BETWEEN METRIC AND MEANING: SELF-EVALUATION AS A MANAGEMENT DEVICE FOR INTERNATIONALIZATION IN GRADUATE PROGRAMSAbstract
This article critically analyzes the tensions between the regulatory requirements of the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) and the construction of autonomous institutional policies for internationalization in Brazilian Graduate Programs (PPGs). It problematizes the reduction of internationalization to quantitative indicators, often dissociated from substantive academic formation and from the institutional identity of the programs. Drawing on a critical-theoretical approach, grounded in the contributions of José Dias Sobrinho, Almerindo Janela Afonso and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, and in recent international literature on internationalization for the global common good, the article proposes the resignification of institutional self-evaluation as a political-pedagogical and managerial device capable of distinguishing “passive internationalization”, characterized by mere reactive compliance with external criteria, from “active internationalization”, oriented by the construction of institutional projects with epistemological density and social relevance. The methodology comprises a theoretical-simulated case study of an excellence PPG, detailing participatory selfevaluation processes and contrasting its Strategic Plan with the CAPES Evaluation Form. The results indicate that participatory self-evaluation constitutes an indispensable tool for overcoming institutional isomorphism, for strategic budgetary decision-making and for building formative processes that transcend the logic of academic productivism.
Keywords:
institutional self-evaluation; graduate internationalization; academic management.
Resumo
Este artigo analisa criticamente as tensões entre as exigências regulatórias da Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) e a construção de políticas institucionais autônomas de internacionalização nos Programas de Pós-Graduação (PPGs) brasileiros. Problematiza-se a redução da internacionalização a indicadores quantitativos, frequentemente dissociados da formação acadêmica substantiva e da identidade institucional dos programas. A partir de uma abordagem teórico-crítica, fundamentada em contribuições de José Dias Sobrinho, Almerindo Janela Afonso, Boaventura de Sousa Santos e na literatura internacional recente sobre internacionalização para o bem comum global, propõe-se a ressignificação da autoavaliação institucional como dispositivo político-pedagógico e gerencial capaz de distinguir a "internacionalização passiva", caracterizada pela mera adequação reativa aos critérios externos, da "internacionalização ativa", orientada pela construção de projetos institucionais com densidade epistemológica e pertinência social. A metodologia contempla um estudo de caso teórico-simulado de um PPG de excelência, detalhando os processos de autoavaliação participativa e contrastando seu Planejamento Estratégico com a Ficha de Avaliação da CAPES. Os resultados indicam que a autoavaliação participativa constitui ferramenta indispensável para a superação do isomorfismo institucional, para a tomada de decisão orçamentária estratégica e para a construção de processos formativos que transcendam a lógica do produtivismo acadêmico.
Palavras-chave:
autoavaliação institucional; internacionalização da pós-graduação; gestão acadêmica.
Resumen
Este artículo analiza críticamente las tensiones entre las exigencias regulatorias de la Coordinación de Perfeccionamiento del Personal de Educación Superior (CAPES) y la construcción de políticas institucionales autónomas de internacionalización en los Programas de Posgrado (PPGs) brasileños. Se problematiza la reducción de la internacionalización a indicadores cuantitativos, frecuentemente disociados de la formación académica sustantiva y de la identidad institucional de los programas. Desde un enfoque teórico-crítico, fundamentado en contribuciones de José Dias Sobrinho, Almerindo Janela Afonso, Boaventura de Sousa Santos y la literatura internacional reciente sobre internacionalización para el bien común global, se propone la resignificación de la autoevaluación institucional como dispositivo político-pedagógico y gerencial. La metodología contempla un estudio de caso teórico-simulado de un PPG de excelencia, detallando los procesos de autoevaluación participativa. Los resultados indican que la autoevaluación participativa constituye herramienta indispensable para la superación del isomorfismo institucional, para la toma de decisión presupuestaria estratégica y para la construcción de procesos formativos que trasciendan la lógica del productivismo académico.
Palabras clave:
autoevaluación institucional; internacionalización del posgrado; gestión académica.
