NGOs, Capital, and the Architecture of Partnership: How Civil Society Strengthens Sustainable Higher Education — The Case of the European Council of Leading Business Schools (ECLBS)

Author: Anastasija Ivanova

Affiliation: Independent Researcher

ORCID iD: 0009-0000-7715-8015

Received 12 February 2025; Revised 28 March 2025; Accepted 22 April 2025; Available online 10 May 2025; Version of Record 10 May 2025.

Volume 2, December 2025, (10013)

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Abstract

The role of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) as structural actors in higher education governance has yet to be fully theorized in terms of their contribution to sustainable cross-border collaboration. The article is aimed at answering the question of how professional, non-statutory NGOs reinforce global partnerships for sustainable higher education and by what mechanisms. It develops an integrated analytical framework combining Bourdieu’s theory of capital, neo-institutional explanations of isomorphism and decoupling, and world-systems thinking about centre–periphery hierarchies, supplemented by the notion of epistemic communities. The framework is applied in one illustrative case, that of the European Council of Leading Business Schools (ECLBS), an independent, non-profit network that connects universities, business schools and quality-assurance practitioners across several regions through voluntary standards, peer learning and capacity-building rather than statutory accreditation. Drawing on publicly available documentation and the quality-assurance literature, the analysis adopts a theory-building, single-case design to identify five mechanisms - capital conversion, norm diffusion, counter-hegemonic recognition, goal translation and trust brokering - and re-expresses them as testable propositions. The discussion specifies how each proposition elaborates or qualifies the parent theories, such as the conditions under which voluntary convergence leads to substantive change rather than ceremonial conformity. The study offers a mechanism-level account of NGO agency in higher-education governance and a research agenda to empirically test it.

Keywords: non-governmental organizations; sustainable higher education; SDG 4; SDG 17; institutional isomorphism; social capital; world-systems; quality assurance; soft governance; partnerships.

1. Introduction

Two dynamics are shaping higher education today. The first is the institutionalization of sustainability. For instance, the United Nations 2030 Agenda asks universities to integrate equity, inclusion and ecological responsibility into their fundamental teaching, research and management functions. The second is the growing transnational integration of teaching and research. This integration decreases the cost of collaboration and, in particular, unveils persistent inequalities in access, capacity and recognition. In this context, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have shifted from the periphery of educational advocacy to a progressively central role in educational governance. NGOs now assemble stakeholders and facilitate codified voluntary standards and peer-learning platforms. They also develop policy instruments.

Professional NGOs are not as complex as ministries or intergovernmental organizations because they have lean structures. They have the relational flexibility to circulate new practices throughout their networks much faster than statutory organizations (i.e. peer review formats, micro-credential rubrics and sustainability audits). They have a relational advantage, not a coercive one. Where formal mandates tend to breed resistance, they build trust and credibility and move across academic, professional, civic and market logics. Studies on the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in higher education describe the types of institutional involvement and the gaps between what is done and what is promised (Serafini, de Moura, de Almeida & de Rezende, 2022; Amorós Molina et al., 2023). There is also literature on collaborations to fulfill SDG 4 (Quality Education) and SDG 17 (Partnerships) that argues that collaboration is increasingly popular and contested, with varying results due to differing levels of control (Menashy & Zakharia, 2022, 2023). Research on the role of non-state actors in education governance shows that civil society organizations are key actors in the production of the data, indicators and standards used to measure and assess systematic progress in education (McKenzie, Benavot & Redman, 2024).

Much has been written on this subject but the operations of NGOs have been mostly studied on a surface level. Three questions come up. First, why can NGOs work internationally if they do not have compulsory functions? Secondly, what are the possibilities for transforming voluntary operations into a similar practice across functionally diverse systems? Third, when do reproductions of such practices function to reinforce instead of undermine the hierarchy from the center to the periphery that characterizes the structure of global knowledge production? Most NGO accounts are functionalist. However, such accounts do not theorize mechanisms through which social relations can be transformed to bring about significant changes within an institution. There is also no account of the limits of such changes. This paper will start to fill this gap.

The article is new in three ways. First, it develops a new integrated framework drawing on Bourdieu’s theory of capital, neo-institutional theory and world-systems reasoning to show how NGOs concentrate resources, systematize norms and redistribute recognition. Second, it applies this framework to analyze the European Council of Leading Business Schools (ECLBS), an independent, non-profit organization that connects higher-education institutions to quality professional communities across Europe, Middle East and Africa, and Central Asia, through voluntary standards and peer-based evaluations and training, without statutory accreditation. Third, it reformulates the study into five propositions and identifies the contexts in which each proposition is applicable. The contribution is a mechanism level description of NGO agency in sustainable higher education, together with a framework that can be adapted to other non-statutory systems and that can be empirically validated in future studies.

