Darryl S. L. Jarvis

Regulating higher education: Quality assurance and neo-liberal managerialism in higher education—A critical introduction

Abstract Quality assurance (QA) regimes have become an increasingly dominant regulatory tool in the management of higher education sectors around the world. By one estimate, nearly half the countries in the world now have quality assurance systems or QA regulatory bodies for higher education. This paper explores the emergence and spread of QA regimes, the coalescence of regulatory logics around qualifications frameworks, and the broad confluence of such approaches in terms of their impact on the historically contested relationship between the state and university. By focusing on the interlocking regulatory logics provided by QA, the article explores how such approaches impose quasi-market, competitive based rationalities premised on neo-liberal managerialism using a policy discourse that is often informed by conviction rather than evidence.

Risk, Globalisation and the State: A Critical Appraisal of Ulrich Beck and the World Risk Society Thesis

Ulrich Beck has been one of the foremost sociologists of the last few decades, single-handedly promoting the concept of risk and risk research in contemporary sociology and social theory. Indeed, his world risk society thesis has become widely popular, capturing current concerns about the consequences of modernity, fears about risk and security as a result of globalisation and its implications for the state and social organisation. Much of the discussion generated, however, has been of an abstract conceptual nature and has not always travelled well into fields such as political science, political theory and International Relations. This article introduces Beck to a wider audience while analysing his work and assessing it against recent empirical evidence in relation to the effects of globalisation on individual risk and systemic risk to the state.

Learning to Fly: The Evolution of Political Risk Analysis

This article analyses the concept of political risk, its evolution and conceptualisation, and explores its utility as a means of understanding political events and processes that can threaten order, stability and continuity in International Relations and disrupt the normal practices of inter-state investment, trade and commerce. More particularly, the article organises the disparate literature that surrounds the concept of political risk such that it might be more rigorously applied as a social science method for understanding political events and their effects upon commercial and strategic activities.

The Regulatory State in Developing Countries: Can It Exist and Do We Want It? The Case of the Indonesian Power Sector

Abstract In the rush for development, the regulatory state has assumed the mantle of a new panacea: the instruments and mechanisms necessary for better government, better governance, and better lives. This paper poses two basic questions in response to the rise of the regulatory state and its increasing diffusion into developing countries. First, can regulatory states exist in developing societies or, more accurately, can effective regulatory states emerge and hope to function in a manner similar to their counterparts in developed countries and deliver the types of benefits and outcomes they promise? And second, do regulatory states offer the most effective modalities for delivering enhanced social well-being? By unpacking the concept of the regulatory state and addressing its underlying assumptions and implicit normative values, it is suggested that the modalities of governance entailed in the regulatory state model may not be well suited to developing countries, hurting rather than enhancing governance outcomes. These issues are explored in relation to the Indonesian energy sector, specifically the upstream electricity generation, transmission and distribution sectors, and the machinations involved in governing the sector.

The New Politics of Development: Citizens, Civil Society, and the Evolution of Neoliberal Development Policy

Abstract In this article, we explore the evolution of neoliberal development theory and practice, its manifestations and impact on the political economy of the state, domestic classes, and the material conditions of populations in emerging economies. Specifically, the article focuses on the modes of resistance to the rollout of neoliberal development practice by citizens, civil society, and NGOs, and, in turn, the responses of international financial institutions such as the World Bank—a process that we argue has forced the reinvention and transformation of neoliberal development policy. Furthermore, we attempt to situate the evolution of neoliberal development policy and the changing modes of resistance to it within a theoretical framework that explains emergent class and material interests in the context of the increasing functionality of pro-market agendas to modes of accumulation that benefit discrete elite and class interests but which also generate substantial and ongoing contradictions.

Market building in Asia: standards setting, policy diffusion, and the globalization of market norms

