Le rôle de l’État fédéral dans la reconfiguration des territoires de la coordination interuniversitaire. Le cas suisse

• Main Authors: Jean-Philippe Leresche, Martin Benninghoff
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses Universitaires du Mirail 2014-02-01
• Series: Sciences de la Société
• Subjects: public action; instrumentation; coordination; universities; scale changes; new public management
• Online Access: http://journals.openedition.org/sds/607

Multi-level university policy has historically fallen within the sole authority of the cantons in Switzerland. This paper aims to demonstrate in which way the Swiss Confederation has progressively participated in such policy and to show the (multi-) territorial repercussions of this intervention. The territory of higher education institutions in the Lake Geneva area (Universities of Geneva and Lausanne, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne) has notably been reshaped by the instrumentation of an incentive and constraining public action accompanied by dominant legitimisation modes at the end of the 1990s (“new public management” and “knowledge-based economy”). These measures have led to the institution of at once coordination and competition logics among higher education institutions and to the strengthening of research domains’ concentration. These processes are here studied using the notion of interuniversity coordination regime to analyse the scale changes in university policy and in the new relations between the State and local communities.