Transfer of Ideas, or Transfer of Legitimacy? The OECD Thematic Review of Tertiary Education in the Czech Republic
Abstract
The higher education system in the Czech Republic has been recently undergoing a transformation towards universal access (Trow 2000) as well as towards a new model of steering and financing inspired by new public management. One could consider this process as a part of convergence of different European higher education systems and as one of the reforms of this sorts that have been implemented in many European countries since 1990s.
These drifts may have a common source in international organizations (EU, OECD) and transnational diffusion of their ideas. The release of the Country Note, the outcome of the OECD Thematic Reviews of Tertiary Education, in 2006 is regarded as a starting point of the reform in the Czech Republic.
This document has authoritatively framed various arguments up to the present time. Nevertheless, despite seven years of reform efforts of the right-wing government and despite increasing institutional interdependence between the Czech Republic and other European countries, the traditional system seems to stay resistant.
By theories of policy transfer (Dolowitz, Marsh 1996; Bennet 1991; Hassenteufel 2005), of lesson-drawing (Rose 199; James, Lodge 2003), of epistemic communities (Haas 1992; 2004; Antoniades 2003) and concepts of depoliticisation (Burnham 2001; Buller, Flinders 2005, 2006) this paper intends to explain why data and recommendations of examiners of the OECD are understood as instruments that help decision-makers legitimize their own policy agenda, rather than instruments of policy diffusion or lesson-drawing. Besides utilization of foreign (Western) evidence by decision-makers, the paper explores another type of legitimizing strategy, that has been employed since 2006, the involvement of different bodies of independent experts in the policy-making process.