Agencies’ roles in higher education system governance and policy-making

The chapter explores a key theme within higher education governance that has so far received (too) little attention in higher education studies. It concerns the proliferation of agencies (‘agencification’), which is a deliberately planned structural change at the system level, inspired by new public management approaches. Although every higher education system has several agencies, from a governance perspective, little attention is paid to how the interrelationships between key policy actors have changed. The chapter is a kind of risk analysis of agencification, based on ‘agency studies’ in other public domains, that can be read as the prelude to a research agenda in higher education for the coming years.