E-catalog        

Библиогр.: с. 180-181

On April 8th 2013 the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands announced the Russia-Netherlands Year aimed at fostering bilateral relationships in various fields including education and science. A new Memorandum of Understanding on higher education and scientific collaboration was signed by the Dutch and Russian Ministers of Education and Science in the same year. According to official statements, there has been, as a result, an increase in cooperation in higher education between both countries with 97 existing cooperation agreements between them (Nuffic Neso Russia, 2013). A number of joint initiatives have taken place. Nonetheless, on-going active cooperative projects are rare and the case studies of these projects are even rarer. However, this chapter aims to make visible the day-to-day practices of one of the successfully delivered EU-Russia projects, demonstrating its inner workings, challenges and insights. The aforementioned project is ‘Bridging Innovations, Health and Societies: Educational capacity building in the Eastern European Neighbouring Areas’ (bihsena), funded by the Erasmus+ framework. This project was led by Maastricht University and involved a number of EU and non-EU universities. This case study explores the factors of success in building collaboration and analyses the problems and impediments the participants faced. The data used includes information provided by the participants and executives of the project; interviews with key participants of the BIHSENA project from Russia, the Netherlands, and Ukraine; and the self-reflection of the project teams of each participating country. The chapter provides an exploration of the controversies, motivation and drivers of such collaboration and helps in the understanding of whether the success or failure of cooperation is a matter of institutional practice or has deeper roots in the national strategies for the internationalisation of higher education in Russia and the Netherlands.