Accreditation in European higher education from the comparative perspective: Slovenia and the Netherlands

ABSTRACT This article addresses quality assurance in European higher education from the perspective of accreditation. To reduce the bias in favour of comparative research of Western (European) countries, it investigates which practices are attached to accreditation in Slovenian and Dutch higher education and identifies on this basis key similarities and differences in its development and implementation. First, it explores accreditation procedures in national steering documents of each country. Second, it addresses its implementation in practice with the support from results obtained with interviews. Results showcase that in the past five years, both countries made significant changes to the accreditation framework to increase institutional responsibility for quality assurance procedures. However, accreditation also became an efficient tool for national (political) actors, to guide the development of higher education systems in the direction of more or less control and, hence, to challenge the promotion of institutional quality culture in both cases examined.