2. Theoretical FrameworkThe framework conceptualizes NGO influence as the conversion of relational resources into institutional change. Three traditions each describe one aspect of this process: why NGOs can act, how their practices spread, and where their interventions matter for global hierarchy, while the idea of epistemic communities explains the durability of their effects.

2.1 Capital and the capacity to act

Bourdieu (1986) conceptualizes a field such as higher education as a structured space of positions in which agents deploy economic, cultural, social and symbolic capital. Recent applications reaffirm the continuing influence of cultural and social resources on educational achievement and recognition (Yang, Fan, & Chen, 2022). From this perspective, a professional NGO functions as a capital converter. It coalesces dispersed social capital—connections between universities, agencies, and industry—into collective capacity in the form of working groups and peer-review panels. It translates cultural capital, the accumulated expertise of quality assurance and pedagogy, into codified tools such as rubrics and self-assessment guides. And the recognition it confers functions as a form of symbolic capital to help mitigate uncertainty and to facilitate cross-border cooperation in the absence of formal equivalence. The NGO is not a substitute for public regulation; it is the mechanism that organises the rate at which these forms of capital are exchanged and so determines the incentives that reward sustainable and ethical practice.

2.2 Convergence without coercion

Voluntary practices are explained by neo-institutional theory. Organizations adopt rationalized structures to gain legitimacy, and these forms can be decoupled from actual work activity (Meyer & Rowan, 1977). DiMaggio and Powell (1983) distinguish between coercive, mimetic and normative mechanisms of isomorphic change. NGOs that lack statutory authority mostly work through the latter two: institutions facing uncertainty copy templates that seem to have worked elsewhere, and professional communities establish common expectations through training and accreditation-like recognition. Powell and DiMaggio (2023), in their forty-year reappraisal, warn that convergence is neither automatic nor uniform. The interesting questions relate to the variation in how, and how deeply, practices are adopted. This qualification is important here: the same mechanisms that produce useful comparability can also produce ceremonial conformity. Evidence from responsible management education shows that business schools often decouple visible commitments from internal practice and that external commitment alone does not guarantee against this (Rasche & Gilbert, 2015; Maloni, Palmer, Cohen, Gligor, Grout, & Myers, 2021). Analyses of signatories to the Principles for Responsible Management Education reveal declared commitments that are uneven and only partially embedded (Godemann, Nguyen, & Herzig, 2023). Thus, isomorphism can create either a floor of comparability or a ceiling of mimicry, depending on the design of diffusion.

2.3 Hierarchy and the geography of recognition

World-systems logic places knowledge production within global hierarchies of core, semi-periphery and periphery (Wallerstein, 1974). Contemporary analysis of global science shows that prestige, citation and resource flows continue to be highly concentrated in established centres, so that institutions outside the centre move "upwards" for legitimacy (Marginson & Xu, 2023). This structure has direct implications for what counts as quality: when recognition assumes core benchmarks, peripheral innovation goes unrecognized. In this geography NGOs can function as redistributive mechanisms by curating non-core exemplars as credible, enabling horizontal exchange that is not only flowing from the centre, and articulating equivalence frameworks that respect different resource conditions. Pluralising sources of legitimate practice is a theoretical move in itself, consistent with calls to broaden the epistemic base of higher education beyond a single canonical model (Yang, Marginson & Xu, 2024).

2.4 Durability through epistemic community

Finally, the persistence of NGO influence is explained through the formation of epistemic communities—networks of experts with shared causal beliefs and criteria of validity—stabilizing interpretive frames that outlast individual projects (Haas, 1992). An NGO consolidates durable frames rather than one-off outputs by supporting cross-institutional groups of experts on sustainable curricula, academic integrity or quality assurance. This is the channel through which education becomes a vehicle for what Knight (2023) calls knowledge diplomacy, relationships built through reciprocity and co-produced standards rather than through the exercise of soft power. Together the four strands make a single proposition for the analysis that follows: NGOs strengthen sustainable partnerships by converting capital, diffusing norms, redistributing recognition, and stabilizing shared frames, conditional on the boundary conditions that determine whether these effects are substantive or merely symbolic.

