Governance of Higher Education: What comes after New Public Management?

New Public Management (NPM) has provided the normative basis of higher education reforms in Europe for more than two decades. Along with its losing momentum in recent years, new ideas, orientations and debates related to a post-NPM governance of the public sector (including higher education) have emerged (e.g., Halligan 2010, Bouckaert/Kuhlmann 2016, Reiter/ Klenk 2018). We argue that a new comprehensive governance regime is emerging focusing on a plurality of social value orientations that are partly contradicting and concurrently encapsulate the efficiency-oriented and performance-based NPM model. Among such values (like gender equality or social inclusion) sustainability has been one of the most prominent ones. Based on the example of sustainability we will conceptually delineate these shifts of higher education governance that point towards the new regime of value-based governance.