The Ibero-american university cooperation: between the rhetoric and the uncertainty

Abstract

The article describes the current landscape of international university cooperation, whose articulators axes are the complementation of the capacities, institutional strengthening and the internationalization of universities. This is a very diversified cooperation regarding to the modalities and to geographical areas, and its expansion has contributed to generate strategies to increase it. Under the premise that there is no university scope or component that cannot contemplate some form of international cooperation and benefit from the opportunities it offers, integrated into the objectives of capacity building and institutional development of a university, this contribution focuses its attention on the university cooperation in the Ibero-american field. This last one occurs in a wide variety of schemas, of which only a few are strictly ibero-american, that is to say, fueled from ibero-american institutions; what has led to differentiate the strict Ibero-american cooperation from the indirect and the autonomous. Finally, we analyze the potential and the future of the ibero-american cooperation, the latter conditioned by a number of factors, including the lower weight of the ibero-american dimension, the growing asymmetries between the universities and the fatigue observed in the instruments for the promotion of cooperation.