The re-emerging debate over the rise of the evaluative state in the British university sector

This article problematizes approaches which conceptualise the rise of the evaluation framework in the British Higher Education as a case of the state’s appropriation of a managerial ideology. It sheds light on the contradictory role of the British state during the reform period initiated in the 1980s and argues that initial evaluation policies were more concerned with shifting the burden of financing to lower levels of the sector than at devising new control technologies. It presents Neave’s insights on the rise of the evaluative state in order to inform the debate on the centralizing effects of “steering at a distance” governance, suggesting that some scholars tend to conceive evaluation as a purely instrumental practice for the implementation of a new funding regime rather than as a political process in which the notion of quality was contested and rearticulated by a variety of agents at different levels of the Higher Education sector.