Governance and Coordination of the Higher Education System in Namibia: Challenges and Prospects

The authors are thankful to the reviewers of this article. Their suggestions helped to significantly improve this paper. We are also grateful to all the interviewees who participated in this study.

Considering that coordination can take many forms, and may be instituted through an array of policy instruments and tools, we take the position that coordination is both a consequence of pressures on higher education some of which are brought by market forces (globalisation) but also that state coordination of higher education can be a trigger for change. Our objective is to demonstrate this through a review of literature and legislative and policy instruments in Namibia. We complete the review with an in-depth analysis of key informant interviews on coordination in Namibia. We argue that although Namibia's approach of higher education governance and state coordination strongly emphasizes autonomy, which is in-line with international trends. We also argue that self-governance in an absence of policy does not promote effectiveness of HEIs in the country. We conclude that coordination and state steering of it, is in Namibia's context a consequence of experience in hindsight rather than a case of foresight.