1 INTRODUCTION
Brazilian graduate education is immersed in a silent crisis, whose most evident manifestations lie in the tension between the regulatory logic imposed by the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) and the pressing need for Graduate Programs (PPGs) to build substantive institutional identities, anchored in their own epistemological and political projects. This tension acquires particularly dramatic contours in the field of internationalization, transformed into a categorical imperative of the quadrennial evaluation without an adequate problematization of its formative meaning or its relevance in light of the heterogeneous realities that characterize the national graduate system.
The National Graduate System (SNPG), internationally recognized for its institutional robustness and for the quality of its scientific output, paradoxically faces the risk of succumbing to what Dias Sobrinho (2008b) termed “evaluative fetishism”: the progressive substitution of ends by means, in which performance indicators cease to be instruments of monitoring and become ends in themselves. In this context, internationalization, originally conceived as a strategy of intercultural dialogue, scientific cooperation and knowledge circulation, is reduced to a set of quantifiable metrics: the number of publications in foreign journals, international co-authorships, academic mobility and participation in global networks.
The problem that guides this study may be formulated as follows: in what way can institutional self-evaluation constitute a political-pedagogical and managerial device capable of distinguishing quantity from quality in internationalization processes, overcoming the logic of “academic tourism” or “sterile productivism” that frequently characterizes the adaptive strategies of PPGs in the face of regulatory requirements? The hypothesis advanced here holds that self-evaluation, when conceived as a collective reflective practice rather than as a mere bureaucratic formality of accountability, can transform “passive internationalization”, characterized by reactive compliance with CAPES indicators, into “active internationalization”, oriented by the deliberate construction of an institutional policy endowed with epistemological density and social relevance.
The phenomenon of institutional isomorphism, widely documented by organizational and educational literature, manifests itself with particular intensity in higher education evaluation systems. As Afonso (2009) argues, the mechanisms of regulatory accountability tend to produce a homogenization of institutional practices, insofar as educational organizations, subjected to normative and mimetic pressures, come to reproduce the organizational forms and strategies deemed “successful” according to the hegemonic criteria of evaluation. In the Brazilian case, this isomorphism translates into the standardization of internationalization strategies, frequently disconnected from the historical trajectories, regional vocations and specific formative projects of each program.
The CAPES Quadrennial Evaluation, the central instrument for regulating the SNPG, operates according to a technical-instrumental rationality that, although it has contributed significantly to the expansion and qualification of the system, presents epistemological and political limitations that warrant problematization. The Evaluation Form, the document that synthesizes the criteria and weightings of each field, privileges output indicators - published articles, completed supervisions and the raising of funds - to the detriment of process and formation indicators. In the specific domain of internationalization, this logic manifests itself in the emphasis placed on metrics of international insertion - publications in high-impact journals, formalized partnerships, students on mobility - without adequately interrogating the formative quality of these experiences or their articulation with the educational objectives declared by the program.
Santos (2008), in developing his critique of the contemporary university, identifies three interconnected crises: the crisis of hegemony, arising from the loss of the monopoly over the production and transmission of knowledge; the crisis of legitimacy, resulting from the tension between hierarchization and democratization of access; and the institutional crisis, provoked by the imposition of business-oriented organizational models upon the university. Internationalization, as hegemonically conceived, is inscribed within this context of crisis: it may represent a vector of epistemic coloniality, reinforcing North-South asymmetries in the production of knowledge, or it may constitute a strategy of resistance and of building epistemological alternatives, through processes of “solidary internationalization” or “South-South cooperation”.
It is precisely in this interstice that we situate the potential of institutional selfevaluation. Unlike external evaluation, oriented by standardized criteria and comparative rankings, self-evaluation, when adequately conceived and implemented, enables the academic community to interrogate its own purposes, critically examine its practices and collectively construct the meanings of its formative action. With respect to internationalization, self-evaluation may constitute the privileged institutional space for distinguishing the “international for the international’s sake”, characterized by the accumulation of disarticulated indicators, from internationalization as an organic dimension of the pedagogical project, articulated with the formative needs of students and the social responsibilities of the program.