This special issue of the Journal of Asian Public Policy brings together five contributions that arose from a series of workshops held at the National University of Singapore in 2012. The workshops were part of a larger project titled ‘New Approaches to Building Markets in Asia.’ The project brought together a series of scholars to examine the ongoing efforts by states, private and non-governmental entities engaged in development work but focused on and mediated increasingly through market-building activities – that is activities related to establishing liberal market norms. For participants in the project, the starting point for engagement with the topic emerged from a collective recognition that development in Asia is no longer a state-directed effort; that the contours of Asia’s development are increasingly driven by market rationality, and that the historical images of East Asia’s ‘developmental state’ were no longer sufficient to capture the contemporary socio-political and economic landscape of Asia’s most recent wave of developmentalism (Cammack 2012). Indeed, for most participants in the project there was a collective recognition that the ‘developmental state’ was all but dead and increasingly replaced by a reliance on markets as a manifest form of development in and of itself – the development of market societies (see Stubbs 2009, Hayashi 2010, Carroll 2012). These observations are in stark contrast with most literatures and ideational images of the state in Asia; literatures that place the state front and centre as the major explanatory factor responsible for the region’s miracle economies. Indeed, they conflict with the historical role of authoritarianism in Asia where states were politically bound by ‘command and control’ governance modalities dominated by coalitions of powerful political elites, large-scale domestic capital (Chaebol capital networks in South Korea, for example, or networks of elite family capital in countries such as Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand), and in some instances the military. For much of their recent history, Taiwan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand have been characterized by these institutional contexts, where political dissent was quashed, civil society demobilized, organized labour disciplined, and the state all powerful in the management of economic activity. While, of course, Japan has been an exception in terms of democratic governance, equally

ASEAN industries and the challenge from China

Introduction: Structural Changes, Economics Challenges and Political Accommodation: Managing the Rise of China in Southeast Asia D.S.L.Jarvis & A.Welch Rising China, US Influence, and Southeast Asia - Background, Status, and Outlook R.Sutter The Dragon, The Tiger Cubs and Higher Education. University Relations between China and SE Asia in the GATS Era A.Welch International Financial Centers in Asia: Contest, Competition and Possible Trajectories D.S.L.Jarvis Being Sandwiched: The Reshaping of ASEAN-China Food Trade N.Fold, J.Neilson & B.Pritchard Energy Security and Competition in Asia: Challenges and Prospects for China and Southeast Asia B.K Sovacool & V.M.Khuong The Impact of China on the Electrical and Electronics Industry in Southeast Asia F.B.Tipton Agricultural Biotechnology in China: Prospects for New Economy Industries in South East Asia F.Z.Ahmadi-Esfahani

Policy transfer, neo-liberalism or coercive institutional isomorphism? Explaining the emergence of a regulatory regime for quality assurance in the Hong Kong higher education sector §

abstract The spread of quality assurance (QA) regimes in higher education has been an explosive phenomenon over the last 25 years. By one estimate, for example, half of all the countries in the world have adopted QA systems or QA regulatory agencies to oversee their higher education sector. Typically, this phenomenon is explained as a process of policy diffusion, the advent of marketization, the spread of neoliberalism, massification and, concomitantly, the emergence of a ‘global market’ for higher education, prompting governments to respond by validating standards, quality, and introducing certification and compliance regimes. In this paper I question the utility of these explanatory frameworks, specifically looking at the case of Hong Kong in order to explore the role coercive institutional isomorphism plays in policy adoption and the implications of this for regulatory performativity.

Theorising Risk and Uncertainty in International Relations The Contributions of Frank Knight

Frank Knight was one of the twentieth century’s most illustrious economic thinkers. His writings and enquiry into the nature of method, theory and knowledge in relation to the activities of social actors, and under what circumstances and with what limitations we might adequately theorise social agency, bequeathed a rich tradition of theoretical and practical insight. Many of his writings centred on the issue of risk and uncertainty, how social actors anticipate the future and manage and mediate terrains of uncertainty and risk, and in doing so change the outcomes that obtain. Knight’s contributions essentially constructed a means for assessing and measuring risk in various facets of social activity, seeding insights which remain pertinent today. As the article notes, however, despite Knight’s insights and the methodological schema he constructed for probability analysis, remarkably few social sciences – including international relations – have mined his work. Ironically, much that we need to know to more effectively theorise and accommodate the conundrums of risk and uncertainty into social scientific methods Knight long ago handed down to us.

Contextualising the context in policy entrepreneurship and institutional change

Abstract While there is a considerable literature concerning policy entrepreneurship and institutional isomorphism, significantly less literature has emerged addressing the impact of context on policy and institutional entrepreneurship and of the interactions between various contexts and agency. In this article, we demonstrate that the actions of entrepreneurs in the public sector are most likely to generate policy and institutional changes when they are reinforced by complementarities arising from context-dependent, dynamic interactions among interdependent structures, institutions and agency-level enabling conditions.