Analysing knowledge networks in higher education policymaking (edited volume by Eeva & Kauko)
Chapter 1. Eeva & Kauko (2026) Knowledge, power, and networks in higher education policymaking
Key takeaways:
- We identify the locations of knowledge making in networks operating within European policymaking structures.
- Contemporary European higher education policy appears more closely linked to EU policy developments than is publicly recognised
- We offer an analysis of the political framing of educational knowledge and its use
- We introduce the conceptual foundations that shape contemporary higher education policymaking in the EU context.
Chapter 2. Kauko et al. (2026) Studying knowledge networks in higher education policymaking
Key takeaways:
- Publicly available sources can be analysed with network analysis to show how EU-level and Finnish working groups are formed.
- 45 thematic interviews with politicians, officials, and stakeholders afford an insight into how they operate within these networks.
- Observing meetings in Finnish ministries and in the European Parliament’s CULT committee helps examine day-to-day policymaking practices.
Chapter 3. Silvén et al. (2026) Inside the knowledge networks
Key takeaways:
- We describe the researcher perspective and insights into their conceptions of knowledge and trustworthy research, and how they have influenced the research process.
- The research group members’ different perspectives, positions, and experiences have increased the study’s trustworthiness.
- Researchers’ insider and outsider perspectives shape how the same events are interpreted. Combining these perspectives enriches the analysis and strengthens our research’s trustworthiness.
- Power and access are entangled with our researcher positions as part of this knowledge network, instead of the network being a separate external object of research.
Chapter 4. Eeva & Kauko (2026) National and European systems intertwined
Key takeaways:
- National policymaking and public discussions have not fully understood the EU’s growing influence on higher education.
- The boundaries between higher education policy and research and innovation have become blurred in EU higher education policymaking, as the EU’s influence extends beyond formal legislative power through funding instruments, for example.
- At the institutional and political levels, these policy sectors are steered largely independently of one another in day-to-day policymaking, in part due to their differing EU legal competences.
- While national higher education policymaking is deeply embedded in European structures, the Finnish parliamentary process regarding EU education matters follows the conventional order, in which the Grand Committee tends to follow the Education and Culture Committee’s reporting on higher education issues instead of discussing them in the more powerful forum. This is partly because of the perception that education is not within the EU’s legal remit.
- Official preparatory venues’ influence on EU higher education policy developments seems to play a more modest role in national higher education policymaking. Can other higher education policy venues and stakeholders hold more powerful positions?
- CULT offers the official setting for education policymaking in the European Parliament, yet there are other internal venues within and without the committee structure. In the Finnish case EU higher education issues are characterised by a pattern in which each decision-making body assumes that decisions rely on a different instance. EU higher education questions thus seem systematically to be a matter for “someone else”.
- EU higher education policymaking operates in an intermediary space: day-to-day policymaking practices may well be institutionalised but are unrecognised as official decision-making bodies.
Chapter 5. Silvén et al. (2026) Finland-EU higher education policy network
Key takeaways:
- National (Finnish) and EU actors form a well-connected network that co-produces policy agendas.
- Networks are based on the informal trust-building around them.
- Formal decision-making structures can also work as a platform for building informal networks. Informal and formal networks coincide.
- Finnish universities’ autonomy, combined with the EU’s lack of competence in education matters, seems to influence the structure, character, and formation of transnational higher education policymaking networks within the EU and Finland.
Chapter 6. Kallunki et al. (2026) Organisational knowledge network
Key takeaways:
- The organisations with which they are affiliated appoint individuals to the network: organisational memberships empower individual actors.
- Activities like collecting, manipulating, brokering, and distributing knowledge are an important part of the work of the network’s member organisations. Knowledge is a form of power in this network.
- The network’s key actors broker EU higher education policies with national fora.
Chapter 7. Forsell & Kauko (2026) Policymakers’ norms on knowledge
Key takeaways:
- “Evidence” is seen as political in policymaking. It is assessed based on whose interests it serves.
- EU and national statistics, as well as OECD data, are seen as neutral; most of the other data are evaluated based on their source’s status in the network.
- Institutional norms define what is trustworthy and credible knowledge, steering its use.
Chapter 8. Eeva et al. (2026) Navigating higher education policymaking in the European Parliament
Key takeaways:
- The European Parliament’s Committee on Culture and Education’s (CULT) role was ideationally constructed, and its actorness – capacity, autonomy, and recognition – was negotiated in the European policymaking space’s inner life.
- There is a discursive struggle for CULT’s relevance and recognition:
- 1) CULT’s main influence tool appears to be its capacity to build the shared deliberation of its actorness in “bridging” people – policymakers, stakeholders, and educational professionals – and policymaking realities. For example, it has constructed a narrative responding to “real-world” (policy) problems that are attentive to the voices of education professionals, stakeholders, and citizens.
- 2) CULT also features internal contestation that may affect its capacity to appear to be a bridging actor in education policy.
- The idea of CULT as a relatively powerless committee (in the words of the interviewees) has “real” effects in report allocations, for example, but also notably affects the committee’s consensual culture.
- CULT seems to have found “soft spots” in existing institutional discourses in the EP, emphasising its consensual rather than politicised forms of decision making.
Chapter 9. Kauko & Eeva (2026) Conclusion
Key takeaways:
- Despite its legal competence, the EU has growing influence in Higher Education.
- Networks and soft governance facilitate the EU’s influence.
- What counts as “knowledge” for policymaking reflects institutional norms, not neutrality.
- Networks define access to power and knowledge.
- Organisational memberships define access to networks and knowledge.
- “Evidence” is seen as political in policymaking.
Journal articles
Forsell et al. (2026) Co-producing evidence in Finnish higher education admissions working groups
Key takeaways:
- The Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) uses working groups as a governance tool to involve and commit stakeholders.
- Working groups co-produce evidence in line with MEC’s agenda and the Government Programme.
- Officials play a key role: they oversee the writing of policy proposals and combine stakeholder perspectives with other evidence such as statistics.
Kallunki et al. (2025) Network governance in Finnish higher education and science policy, 2012–2021
Key takeaways:
- This is the first study of a Finnish higher education policy network that analyses the working groups of the Ministry of Education and Culture (MEC) and the organisations participating in them over time.
- The policy network has a small core set of key actors that includes state ministries and agencies, universities and their associations, and employer, employee, and student unions. This is aligned with the Finnish corporatist tradition in policymaking.
- The network is centralised around MEC and is stable over time.
- The network is used for knowledge exchange, interest intermediation, and policy advocacy.
- MEC plays a dual role as a network coordinator and stakeholder lobbyist, reflecting more horizontally equal relationships between actors, especially at the network’s core, which is characteristic of networked governance.
Kauko (2022) Politics of evidence: Think tanks and the Academies Act
Key takeaways:
- Political choices morphed into fact-based arguments in the policy process. Long-term changes in political structures made this possible.
- Evidence-based policy works to depoliticise the scope of political arguments.
Other book chapters
Kallunki et al. (2025) Education policymaking at the national level
Key takeaways:
- Network analysis is gaining ground in education policy studies.
- The main approaches are social network analysis and network ethnography.
- The contemporary literature focuses on the structure and influence of networks in policymaking, the role of philanthropy and private actors in policymaking, and citation network analysis.
Kallunki et al. (2023) Finland’s Ministry of Education and Culture in the Light of Its Working Groups
Key takeaways:
- The ministry is not a monolithic entity.
- External stakeholders act as links between the departmentalised parts of MEC.
- Hypothesis for future research: external stakeholders shape new ideas for ministry working groups.