Governance and Governmentality: The Influence of the Bologna Process on Ethiopian Higher Education

The purpose of this study was to investigate the Ethiopian public universities' governance systems in the context of the Bologna Process. It specifically aimed at understanding and interpreting the perceptions and strategic responses of leaders, instructors, and students of public universities towards their governance systems. In the past few years, there has been a prevailing chorus of complaints among academic leaders, instructors, and students about university governance. The Ethiopian government acknowledged the stakeholders' dissatisfaction with governance and placed it as one of the priorities in the Growth Transformational Plan-II of 2016-2020. This dissatisfaction and the introduction of newly adopted elements of the Bologna Process brought enormous pressures to the governance of public universities. In addition, little is known about the Ethiopian higher education institutions' governance in the context of the Bologna Process. This limited information on higher education governance in the Ethiopian context and the dissatisfaction of university key actors about the university governance systems provided the impetus for this study.