The Bologna Process (BP) and the Asia-Europe Meeting (ASEM) Education Process - each brings together some 50 member countries and a handful of international organisations - have become major regional and inter-regional higher education projects and generated many research papers.
Having opportunities to know the two secretariats over the last seven years, I became fascinated by the ways they operate and the influence, albeit in a subtle manner, they exert through their secretarial duties. The secretariats like to perceive themselves merely as neutral administrative assistants to the Bologna Follow-Up Group (BFUG) or to the ASEM Senior Officials Meetings (SOM).
In practice, the secretariats, however, performed important roles in all Ministerial Meetings and milestones of the two processes: they are policy actors in their own right. Despite their different approaches, they both have become indispensable in regional cooperation processes, particularly the creation and expansion of regional regulatory spaces for the development, implementation and monitoring/evaluation of higher education policies.