Few of the goals of the EHEA are easier to remember than “20 per cent mobility by 2020”. The goal has, in fact, proved to be easier to remember than to achieve. Despite its straightforward appearance, the goal is complex and composite.
One important condition for successful academic mobility is that students get fair recognition of the qualifications they earn, regardless of whether they go abroad for a short period or a full degree program. Fair recognition depends on both a good international legal basis and sound recognition policy and practice to make the legal framework function in practice.
Recognition of qualifications has been an important goal of the EHEA since its very beginning. Not only does the 1998 Sorbonne Declaration include a reference to the Lisbon Recognition Convention (LRC), which had been adopted one year earlier. The LRC is the only international treaty that has been incorporated into the EHEA. In the 2005 Bergen Communiqué, Ministers noted that 36 of the then 45 members of the Bologna Process had ratified the LRC and urged the remaining EHEA members to do so “without delay”. Nevertheless, the final ratification by the now 49 EHEA members came only in September 2024.
On this background, the publication of Crossing Bridges between Education Systems. The History and Relevance of the Lisbon Recognition Convention should be of interest to both recognition specialists and those interested in higher education policy more broadly. The book draws on contributions by some ten authors in addition to the editors Chiara Finochietti, Kees Kouwenaar, Luca Lantero and Stamenka Uvalić-Trumbić, and myself, and it is available in Open Access.
In the book, we provide an overview of the development of the LRC, but it is not a pure work of either history or reminiscence. It also explores how the LRC remains relevant almost a generation after it was adopted, and it discusses how the convention takes account of developments that could not have been foreseen in the 1990s.
The LRC was born at a time when European cooperation in the true sense of the word was possible for the first time in decades. The developments that are often summarized as the fall of the Berlin Wall made it realistic to aim for pan-European cooperation in higher education. The Zeitgeist was propitious because the notion of a rules based world order had not yet been challenged. At the same time, academic mobility had been placed high on the policy agenda through the success of the ERASMUS program as well as regional mobility programs like NORDPLUS and CEEPUS.
Not least, the existing recognition conventions were outdated. Rather than try to amend these, the Council of Europe and UNESCO decided to develop a new convention and to do so together. From then on, tings went fairly rapidly, since work was launched in 1994, and the convention was adopted at a diplomatic conference in Lisbon in April 1997. That was the start of an equally rapid process of ratifications. The LRC came into force in February 1999, with the fifth ratification, and by now it has been ratified by 57 countries. These include all EHEA members as well as Monaco and a number of countries that are not geographically in Europe but that are nevertheless members of the UNESCO Europe Region and/or were parties to the 1979 UNESCO regional convention for Europe: Australia, Canada, Israel, Kyrgyzstan, New Zealand, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan. The United States has signed but not yet ratified the LRC.
One reason the older recognition conventions had become outdated was that recognition practice had evolved. The LRC therefore included new concepts and provisions to take account of these developments. The most innovative concept was arguable that of “substantial differences”. These are differences between the foreign qualifications for which recognition is sought and the corresponding qualification in the host country that are so important that they may justify non-recognition. Typically, they make it doubtful whether the holders of the qualification may successfully pursue the studies or carry out the work for which they apply.
There are two important aspects of “substantial differences”. Firstly, there are differences that are not “substantial” and that therefore cannot be used as arguments not to recognize foreign qualifications. Students do not go abroad to do the same things they could have done at home. Secondly, this concept illustrates how recognition practice has developed since the LRC was adopted. Through longstanding cooperation, the community of practitioners, most notably in the ENIC and NARIC Networks, has developed a better understanding of this key concept, which has again contributed to improving fair recognition for students and holders of qualifications throughout the European region. While it proved impossible to provide a definition of “substantial differences” in 1997, 22 years later the UNESCO Global Convention was able to define them as “significant differences between the foreign qualification and the qualification of the State Party which would most likely prevent the applicant from succeeding in a desired activity, such as, but not limited to, further study, research activities, or employment opportunities”.
The LRC is now at least as old as the conventions it replaced because they had become outdated. Does the LRC then also run the risk of becoming obsolete? This would perhaps have been a danger if the LRC had been a static document. No legal text is stronger than its implementation, and the community of practitioners, which includes the Lisbon Recognition Convention Committee (LRCC) as well as the ENIC and NARIC Networks, keeps the LRC alive.