Moreover, self-evaluation as a management device has direct implications for budgetary decision-making in PPGs. Programs that have resources from the Academic Excellence Program (PROEX) or the Institutional Internationalization Program (CAPESPrInt) frequently face the dilemma of allocating funding to actions that maximize shortterm indicators or to initiatives of greater formative impact but slower return within the evaluation systems. Active self-evaluation can provide coordinators with grounds to justify strategic choices that privilege, for example, South-South partnerships of joint knowledge construction, even when these generate fewer immediate “points” on the Evaluation Form.
This article is organized into four sections, in addition to this introduction. In the first, theoretical section, we develop a conceptual foundation regarding the paradigms of internationalization, distinguishing their passive and active modalities, and regarding the role of self-evaluation within the National System of Higher Education Evaluation (SINAES) and in graduate education, with emphasis on the contributions of Dias Sobrinho. We also engage with recent international literature, particularly with the contributions of Hans de Wit, Betty Leask and Uwe Brandenburg on internationalization for the global common good. In the second section, we present a theoretical-simulated case study of an excellence PPG, detailing its participatory self-evaluation processes. In the third section, we discuss the results in light of the theoretical framework mobilized, arguing for the need to resignify self-evaluation as a device for building institutional autonomy and strategic management. In the final considerations, we synthesize the contributions of the study and indicate perspectives for research and educational policy.
Methodologically, this study is inscribed within the tradition of criticaltheoretical research in education, combining a systematic literature review with documentary analysis and the construction of a simulated case study. The choice of a simulated case, rather than an empirical study of an existing program, is justified both for ethical reasons - avoiding the exposure of specific institutions - and for heuristic reasons - allowing the construction of a Weberian ideal type that highlights, in a concentrated form, the structural tensions that traverse the field.
2 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: BETWEEN REGULATION AND EMANCIPATION
2.1 Internationalization of higher education: from hegemonic rhetoric to counter-hegemonic possibilities
The internationalization of higher education constitutes a multifaceted phenomenon whose historical roots date back to the medieval origins of the European university, but which acquires radically distinct configurations in the context of contemporary neoliberal globalization. Knight (2004), in a widely cited definition, conceptualizes internationalization as the process of integrating the international, intercultural and global dimensions into the purposes, functions and provision of higher education. However, this apparently neutral definition conceals the political and epistemological disputes that traverse the field, particularly with regard to the power relations between the educational systems of the global North and South.
The specialized literature distinguishes different rationalities underlying internationalization processes. De Wit (2002) identifies four broad categories of motivations: political, economic, academic and sociocultural. In the Brazilian context, one observes the preponderance of motivations of a regulatory and reputational nature, frequently dissociated from a substantive formative project. Internationalization thus becomes a strategy of institutional survival - a condition for maintaining or raising the CAPES grade - rather than a constitutive dimension of a reflexively constructed pedagogical proposal.
Lima and Maranhão (2009), in a seminal contribution to the Brazilian debate, propose the distinction between “active internationalization” and “passive internationalization”. The former is characterized by the elaboration of deliberate institutional policies, oriented by clearly defined strategic objectives, that articulate international insertion with the formative purposes and social responsibilities of the institution. The latter, by contrast, manifests itself as a reactive adaptation to external pressures - regulatory, market-driven or reputational - lacking political density and organic articulation with the institutional project. According to the authors, peripheral countries tend to occupy a predominantly passive position in the internationalization scenario, functioning as recipients of models, practices and indicators produced in the hegemonic centers.
Recent contributions from the international literature have problematized the instrumental logic that orients many internationalization processes. De Wit and Hunter (2015) argue that internationalization is not an end in itself but should be at the service of broader educational purposes. The authors criticize the obsession with rankings and quantitative indicators, which frequently leads to what they call “superficial internationalization”, characterized by inactive cooperation agreements, disarticulated mobilities and publications motivated more by metrics than by scientific relevance.
In this direction, Brandenburg and De Wit (2011) propose the concept of the “Internationalization of Higher Education for the Global Common Good”. This perspective shifts the focus from reputational competition to social contribution, asking: whom does internationalization serve? The authors argue that an authentic internationalization should be oriented toward confronting the great global challenges - climate change, social inequalities, democratic crises - and not toward the mere accumulation of institutional symbolic capital.