3. Research Design and Methodology

The study follows a qualitative single-case design oriented to theory building rather than to effect estimation (measuring outcomes is not within its scope). The aim is explanatory adequacy: to specify plausible, transferable mechanisms that connect NGO action with partnership outcomes such as trust, comparability and capacity, and to suggest the circumstances in which they operate. The case therefore has an analytical function, to develop and illustrate the framework, rather than a statistical generalization.

ECLBS was chosen on theoretical, not representative, grounds. It is a typical example of the larger class of professional education NGOs whose mechanisms the framework aims to explain. It is an independent, non-profit, non-statutory network that emphasizes voluntary standards, peer evaluation and capacity-building rather than government accreditation. Its cross-regional membership across core, semi-peripheral and peripheral systems also offers an information-rich case for addressing the centre-periphery dimension of the argument that a single-system case could not. The case thus fits the logic of purposive selection for a typical-yet-revelatory case. The evidentiary base is composed of publicly available material relating to the purpose, governance and activities of the organization, read in conjunction with the comparative literature on quality assurance, SDGs in higher education, and partnerships for SDG 4 and SDG 17. The analysis was done in three stages. First, organizational activities were inductively coded into functional categories: convening, codifying guidance, coordinating capacity-building, and connecting institutions across regions. Second, we used theory-driven pattern matching to map these categories onto the constructs of the framework—capital conversion, isomorphic diffusion, centre–periphery redistribution, and epistemic stabilization. In this process, we mapped observed practices to the patterns expected by each theory. Third, the matched patterns were abstracted to mechanism statements and stated as propositions, each with its boundary condition under which it is expected to hold. The design is interpretive and the evidence documentary. The propositions are presented as analytically grounded conjectures for subsequent empirical testing, rather than as confirmed findings.

4. Case Context: ECLBS as a Soft-Governance Platform

ECLBS is a non-profit independent council that links universities, business schools and quality-assurance communities in different regions. It is thought of as a platform, not a regulator: it does not give licences to governments and it does not replace national agencies. Instead, it brings together deans, quality directors and practitioners for peer exchange; codifies voluntary guidance in line with widely accepted frameworks for educational management and quality; organizes workshops and advisory work on internal quality systems, ethics and the integration of sustainability; and connects institutions across regions for recognition and collaboration. A representative line of activity is a quality development initiative that helps institutions to self-evaluate, strengthen governance and embed sustainability in teaching and management through diagnostic self-studies, peer observation and context sensitive roadmaps. Such activity complements statutory accreditation, not replaces it: where formal audits specify outcomes, peer-driven development addresses the routines, internal dialogue and culture change that audits often leave under-specified. The initiative is similar in this respect to the whole-institution approaches to sustainability described in the literature, where embedding an initiative relies on cross-functional engagement rather than just compliance (Kohl et al., 2022; Price et al., 2024). The briefs, rubrics, case notes, and seminars that the council produces are shared resources for members . The credibility of the council is based on professional reciprocity: experts provide knowledge, institutions provide cases, and the network provides recognition, comparability, and access to collaboration. Thus, ECLBS exemplifies the mode of soft governance through which much of the sustainability transition in higher education is now sought.

5. Findings: Five Mechanisms and Propositions

The application of the framework to the case illustrates five mechanisms through which a non-statutory NGO can strengthen sustainable partnerships. Each is expressed as a proposition with its governing condition.

5.1 Capital conversion

The network connects actors who would otherwise be isolated – registrars, quality managers, curriculum leads, deans, industry mentors – and turns scattered social capital into collective problem-solving capacity, for example a jointly authored sustainability learning-outcomes framework. Its reputation for fair process and practical utility is a form of symbolic capital that reduces the cost of cooperation and enables institutions to take reputational risks such as revealing weaknesses that adversarial settings discourage. Recognition then multiplies: an institution recognized for its practice gains standing, others are allowed to imitate it, and involvement brings additional resources (Bourdieu, 1986; Yang, Fan, & Chen, 2022).

Proposition 1. The more symbolic capital an NGO accumulates and the fairer its procedures, the more it transforms the dispersed social capital of its members into collective capacity, reducing the cost of cross-border cooperation.

5.2 Norm diffusion

The network distills emergent norms—transparent assessment, stakeholder engagement, SDG mapping, academic integrity—into teachable formats. Institutions under uncertainty take on these mimetically, while professional communities consolidate them normatively (DiMaggio & Powell, 1983). The quality of the diffusion is crucial. Isomorphism establishes a floor of comparability when the network explains why a practice matters and how to adapt it, and asks members to report what they changed and why. When the appearance of conformity is rewarded, the same process results in ceremonial adoption divorced from practice (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Powell & DiMaggio, 2023), the pattern observed in responsible management education (Rasche & Gilbert, 2015; Maloni et al., 2021).

