Inconsistencies in the Governance of Interdisciplinarity: the Case of the Italian Higher Education System Davide Donina, 1, * Marco Seeber, 2 and Stefano Paleari 1,3 1 CCSE-HERe—Cisalpino Institute for Comparative Studies in Europe, Higher Education Research group, University of Bergamo, via Salvecchio 19, 24129 Bergamo, Italy, 2 CHEGG—Centre for Higher Education Governance Ghent, Department of Sociology, University of Ghent, Korte Meer 3, 9000 Gent, Belgium, and 3 Department of Management, Information and Production Engineering, University of Bergamo, via Pasubio 7b, 24044 Dalmine, Italy *Corresponding author: E-mail: davide.donina@unibg.it Abstract Interdisciplinary research is widely considered pivotal to addressing the challenges of modern soci- eties. Accordingly, interdisciplinarity has become prominent in policy discourse for science and higher education (HE). However, little research has explored how interdisciplinarity is considered in governance arrangements of HE systems. This article contributes to this stream of literature by studying the governance of interdisciplinarity at the system level, considering the policy portfolio in a continental European context. Particularly, we investigate whether the policy portfolio in the Italian HE system is consistent towards interdisciplinarity, defining three types of inconsistency: ambiguity, conflict, and incompatibility. Four governance domains are analysed: i) universities’ internal organi- zation, ii) institutional research assessment exercise, iii) doctoral education, and iv) academic recruit- ment/careers. We find that although some elements favouring interdisciplinarity have been intro- duced, a disciplinary rationale still dominates system governance and that the interdisciplinary target is hindered by policy inconsistencies within and between governance domains. Key words: interdisciplinarity; governance; higher education; policy portfolio; policy consistency. 1. Introduction In recent decades, interdisciplinary research has emerged as pivotal to addressing the grand challenges of modern societies (Nature 2015), to innovate and respond to social and economic problems (Frodeman et al. 2010). As a consequence, interdisciplinarity has become a buzzword in the policy rhetoric and programmatic dis- course on research and higher education (HE) (Feller 2002; National Academies 2004; Rhoten 2004; Association of American Universities [AAU] 2005; Brint 2005; Elkana 2012; Woelert and Millar 2013). However, translating policy discourse into policy design and governance arrangements is not straightforward (Howlett 2014). Scholars claim that so far policies have failed to fos- ter interdisciplinarity, and pointed out a ‘paradox of interdiscipli- narity’ in HE research governance, namely that the discourse on interdisciplinarity conflicts with the persistence or even reinforce- ment of modes of governance that almost exclusively rely on rigid discipline-based classification systems (Weingart 2000; Woelert and Millar 2013). Research on interdisciplinarity has mostly considered Anglo- Saxon contexts (particularly Australia and USA) and focused on the meso- and micro-levels, for example on interdisciplinary approaches in specific research fields (Heimeriks 2013; Albert et al. 2015; Turner et al. 2015), the design of interdisciplinary curricula (Jacobs 1989; Millar 2016), the evaluation and measuring of interdiscipli- nary research (Langfeldt 2006; Wagner et al. 2011; Fagerberg et al. 2012; Rafols et al. 2012; Bromham et al. 2016), the funding of inter- disciplinary research proposals (Lyall et al. 2013; Bozhkova forth- coming; Bromham et al. 2016), and the strategies to promote interdisciplinarity at the institutional level (S a 2008; Weingart 2014). Instead, analyses at the macro-level have been very rare. To the best of our knowledge, just two articles have studied the gover- nance for interdisciplinarity at the system level (Weingart 2000 on Germany; Woelert and Millar 2013 on Australia). Moreover, these studies have considered only one policy instrument at a time. Yet, scholars of public policy have stressed that it is the interaction of several policy instruments and governance domains that is crucial for achieving policy goals (Howlett and Rayner 2013). This article addresses these gaps by studying the governance of interdisciplinarity at the system level and considering the policy portfolio in a continental European context: the Italian HE system. 1 V C The Author 2017. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 1 Science and Public Policy, 2017, 1–11 doi: 10.1093/scipol/scx019 Article