Abstract

Drawing on Olsen’s (2007) institutional dynamics and Christiansen and Lægreid’s (2001) public sector reform frameworks, this paper examines how higher education reforms in Kazakhstan are understood, negotiated, and implemented from the perspective of national-level policymakers. While much of the existing literature on higher education reform focuses on institutional or faculty-level experiences, this study recenters analysis on policymakers as key actors shaping reform trajectories, priorities, and constraints in a highly centralized system.

The study adopts a qualitative case study design (Yin, 2014), based on in-depth interviews with eleven senior policymakers, including former Ministers and Vice Ministers of Education and senior officials and departments’ heads at the Ministry. By foregrounding policymaker narratives, the paper explores how reforms are conceptualized at the system level and how policy intentions interact with entrenched governance structures, legal frameworks and institutional realities.

Findings reveal a persistent tension between Kazakhstan’s ambition to build a globally competitive and innovation-driven higher education system and the enduring legacy of centralized, hierarchical governance rooted in the Soviet past. Policymakers themselves acknowledge that reform implementation is constrained not only by institutional resistance within universities, but also by bureaucratic inertia and risk-averse decision-making within government structures. This dual constraint highlights that barriers to reform are not confined to the institutional level but are embedded within the policy apparatus itself.

Furthermore, policymakers point to significant regional disparities that shape uneven reform outcomes, particularly in regional universities facing infrastructural limitations and difficulties in attracting qualified academic and managerial staff. These insights complicate dominant reform narratives by showing how national policies are mediated, adapted, and sometimes diluted across different local contexts.

The paper argues that understanding reform implementation in post-Soviet contexts requires closer attention to policymakers’ perspectives, as they play a critical role in both enabling and constraining change. The findings highlight a fundamental tension between the normative ideal of participatory, context-sensitive governance and the prevailing state-driven, top-down reform model. This tension raises important questions about the long-term sustainability and effectiveness of recent reforms, including large-scale initiatives such as the expansion of international branch campuses. By centering policymakers as agents of reform, this study contributes to global debates on higher education change by offering empirical insights from a non-Western, post-Soviet context, and by rethinking where agency and constraint are located in reform processes.