Proposition 2. NGO-mediated diffusion yields substantive convergence when it stresses contextual adaptation and reflective reporting, and ceremonial conformity (decoupling) when it rewards only visible compliance.

5.3 Counter-hegemonic recognition

The network can give voice and recognition to institutions outside traditional centres without losing autonomy: by treating non-core practices—low-bandwidth digital pedagogy, community-embedded internships—as credible innovations, by facilitating horizontal exchange so that learning does not only flow from the centre, and by using equivalence frameworks that recognize different resource conditions but insist on integrity and student protection. To the extent that recognition is redistributed in this way, the network partially counters the centre–periphery concentration of prestige (Wallerstein, 1974; Marginson & Xu, 2023; Yang, Marginson, & Xu, 2024).

Proposition 3. The more an NGO curates non-core exemplars and allocates agenda-setting roles to semi-peripheral members, the more it redistributes symbolic capital and weakens centre-periphery dependency; absent such design, it reproduces existing hierarchy.

5.4 Goal translation

NGOs embed global commitments into institutional routines: sustainability outcomes at the level of programmes, staff development associated with ethical leadership, indicators of inclusion and quality cycles according to recognized standards of management. This is where sustainability becomes less aspirational, with templates and coaching reducing the transaction costs of embedding sustainability across functions (Serafini et al., 2022; Amorós Molina et al., 2023; Kohl et al., 2022; Price et al., 2024).

Proposition 4. The more an NGO provides adaptable templates and sustained coaching rather than declarations, the more reliably global goals are translated into durable institutional routines.

5.5 Trust brokering

Partnerships don’t work without trust. Neutral NGOs reduce the risk of collaboration through procedural guarantees: transparent peer selection, rules on conflicts of interest and criteria that can be published. These de-personalize the evaluation and reframe the feedback as collective learning. Membership, for institutions experimenting, offers an initial reputational filter that lowers the bar for first contact. The NGO also stabilizes the interpretive frames that make repeated cooperation legible as a standing expert network (Haas, 1992; Knight, 2023; Menashy & Zakharia, 2022, 2023; McKenzie et al., 2024).

Proposition 5. The higher the credibility and transparency of the procedures of the NGO, the higher its role as an epistemic intermediary to reduce the risk of partnership and to sustain cooperation over time.

Table 1. Mechanisms, propositions, and theoretical lenses.

Mechanism	Proposition (condition)	Principal theoretical lens
Capital conversion	P1: Symbolic capital and fair procedure convert social capital into collective capacity.	Theory of capital (Bourdieu, 1986)
Norm diffusion	P2: Adaptation and reflective reporting yield convergence; rewarding visible compliance yields decoupling.	Institutional isomorphism and decoupling (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983)
Counter-hegemonic recognition	P3: Curating non-core exemplars redistributes recognition; otherwise hierarchy is reproduced.	World-systems / centre–periphery (Wallerstein, 1974; Marginson & Xu, 2023)
Goal translation	P4: Templates and coaching, not declarations, embed global goals as routines.	Sustainability embedding in HE (Kohl et al., 2022)
Trust brokering	P5: Transparent procedure makes the NGO an epistemic intermediary that reduces partnership risk.	Epistemic communities / knowledge diplomacy (Haas, 1992; Knight, 2023)

Note. Propositions are analytically grounded conjectures derived from a single illustrative case and are intended for subsequent empirical testing. Each proposition is stated with the condition under which it is expected to hold.

6. Discussion

How far does our framework go in telling us about mechanisms? How does a non-statutory actor – in this case, an NGO – move institutions? What conditions exist that differentiate real change from change that is not genuine, but merely optical? These questions extend our parent theories in different ways.

First, consider the theory of capital. Here, we are able to conceptualize the NGO not as a passive holder of resources, but an actor that controls the exchange rates of different forms of capital, something that has a lot of purchase to the NGO literature. In the first proposition, we are looking at the fairness and openness of the conversion, to demonstrate whether social capital is converted to collective capacity or if social capital is used to enhance the existing social advantage. This balances Bourdieusian field theory and recognition dynamics that are evident in higher education (Yang, Fan, & Chen, 2022).

