ACA is pleased to announce that work has recently been completed on its Study on European and national mobility policies (ENPMOB). The findings from this project, which ran from November 2010 until January 2012, will soon appear in book form in the ACA monograph series, the ACA Papers on International Cooperation in Education.

ENPMOB was dedicated to the exploration and analysis of mobility policies and strategies at both the European level and across a group of countries dubbed “Europe 32”, essentially comprised of the 32 countries participating in the Lifelong Learning Programme. Building on the quantitative foundation laid by another ACA study completed last year – Mapping mobility in European higher education (see ACA Newsletter - Education Europe, October 2011) – ENPMOB has aimed to make sense of the concrete set of policy objectives, instruments, responsible actors, monitoring actions and timeline specifications for mobility articulated in the study countries and within the broader European Union (EU) framework.

The final report provides a substantial contribution to ACA’s body of work focused on international mobility. It includes a macro-level comparison of the mobility policies of the Europe 32 countries and the EU itself. There is also an historical account and analysis of the evolution of EU mobility policies over the past 25 years as well as in-depth presentations of the national mobility policies in eight specific countries – Austria, Cyprus, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom. A central consideration within the study was the question of ‘convergence’ or ‘divergence’. That is to say, if, how and to what degree national and European-level policies have exerted an effect on one another. Attention is also paid to the alignment (or lack thereof) between stated policy objectives and the ‘real world’, in the form of discernible mobility trends and the practical application of steering instruments.

ENPMOB was made possible by funding from the ERASMUS Programme’s ‘Accompanying Measures’. ACA served as project coordinator and worked closely with colleagues from Nuffic and DAAD to realise the project’s goals.