Higher education in Asian countries and the role of international ...

Conclusions
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The increased number of International Organizations and other international actors has made the
world political structure complex. Furthermore recent socio-economic development and cultural
changes pose new challenges to the process of collaboration and cooperation at international
level. In this complex environment, IGOs being international actors play an important role to
initiate and promote cooperation at international level. The level and nature of state-IGOs and
sate-state interaction vary from one government to other. In this regard, it is very interesting to
explore how, when and why these international actors act, react and cooperate to achieve mutual
objectives in different sector including education. The available evidence indicates that IGOs are
active players in the education sector for the last many decades but their active participation in
the development and promotion of higher education is a recent phenomenon and with the
passage of time their presence is increasing. This shift in IGOs stance can be attributed to two
main factors: the increased importance of higher education in human capital development and
the enhanced role of IGOs in socio-economic development. Today many IGOs have higher
education in their agenda and these international bodies are playing an active role in its
development and promotion in Asia as well.
The development of higher education is a complex phenomenon and, when many actors and
factors are involved in the process of development, studying the impact of any program or to
identify or assess the share of any one IGO in the process of change, is very difficult. However,
to examine the role of an IGO, it is more appropriate to study how efficiently an IGO played its
role in its member countries through policy directions, capacity building measures, technical and
financial assistance, information sharing, monitoring, and reporting. This approach enabled us to
study the IGOs role in depth.
This research was based on explanatory study of three IGOs, which are engaged in the
development of higher education: OECD, UNESCO and World Bank. The major focus of this
research was to investigate into the role of the selected IGOs in the development of higher
education through outlining the background of the IGOs involvement in higher education,
studying different initiatives, and exploring the result and outcomes of these initiatives and
activities. To study the role of IGOs, in Asian higher education, two major pointers were used;
the first was related to process of policy reform in the member states, restructuring of education