Evaluating the Application of Leadership and Governance in Higher Education Institutions

This chapter aims to evaluate the application of leadership and governance in higher education (HE) organizations in the Kingdom of Bahrain and the UK. The method of the study relies on reading lists of governance standards from several advanced educational institutions and uses a “comparative methodology” based on the collected data from both counties. This research reviews the various models of “the higher education governance” and analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of each model. The study employs the three principles of UNDP (transparency, participation, and accountability) to assess application of leadership and governance in higher education institutions. The findings of this study reveal that Arab universities need to perceive the significance of clarifying the reason for governance. The study likewise distinguishes the significance of relating their job and commitment to the procedure of change to the learning-based economy and world informatics. Further, it features the need of broadening the cooperation of stakeholders in the key basic leadership.

Tracing accountability in higher education

Drawing upon earlier studies of reforms and institutional changes in higher education, the purpose of this paper is to trace how the understanding of accountability has changed over the past twenty years and how it is understood to have impacted on higher education institutions. We do so by reviewing more than 350 papers and by asking three questions: Who answers to whom? For what are they answering? And how to assess those accountability arrangements? With these three questions as guides, our results indicate that higher education institutions have been undergoing processes of what we term accountabilization. These results contribute to the scholarship on higher education governance by conceptualizing the processes of accountabilization.