Understanding and developing deliberative approaches to university governance
Date
2026-05
Authors
Kennedy, Jeffrey
Pek, Simon
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Society for Research into Higher Education
Abstract
This report sets out the results of a review of existing research on deliberation in the context of university governance – an area of scholarship that, while both promising and increasingly relevant, is still nascent and in need of further development. Drawing on an initial analysis of 140 articles and book chapters that engage with the issue, the review presents a number of observations about deliberative university governance. For one, the review demonstrates that deliberation is a significant idea within university governance, both by virtue of a growing number of researchers giving it a central place in their work as well as the frequency of references to deliberation in discussion. That this occurs across various fields adds to a sense of its wider relevance. Nonetheless, the review also demonstrates that conceptual approaches to deliberation in the literature vary considerably. Some authors tie their engagement to established political theory, while others provide no definition, and others occupy a middle path to varying effects.
In practical terms, the review demonstrates that deliberation is invoked in a variety of formats and contexts within universities. In addition to innovations intended to further deliberative approaches, both proposed and instituted, the review shows that authors regularly make claims about deliberation being a common feature of different bodies in university governance. Accordingly, in addition to scholarship making normative claims that university governance should be deliberative, scholarship also makes descriptive claims or assumptions about governance already being deliberative. Such claims are, however, not based on empirical research. While such broad trends are identifiable, the report points to the need for both empirical research on both conventional and innovative practices alike and highlights the need for more thorough, systematic theory regarding deliberative university governance and its relationship to longstanding models in the field. In all, then, this review offers an initial analysis of an emerging field and offers direction for future research.