Documentary Data

With respect to the policy documents, I used several key guiding documents in the higher education sector in Kyrgyzstan, which are the Law on Education and Education Development Strategy of the Kyrgyz Republic for 2007–2010 (EDS 2010) and for 2010–2020 (EDS 2020). In addition to this, I have chosen two key

documents and program guidelines from the European Commission to illustrate the internationalization process in Kyrgyzstan. I have chosen five legislative regulations and two program guidelines, which are relevant for providing a comprehensive under-standing of the priority areas of the cooperation agenda between the EU and the Central Asian states in the higher education sector. To understand the internationalization of higher education development in Kyrgyzstan I am using the key guiding documents that define cooperation between the EU education policy and Kyrgyzstan as research data. Consequently, the documentary data comprise three types of document, which are first, guiding legislation documents for higher education, second, a document concerning educational development in Kyrgyzstan and, thirdly documents about cooperation between the EU and Kyrgyzstan.

To make it possible to analyze travelling reforms, the guiding legislation documents for higher education are used as empirical data. To examine the travelling reforms implemented and the international influences at the national level, the key decrees of national legislation have been analyzed. As the definitions and frames of higher education reforms are defined in legislation, it is important to include the key legislation degrees into the analyses. The guiding legislation documents for higher education are as follows:

I. The Law on Education of the Kyrgyz Republic (2003). No 92, April 30th 2003 (Zakon Kyrgyzskoi Respubliki “Ob Obrazovanii”

30.4.2003 No 92).

II. The Decree of the government of Kyrgyzstan for independent accreditation, nro 670, September 29th 2015. (Ob utverždenii aktov po nezavisimoi akkreditatsii v sisteme obrazovanija Kyrgyzskoi Respubliki 29.09.2015, No 670)

III. Resolution No 496 of the Government of the Kyrgyz Republic “On establishing a two-level structure of higher professional education in the Kyrgyz Republic”, August 23rd 2011.

IV. Regulations on higher education institutions of the Kyrgyz Republic, 3rd February 2004, Nro 53 (http://cbd.minjust.gov.kg/act/view/ru-ru/55077?cl=ru-ru)

V. Regulations on the National Accreditation Board under the authorized body in the field of education (http://cbd.minjust.gov.kg/act/view/ru-ru/96715)

The second category of documents are the key development strategies for education. The first development strategy for Education in the Kyrgyz Republic (hereafter EDS) was approved in 2002. This strategy was named the Education Development Strategy of the Kyrgyz Republic for 2007–2010 (hereafter EDS 2010). The second strategy was named the Education Development Strategy of

the Kyrgyz Republic for 2012–2020 (hereafter EDS 2020). These both documents are used as a documentary data:

I. EDS (2010). Education Development Strategy of the Kyrgyz Republic 2007–2010.

II. EDS (2020). Education Development Strategy of the Kyrgyz Republic 2012–2020.

Based on the Law of Education, the Ministry of Education and Science is responsible for the Education Development Strategy, which is a guiding policy document describing the vision and goals of the country education development.

The Ministry of Education and Science is the central governmental agency for education. According to the Law on Education (2003), the Ministry of Education and Science is responsible for developing state educational standards, for defining policy priorities in the context of the country’s development strategy, for approving the rights and authorities of educational organizations, for coordination of curriculum development, teacher training, state examinations, accreditations, for appointing the heads of the Republic’s preschools, schools and state universities, and donor involvement.

My intention in using EDS 2020 as research data was to understand the discursive movement of policy ideas and practices across national territorial boundaries. With this policy document it is possible to observe complexity of the global and local policy influences. In this policy document, donors2have used their voices to describe current education reforms, their concerns and plans to solve assigned tasks. Anyhow, those concers are getting local menaings in that policy document. My interpretation is that EDS 2020 is not primarily serving as a strategic tool for national government to achieve its own national targets, but it is more as a strategic document to help the government to commit donors to the education development programs in Kyrgyzstan. Hence, it is a useful and relevant policy guiding document for studying international and national policy transfer.

From EDS 2020 it is possible to find out crossnational policy trends in local policy discourses. Even though EDS 2020 has little to do with local policy practices, it is crucial to analyze and understand the discursive level between donors and the Ministry of Education of Kyrgyzstan. The purpose of using this document is to broaden our understanding of policy changes and to explore how global travelling reforms are molded to a national context.

2 Donors are considered to be an international organization involved in the field of edu-cation with economic support (such as the Open Society Organisation, Unicef & World Bank).

The third set of documents are declarations concerning the key cooperation programs between Kyrgyzstan and the EU Council, and program guidelines which set the framework for international cooperation, such as the Multiannual Indicative Programme Regional Central Asia 2014–2020. Within this data set, selections include the following documents:

I. Committee paper: Opening of the EU-funded Erasmus+ Pro-gramme in Central Asia. 26.6. 2016. Council conclusions on the EU Strategy for the Central Asia Foreign Affairs Council. 22.6. 2015. European Commission (2012), From Erasmus Mundus to Erasmus+ Central Asia. May 2014.

http://eacea.ec.europa.eu/erasmus_mundus/tools/documents/repositor y/em_central_asia.pdf Multiannual Indicative Programme Regional Central Asia 2014–2020

II. Council conclusions on the EU Strategy for Central Asia Foreign Affairs Council (22 June 2015)

These documents are declarations of the key cooperation programs between Kyrgyzstan and the EU Council and program guidelines, which set out the framework for international cooperation, such as the Multiannual Indicative Programme Regional Central Asia 2014–2020. Through those documents it is possible to analyze cooperation in the field of education between the EU and Kyrgyzstan.

The restrictions with the selection of research data may be because the official documents and program declarations statements do not necessarily reflect decisions taken in the policy process of implementing international reforms as they are generally oriented to the future. Thus, those documents might create a unilateral picture of the situation of the higher education policies of Kyrgyzstan.

To respond to my research questions and to be able to provide an accurate overall picture of domestication of travelling reforms in Kyrgyzstan, the context of higher education policy platform of Kyrgyzstan needs to be presented. Therefore, in Chapter 4, the comprehensive picture of the higher education policy of Kyrgyzstan is outlined. In that chapter, I refer to other documentary materials from Kyrgyzstan’s higher education policy. There I used statistical data from the National Statistical Committee of Kyrgyzstan and budget databases from the Ministry of Finance of Kyrgyzstan. I consider bounding this research and background materials in this way to be a reasonable solution as it makes the examination relevant to the whole higher education sector in Kyrgyzstan, as well as to facilitate the contextualization of Kyrgyz higher education policy with other countries in the region. I also used materials (such as internet pages) from the universities in which the empirical interview data were collected. In addition to this, I also used pub-lications drafted by the National Tempus Offices in five

Central Asian countries to contextualize the needs and objectives of internationalization in the region. I used the document of the Overview of the Higher Education Systems in the Tempus Partner Countries: Central Asia, to get historical and comparative knowledge about the systems of higher education in Central Asian countries, to be able to understand cultural and geographic circumstances behind the reforms and modernization. The documents that have been analyzed and used as empirical data are the documents mentioned above.