Given their education, research and societal missions, universities are important actors in the transition towards carbon neutrality, sustainable societies and economies. They are well placed to play a key role in achieving the objectives of the UN SDGs, the Agenda 2030 and the European Green Deal.

During the upcoming presidencies of the Council of the European Union, there will be an opportunity to work towards long-term system transformation by jointly strengthening research, education and innovation in Europe.

This purpose of this paper is threefold: First, it describes the international milieu of policymaking relevant to joint programmes and its development in recent years. It focuses predominantly on the ambivalence of terminology commonly used to describe these programmes, while also comparing the practices, which the terms generally label.

In the Finnish accreditation system, the element of benchlearning was introduced in 2018. Turku UAS grabbed the chance with this new method and invited HU UAS Utrecht, a long-time partner from the Netherlands, to dive in and see how much this method would bring both institutions.

This paper illustrates how HEIs, experts and a quality assurance agency address the key challenges of building trust among stakeholders and, while being engaged in an experimental “learning by doing together” process, what body of evidence would help to create confidence in the new process.

This papers presents a quality assurance approach for joint programmes which has been developed by the Una Europa alliance. The Una Europa partners developed a lean joint internal quality assurance strategy for the joint programmes, which seeks to build on the existing practices within the partner institutions to the maximum extent. Trust between the partners is the key aspect of the joint quality assurance strategy.

The relationship between quality assurance and impact has increasingly gaining attention during the last two decades. The focus, however, is usually put on the impact of quality assurance. In this paper, the authors want to shift the attention to how QA could contribute to assessing the impact of higher education (institutions) and what this implies methodologically.

In 2017, the Université Grenoble Alpes (UGA) began the construction of a new database of relationships with its external partners, both local and international. The database provides the university with its first global view of its external relations and some of its impact. This new database also provides university stakeholders with tools for evaluation and decision-making.

This paper describes the experiences by four Dutch universities of applied sciences in the context of a pilot project organised by the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science. This development suggests an important shift in the Dutch accreditation system from programme accreditation to institutional accreditation.

The paper will present an overview of the mandatory use of performance indicators in programme accreditation in Germany. The use of performance indicators in Germany is not new but recent developments have made their use more prominent.