Scotland's colleges have a wide-ranging mission. They strive to meet the needs of a diverse range of stakeholders, including individual learners, local communities, regional and national bodies and the national and international economies. At an individual level, the curriculum offered in Scotland's colleges aims to enable people to develop skills…

The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) is the UK national coordinator for the European Agenda for Adult Learning, with the challenge of creating a coherent message across the four countries to inform European cooperation on adult learning. To start the debate, the journal staff asked Sue Waddington, Alan Tuckett, and Fiona…

For more than one hundred and fifty years, until 2008, California was an undisputed national leader in its commitment to adult education. The state's investment in adult learners topped $750 million, a sum greater than the combined total of every other state in the nation. However, for the past several years recession and fiscal crisis have left…

The UNESCO-UNEVOC Regional Forum for Europe and North America was co-hosted by Moscow-based CVETS National Observatory on Vocational Education/Centre for VET Studies, with the support of the Moscow Institute for the Development of Education. It was the fourth of five regional follow-ups to the Shanghai Consensus on developing and sharing policy…

Internationalisation has transformed the higher education landscape around the world and has dramatically changed itself. Some question whether the change is for better or worse given some of the unintended consequences of internationalisation such as commercialisation, diploma and accreditation mills, international rankings and the great brain…

The idea of having a "Compare" Forum focusing on the above title was first discussed with one of the Editors of "Compare" during a PhD defence in Oslo in 2011. The PhD dissertation itself was linked to a larger project in which researchers from the North (Norway) and the South (South Africa) had been collaborating in…

To strengthen global and regional harmonization for the advancement of TVET transformation through the capacities of UNEVOC's unique global Network of specialized TVET institutions and affiliated partners, the UNESCO-UNEVOC International Centre organized a series of meetings to be held in all regions of the world. The meetings are organized…

In the current society, economic development in any region has to rely on higher education. Conversely, higher education cannot do without regional economic development in order to achieve greater progress in scale and level. Starting with the function of higher education in Wenzhou, this paper analyzes the reality and problems in Wenzhou's higher…

Everyone under the age of 20 who has grown up in North America has lived in the common market created by NAFTA--the North American Free Trade Agreement. In a zone linking the United States, Canada, and Mexico, most goods and investments flow freely across borders to users, consumers, and investors. In 1994, NAFTA created the largest relatively…

In the beginning of the 21st century, Ukraine finds itself in a complex position as it continues with the post-Soviet transition. The country faces tasks of national identity formation and nation building. Due to its location at the geopolitical crossroads between Russia to the East and the European Union to the West, Ukraine is also faced with…

Facing a collection of challenges, how can the Shanghai cooperation organisation (SCO) use technology to help improve cohesion, cope with enlargement, manage relations better with external parties, develop resources, advance economic cooperation between members, improve their speed of decision making and upgrade their quality of decision…

Objective: To evaluate the partnership structure of the "Network for a Healthy California" ("Network"), a social marketing program, from 2001-2007, to determine if California's program was able to establish and maintain partnerships that (1) provided access to a local audience, (2) facilitated regional collaboration, (3)…

Can democracy be expanded beyond borders? For many years, it was taken for granted that the norms and values of democracy could be applied within the boundaries of a state only. But over the last 20 years, it has been increasingly argued that democracy can also inform international organizations and global politics. This article recapitulates the…

In the early 21st century, food security has become an urgent public concern, arguably more entangled with social, political and environmental problems at multiple scales now than in the past. This paper examines approaches to food system change emphasizing regionalization, rather than either localization or globalization, to consider framings of…

Recent Finnish policies have encouraged Finnish higher education institutions to develop a market-oriented approach to international higher education by implementing fee-based educational programmes for students from outside the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA). From the Finnish government's perspective, higher education is…