The appropriations of quality assurance in higher education in Chile and Colombia

What factors influence the circulation of new quality assurance practices, and what do these practices represent in the broader process of higher education reform? Based on the notion of translation, this article proposes an analysis of the appropriation of quality assurance in higher education in Chile and Colombia during the 1990s. In both cases, the analysis will focus on the collective agents of change, the influence of the institutional framework on the strategies of these agents, and the features of the political context that determined the process of appropriation and its outcomes. It will be shown that in Chile this process represented an adjustment of the legal framework that was introduced in a context of institutional constraint, while in Colombia it was part of a turning point of the regulation of higher education.