Abstract

The Bologna process, which begun in 1999, aims at building a European higher education area and involves the participation of a very large number of heterogeneous actors who do not necessarily attribute the same objectives to higher education and who, for most of them, never meet, which raises the question of coordination. This involves a set of public policy instruments that must be implemented within each higher education system, including the ECTS system, the Diploma Supplement, the European Qualifications Framework, the Global Qualifications Framework for the European higher education area, and the quality assessment of higher education. These instruments are connected by the same element that compose them, i.e. learning outcomes. Starting from the French-speaking Belgian higher education, this article offers an analysis of the actors’ coordination work by mobilizing the concepts of policy instruments and boundary-objects.