Second, we consider neo-institutional theory. Here, we engage the decoupling debate directly. Here, instead of asking the question, ‘do voluntary networks result in convergence?’, the second proposition asks the question ‘what are the design elements (contextualization and reflective reporting) that will result in substantive convergence instead of decoupling and, therefore, become ceremonial convergence (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; DiMaggio & Powell, 1983; Powell & DiMaggio, 2023)?’ This proposition answers one of the gaps in the literature of isomorphism, which is looking at convergence and predicting outcomes of convergence but not the depth of convergence. This is also congruent with empirical studies that document examples of decoupling in responsible managerial education (Rasche & Gilbert, 2015; Maloni et al., 2021). What we conclude from this is that NGOs are not passive actors in the normative game of isomorphism, wherein the design of their procedural processes does result in convergence (isomorphic practices) at a minimal level of comparability; isomorphic practices, therefore, result in a high level of mimicry.

Within the framework of world-systems reasoning, the analysis tempers the degree of determinism that some centre-periphery models may describe. Proposition 3 presents the NGO as a redistributive mechanism, the impact of which depends on purposely collecting non-core exemplars and granting semi-periphery members the role of leaders. This approach places civil-society networks amid the current debates regarding the hegemonic position of global knowledge (Marginson & Xu, 2023), and pluralism in the epistemic foundation in higher education (Yang, Marginson, & Xu, 2024), while countering the belief that voluntary networks tend to spread core models.

The study also advances discussions on the role of partnerships and non-state actors in the governance of education. By portraying the NGO as an epistemic intermediary (Haas, 1992), engaged in knowledge diplomacy (Knight, 2023), Propositions 4 and 5 capture the reasons why some partnerships remain productive and some are not, and add to the existing critical literature on the power relations and differential impact of partnerships for SDG 4 and SDG 17 (Menashy & Zakharia, 2022, 2023; McKenzie et al., 2024). The integrated framework combines three rarely integrated fields and provides a single definitional system for understanding how relational resources are transformed into institutionalized change.

7. Risks and Boundary Conditions

The propositions are conditional, and these conditions constitute the main risks. The first is performative compliance. Organizations may implement the outward form, but not the inner substance, of good practices. This is the decoupling outcome predicted in Proposition 2 and documented in management education (Meyer & Rowan, 1977; Rasche & Gilbert, 2015; Maloni et al., 2021). The requirement for reflective narratives and supporting evidence helps to offset this risk. The second is homogenization, which is the convergence of local pedagogical cultures and domination of one over the rest. This can be offset by promoting design principles over overtly rigid templates, as well as maintaining a regionally diverse representation in peer panels (Yang, Marginson, & Xu, 2024). The third is unequal voice, where core institutions monopolize the agenda setting and preserve the very hierarchy Proposition 3 aims to disrupt. In this case, Marginson and Xu (2023) suggest a safeguarding measure of rotating leadership to semi-peripheral members. The fourth is self-accountability of NGOs, which can be offset by having governance, conflict-of-interest policies, and independent observers published. A network that meets these conditions is much more likely to achieve substantive partnership outcomes. A network that does not meet these conditions is likely to reproduce the very asymmetries that it seeks to address.

8. Limitations and Future Research This design results in three limitations. The study is interpretive and documentary. The mechanisms are specified but not their effects, and the propositions are thus to be tested. Second, the single-case approach underpins analytical rather than statistical generalisation. Other models of NGOs, donor-funded, mission-driven or sector-specific, may have different mechanisms activated. Third, the centre–periphery analysis is based on the documented structure of global recognition and not on primary data on the positions of members. These constraints define a clear agenda. Comparative, multi-case work could investigate the presence of the five mechanisms across types of NGOs and regions, and which procedural designs reliably prevent decoupling. Longitudinal and mixed-methods studies could directly test the propositions—for example, in relation to the transparency of an NGO’s procedures (P5) and measured partnership durability, or the design of its diffusion (P2) and evidence of substantive curricular change. Network analysis methods could examine if semi-peripheral members (P3) assume agenda-setting roles in altering the diffusion of recognition. Such work would turn present conjectures into tested theory.

9. Conclusion

Sustainable higher education is not only about policy declarations, but about relational infrastructures that translate intention into practice across borders and sectors. This article has argued that non-statutory NGOs can act as such infrastructures by converting capital, diffusing norms, redistributing recognition, translating global goals, and brokering trust. It has re-expressed these mechanisms as five conditional propositions. The main contribution is analytical: an integrated framework that connects Bourdieusian, neo-institutional and world-systems logics to explain how a non-coercive body can still change institutions, and to identify when its influence is substantive rather than ceremonial. The ECLBS case is an illustration of the argument, not an exhaustion. Whether NGOs extend the collaborative and democratic capacities of higher education or simply add a layer of symbolic conformity depends on the procedural conditions identified here, which future empirical work can now test.

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