“Conditioned” Quality Assurance of Higher Education in Georgia: Talking the EU Talk

Abstract The article discusses the latest wave of the higher education quality assurance (QA) reform, implemented by the Government of Georgia in response to its obligations envisaged by the EU–Georgia Association Agreement and its consequent Association Agenda 2017–2020. We argue that Eu conditionality was a major driving factor for the modernization of Georgian QA system according to the European Standards and Guidelines for Quality Assurance (ESG 2015), and even though the reform was mostly implemented in the framework of the country’s EU integration, an expected reward in the form of the membership of the European Association for Quality Assurance in Higher Education (ENQA) granted to the national Center for Educational Quality Enhancement (NCEQE) of Georgia was the major driving force for implementing the reform successfully. While this reward-driven reform has resulted in the ENQA membership, it has not inevitably led to building a sustainable, independent and development-oriented external quality assurance system for the enhancement of Georgian higher education. Therefore, the entire QA reform was merely aimed at “talking the EU talk” (Schimmelfennig & Sedelmeier, 2005, p. 27) by the Georgian government instead of actually being focused on the development of internal “quality culture” in Georgian higher education institutions.