3 Researching governance inTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA higher education: trends, issues and challenges Jeroen Huisman and Futao Huang Introduction: from government to governance Our point of departure is to conceive of governance as a set of arrangements of authoritative direction and coordination of and control over a higher edu - cation system. The term ‘ governance ’ is used, in line w ith what many analysts labelled as a shift from government to governance (van Kersbergen & van Waarden, 2004). This is a multi-faceted development in many public and semi-public sectors and encompasses a change in the composition of actors involved in this set of arrangements as well as a change in the mechanisms and styles and level of coordination and control. The authors refer for instance, to the emergence of supra-national and multi-level arrangements to deal w ith problems that cannot be solely tackled by nation States, to self-governance in case actors w ithin a certain domain can actually do without governments, to the increasing importance of markets and competition to regulate public sectors, to the transfer of governance practices from the private sector to public sectors (New Public Management), and to network governance in which actors collectively and in consensus strive for governance Solutions. Shifts in governance can easily be found in higher education. Supra-national arrangements are visible in how transnational actors and agencies, includ- ing the European Union, WTO, W orld Bank and OECD, engage in higher education affairs (see e.g. Fumasoli, 2015; Bassett & Maldonado-Maldonado, 2009; Sin et al., 2018). Self-governance is part and parcel of higher education coordination (see Clark, 1983 on the academie oligarchy), in fact predating the emergence of governments as important agents (see Neave, 2001 on the rise of the nation state in higher education). The increasing importance of market mechanisms (e.g. competition for funding, performance-based resource allo- cation) and New Public Management (e.g. empowerment of customers, decen- tralization, privatization) as alternatives to governmental steering can also be 43