Navigating higher education policymaking in the European Parliament

This chapter analyses the role of the European Parliament's Committee on Education and Culture (CULT) in European higher education policymaking. Because the European Union (EU) has no formal power in education policy, there has been little interest in investigating CULT as a higher education policymaker and knowledge producer. The chapter builds on policy ethnography through observations and interviews conducted in CULT, focusing on discourses and interactions in the committee's everyday policymaking. Following discursive institutionalism, we study how the CULT committee is discursively constructed, contested, and maintained. We apply discourse analysis to examine how CULT's actorness is constructed and negotiated through ideas. The preliminary results suggest that CULT operates as an arena of contested national and European cultural identities, negotiating its policy boundaries internally and externally with the European Commission and the Council of the EU.