Policy Borrowing

Abstract

Changes in Vietnamese society have historically been embedded in its interactions with foreign influences. So have most transformations in Vietnamese higher education. Be it an imposed or a self-initiated process, the penetration of ideas from outside Vietnam has interwoven into the very fabric of remoulding the landscape of Vietnamese higher education. Now that Vietnam’s integration into the global process of ‘widening, deepening and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness’ (Held et al., 1999, p. 2) has become obvious, discourses of transnational mobility of ideas and ‘policy synchrony’ (Marginson, 2010a) are arguably of greater significance in relation to the modernization of Vietnamese higher education.