Secondly, the LRC allows for the adoption of subsidiary texts. These have lesser legal status than the convention itself, but they are nevertheless important in guiding policy and practice. Through the LRCC, the States Parties have accepted recommendations that develop policy and practice and in some cases address topics that were not on the agenda in the mid-1990s. As examples, the LRCC has adopted recommendations on the use of qualifications frameworks in recognition, recognition of joint degrees, and recognition of qualifications held by refugees. A recommendation on the criteria and procedures for the assessment of foreign qualifications details many of the provisions of the LRC beyond what it was possible to do in the text of the convention itself. Two monitoring reports, in 2016 and 2022, identified provisions that are work well and others that do not. Hence, the 2016 implementation report spurred the development of the European Qualifications Passport for Refugees.
One could perhaps have feared that the LRCC would be unable to develop beyond a minimum common denominator, so that the countries least willing to develop new practice would set the pace. The opposite has happened: the LRCC and the ENIC Network have been able to develop agreed policy that goes well beyond what some countries may originally have wanted. As the BFUG, the LRC has demonstrated that working together on common issues brings progress.
The fact that the LRC has been successful so far does of course not mean that it will always remain relevant. As the book discusses, those responsible for implementing the LRC have been able to develop policy and practice in directions that take account of new developments. In addition to the topics covered by the recommendations referred to above, the book explores how the LRC relates to developments like greater reliance on learning outcomes as well as technological developments (including artificial intelligence), micro credentials, and automatic recognition. One could well imagine that some of these topics may be the subject of new recommendations, and it is important they be addressed within the framework of the LRC. The situation in the early 1990s, with a myriad of European recognition conventions, testify to the importance of having an overarching recognition convention that gives room for development of policy and practice.
Like the EHEA, the LRC also has a global dimension. In the UNESCO context, it is one of several regional recognition conventions. The LRC is, in fact, the first of a new generation of regional conventions, and it provided inspiration for a series of regional conventions for Asia and the Pacific, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Arab States that were developed from around 2010 onward. The LRC also provided inspiration for the UNESCO Global Convention that was adopted in 2019, and it may even be one of the reasons it was now possible to adopt a global convention. A first attempt was made in the 1990s, but in the face of opposition not least from European countries, this work ended with the adoption of a recommendation rather than a legal treaty.
In the medium term, it will be important to find the proper relationship between the LRC, as one of a series of regional conventions, and the UNESCO Global Convention. An important consideration in this respect is that the LRC benefits from more advanced and better resourced support through the LRCC and above all the ENIC and NARIC Networks than what may reasonably be expected in other UNESCO regions in the foreseeable future. Hence, the Global Convention will hopefully supplement rather than replace the regional conventions.
Even if the recognition of qualifications may seem like a technical issue, it is much more. The biggest threats to the LRC do not come from technical obstacles, which the States Parties and the community of practitioners have demonstrated that they can solve. The biggest threats come from political developments that question a rules based world order and see armed intervention as a legitimate approach to conflicts, even between parties to the same conventions. So far, the EHEA has taken stronger measures than the LRCC against Russia and Belarus over their role in the war of aggression against Ukraine, and other examples of armed aggression have not truly been addressed in either framework.
Even if the climate of international cooperation today gives less reasons for optimism than what we saw a generation ago, however, the authors of the new book on the history and continued relevance of the LRC believe this convention will remain important both within the EHEA and globally. We do not believe the LRC has an expiry date as long as the States Parties and the community of practice want it to function well. We hope this new book will inspire reflection that will improve higher education policy within the EHEA, underline the continued importance of international cooperation more broadly, and develop policies and practice that will make recognition even fairer.
Sjur Bergan is an independent education expert and one of the authors of the Lisbon Recognition Convention. Until his retirement in February 2022, he was Head of the Council of Europe Education Department, and he represented the Council in the BFUG between 2000 and 2022. Sjur chaired successive working groups on qualifications frameworks and structural reforms 2007 – 15 and was a member of the Working Group on Fundamental Values until 2024. He remains associated with this WG as an expert with the NewFAV project.