Abstract:

The higher education institutions in Palestine lag behind their global counterparts on the major university ranking systems. Several studies have highlighted that competent governance systems and accountability practices should be inaugurated in order to retain a decent position across various ranking systems. This research attempts to fill this void. In particular, by taking the UNIGOV Project “Improving Governance Practices at Palestinian Higher Education Institutions” as a case study, this research potentially attempts to explore the main weaknesses in governance systems across five Palestinian universities and proposes innovative mechanisms to improve the academic quality and educational systems as a whole.

UNIGOV is an international cooperation project funded by the Erasmus Plus of the European Union (Project #: 573684-EPP-1-2016-1-PS-EPPKA2-CBHE-JP). It seeks to benchmark five European universities’ governance systems (from Italy, Slovenia, Ireland, and Portugal), identify best practices, while facilitating knowledge transfer between Palestinian universities and their European counterparts.

Firstly, three university activities have been recognized (i.e. teaching, research, and social responsibility) and four governance dimensions have been identified during the preparation stage of the project (i.e. autonomy, accountability, management techniques, and participation). Secondly, the AHP (Analytical Hierarchy Process) have been utilized to evaluate the weights of these activities across the different dimensions of governance in order to identify weaknesses in governance systems across Palestinian universities.

The research provides a thorough and practical understanding of the main weakness in governance systems in Palestinian universities. The results show that teaching is still the dominant activity in Palestinian universities. Although there are weaknesses in all dimensions of governance across the different university activities, the results show that social responsibility activity is given less emphasis across the various dimensions of governance (compared to teaching and research). Finally, the overall results advocate that more strategies and practices should be established in order strengthen the accountability and participation dimensions across the teaching, research, and social responsibility activities. The project and the results of the analysis can be considered a modest step towards establishing a more competent and resilient Higher Education System in Palestine.

Keywords:

Governance, Erasmus+, Governance Practices.