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Agenda Setting and Policy Development, Higher Education

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Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions

Synonyms

Policy cycle; Policy development; Policy framing; Policy process

Definition

The capacity of an actor to define or influence issues on the public agenda by selecting issues seen as important or relevant or by shaping the way these issues are framed, discussed, and interpreted.

Introduction

Agenda setting is one of the key concepts in the critical or interpretative approaches in the study of policy development. Developed in response to positivist paradigms, which saw policies as largely technical solutions to objectively existing problems, critical or interpretive analysis emphasizes the constructed, contingent, and processual nature of policies, in particular the role of differently positioned actors in bringing specific issues to the fore (Fischer 2003). In this sense, the use of agenda setting in the research on higher education policy is fundamentally related to the questions of political power and influence and thus to the relationship between longer-term structural change...

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Correspondence to Terhi Nokkala .

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Bacevic, J., Nokkala, T. (2018). Agenda Setting and Policy Development, Higher Education. In: Encyclopedia of International Higher Education Systems and Institutions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_137-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9553-1_137-1

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