national level, these themes have been examined within the national contexts of Slovakia, Spain, Turkey, Scotland and Cameroon with different connections and relationships to the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). In this concluding Chapter, we elaborate further on these themes, their relationship to each other based on the case studies covered and explore how inclusion discourses evolved in the neoliberal context of the BP while drawing attention to aspects of the inclusion agenda that require further attention. As the compilation stage of this book coincided with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we also reflect on the implications of this invasion for social justice and neoliberalism in the BP through actions taken by the EHEA.

This chapter maps the landscape of previous research into the Bologna Process on the international and national scales. This literature shows that Bologna has internationalised higher education in post-Soviet countries, and the Bologna developments have been acknowledged in the literature to be a case of Europeanisation.

This chapter also points out a few major gaps in that research. One of them is the interconnected development of higher education actors and instruments from the perspective of the idea of layering that brings path-dependence and change in a dialogue. The research about Bologna in the national contexts focuses mainly on a more normative, evaluative side of the debate. Prior research on Bologna in post-Soviet countries and specifically in Ukraine also looks primarily at positive and negative effects of the reform on the country's higher education. There have been difficulties ‘fitting’ Bologna ideas into the established conventions in Ukraine. There have been also challenges with interpreting some action lines, such as the student-centred learning or quality assurance. These studies have mainly investigated the change of higher education policies, overlooking the exploration of the change in the system of higher education actors and their roles in the countries. The studies seem not to have placed enough emphasis on the process of the development of higher education actors and their relationships in Bologna. Neither have they looked in detail into the contribution of these actors to the development of the Bologna instruments.

The Bologna reform in the post-Soviet context, just like Europeanisation there, tends to be seen as the implementation of change which is hindered by some past conventions. In contrast, this study about Bologna in Ukraine rests on the idea of layering that brings path-dependence and change into a dialogue.

This chapter conceptualises inclusion and neoliberalism and theorises the relationship between these two phenomena in order to contextualise the debates presented in the rest of the chapters in this book. Additionally, this chapter investigates the evolution of the meaning of ‘inclusion’ in the key international Bologna Process (BP) policy documents. This chapter is informed by a thematic analysis of 26 documents, issued between 1998 and 2020. The chapter demonstrates that understanding ‘inclusion’ only with regard to lifelong learning, student-centred education and the social dimension has pitfalls – there are overlaps between these action lines and, consequently, the relationships among them are unclear. A better way of understanding inclusion in Bologna may be through considering a tight relationship between the inclusion and neoliberal discourses in the support of marginalised groups in higher education (HE). The relationship has been evolving in relevant policy documents since 1998 which is the year that marks the preparatory Sorbonne meeting that gave life to Bologna in 1999. The inclusion discourse grew in strengths, while the neoliberal rhetoric firmly stood its ground since the beginning of the BP, while undergoing some transformations. In spite of such seemingly positive dynamic in the development of inclusion in the BP, its definition remained vague in the policy documents until 2020 as it was unclear which exact underprivileged groups were meant to be supported in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). The 2020 conference outcome documents made a significant step towards closing the gaps in our understanding of whom inclusion targets in Bologna and how to implement these inclusion ideas. The chapter highlights this achievement and also prepares the reader to problematise its reach in national contexts later in the book.

This is the final chapter of the book. It summarises the story in the book and explains the contribution it makes. This book contributes, first and foremost, to the body of literature that investigates Bologna specifically in Ukraine, as well as Bologna in the national contexts of the post-Soviet region more broadly. Crucially, the analysis of the reform process in Ukraine also gives some insight into the literature about wider Europeanisation processes in the post-Soviet context, particularly in the area of higher education and other policy fields. The Ukrainian case has demonstrated that Europeanisation is associated with change as much as it is associated with policy continuity. The pace of post-Soviet change might be related to the interplay of different groups of policy actors who have different motivations – following the past conventions or moving away from them. Change often existed only in discourse because of strongly rooted Soviet legacies of centralisation and established policies. Europeanisation then often served as an object of appropriation by central governing bodies for demonstrating in discourse to the public that change is underway.

The Bologna Process seems to have been widening the borders of Europe further to the east more than any other previous European policy initiative (e.g., the European Union, the European Neighbourhood Policy). Bologna might also be emerging as a source of a new joint image of Europeanisation in the EHEA. Unlike most of the previous initiatives that were focused around Europeanisation in the EU or around the EU, Bologna might become a tool for assimilating different spaces (such as the EU and the post-Soviet area) in their aims for Europeanisation in the future, while at present we may speculate that Europeanisation in the post-Soviet space may be a distinct phenomenon.

The Bologna Process (BP) remains a key international framework for guiding higher education development in the European Higher Education Area (EHEA) until 2030. This chapter traces integrative curriculum ideas in the BP post-2020 and explains why they are symbolic policies. Prior research into curricula in the BP does not explicitly refer to integrative curriculum ideas and does not explore them in the post-2020 context. 2020 marked the deadline for the achievement of a fully functioning EHEA and for setting up new priorities for 2030. This study is informed by the theoretical ideas of soft governance and symbolic policies in the Open Method of Coordination. This chapter addresses the aforementioned gap in the scholarship by relying on a thematic analysis of the first EHEA communique that set the agenda for the post-2020 period – Rome Ministerial Communique (2020) with its three annexes. The findings highlight the following main areas of the integrative curriculum agenda as symbolic policies after 2020: student-centeredness, research-based learning, and the interconnectedness between learning and wider society. This analysis is significant for our understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of the international policy rhetoric about the integrative curriculum which, in turn, defines the effectiveness of the implementation of these ideas in practice.