Eppur si muove. How higher education reforms travel between international organisations and domestic spaces

This article analyses how public policy schemes travel transnationally by considering their international framing and domestic translations. It analyses the strategies of International Organisations (IOs)—Council of Europe, European Commission, OECD, UNESCO—in the Higher Education field. It discusses their dependence on States and other donors in their activity in Higher Education, a secondary policy sector. This dependence and the scarcity of material resources do not prevent IOs from devising ambitious schemes to measure and compare the performances of domestic HE systems. Based on three country case studies (France, Poland and Ukraine), it analyses how transnationally elaborated recommendations are translated in the domestic policy fields.