THE OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT

Within the framework of the thematic priorities "governance, strategic planning, management of higher education institutions" set for the Asia region under the ERASMUS+ CBHE program, the PURSEA consortium members have set as a main objective to strengthen the capacity of partner HEIs to define and implement strategic planning in an empowering context.

Two processes characterize the university systems in Cambodia and Vietnam: on the one hand, a political will to empower HEIs driven by the two governments concerned and, on the other hand, a search by HEIs for academic and scientific recognition at both the national and regional levels for the projects they develop. In this context, two observations stand out:

• 1st observation: this process of empowerment associated with the search for academic and scientific recognition is forcing Cambodian and Vietnamese HEIs to rethink the main strategic orientations of their development plans, and therefore the university governance on which their implementation is based.
• 2nd observation: university governance associated with the implementation of a strategic planning process remains an area where operational and contextualized reflection is often insufficient in Southeast Asia: its definition and implementation by an HEI presuppose the creation of institutional conditions for identifying, over specific periods of time, certain issues that are thought of as challenges that the HEI must take up, and the objectives that it sets for itself in order to respond to them with regard to its missions and specificities, whether it is a question of its training offer, the research activities that it wishes to program, etc.