Betty Leask (2015), in turn, develops the concept of the “Internationalization of the Curriculum”, arguing that internationalization cannot be reduced to the physical mobility of students and faculty. For the author, the most transformative dimension of internationalization lies in the incorporation of global and intercultural perspectives into the curriculum itself, benefiting the whole student body - including those who, for economic or personal reasons, cannot undertake international mobility experiences. This perspective dialogues directly with the notion of “internationalization at home”, emphasizing the democratization of access to intercultural competencies.
This distinction proves particularly fruitful for the analysis of the Brazilian case. Despite the quantitative advances observed in recent decades - an increase in the number of international publications, the expansion of institutional partnerships, the growth of academic mobility - doubts persist regarding the quality and relevance of these processes. The phenomenon of “academic tourism”, characterized by mobility experiences devoid of insertion in research projects or of articulation with the student’s formative trajectory, constitutes an emblematic manifestation of an internationalization that accumulates indicators without producing substantive transformations in the institutional culture or in the formation of researchers.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2008) offers valuable theoretical instruments for the critical understanding of these processes. The Portuguese sociologist argues that the contemporary university is caught between forces of regulation that impose market and managerial logics, and potentialities of emancipation that preserve the commitment to knowledge as a public good and to the integral formation of subjects. Internationalization may serve either logic: it may constitute a vector of epistemic coloniality, reinforcing the hegemony of the scientific paradigms of the global North, or it may take the form of a strategy for the decolonization of knowledge, through processes of solidary cooperation and dialogue among different epistemological traditions.
The notion of an “ecology of knowledges”, developed by Santos (2007), points toward a conception of internationalization that transcends mere insertion into the hegemonic circuits of knowledge production and circulation. It is a matter of recognizing the epistemological plurality of the world and of building horizontal dialogues among knowledges situated in different geographical and cultural contexts. This perspective implies questioning the very criteria of “excellence” and “quality” that guide the evaluation of graduate education, frequently anchored in parameters defined by the academic systems of the global North and naturalized as universal.
The commodification of higher education, identified by Santos (2008) as one of the most worrying tendencies of the contemporary university, also manifests itself in the field of internationalization. The proliferation of global rankings, the competition for international talent and the market of transnational certifications and accreditations configure a scenario in which higher education is increasingly treated as a commodity to be traded on a global scale. De Wit (2019), in a critical review of his own intellectual trajectory, recognizes that the field of internationalization has been excessively captured by instrumental and competitive logics, calling upon the academic community to recover the formative and solidary values that should orient international cooperation.
2.2 Institutional self-evaluation: from bureaucratic control to formative praxis
The trajectory of higher education evaluation in Brazil is marked by disputes among different conceptions of evaluation, which express divergent visions of the purposes of the university and of the relations among State, society and educational institutions. Dias Sobrinho (2003), one of the country’s leading theorists of institutional evaluation, distinguishes two fundamental paradigms: evaluation as control, oriented by the logic of accountability, and evaluation as a formative process, committed to the collective construction of meanings and to the qualitative improvement of institutional practices.
The National System of Higher Education Evaluation (SINAES), established by Law No. 10,861/2004, represented an attempt to articulate these different dimensions in an integrative proposal. Institutional self-evaluation was conceived as a fundamental pillar of the system, granting institutions a leading role in reflecting on their own practices and in defining improvement strategies. As Dias Sobrinho (2008b) argues, self-evaluation constitutes a privileged space for the exercise of university autonomy, insofar as it enables the academic community to interrogate its purposes, critically examine its processes and collectively construct the meanings of its educational action.
However, the implementation of SINAES revealed the tensions among the different logics of evaluation. Progressively, the regulatory components of the system - particularly performance indicators and institutional rankings - acquired centrality, to the detriment of the formative processes of self-evaluation. The Internal Evaluation Committees (CPAs), the bodies responsible for conducting self-evaluation, were frequently reduced to bureaucratic organs of report-writing, emptied of their potential as forums for collective reflection and institutional construction.
Afonso (2009), analyzing evaluation policies in the European context, identifies an analogous phenomenon. The Portuguese sociologist argues that contemporary systems of educational accountability tend to produce a “shortened evaluation”, centered on measurable and comparable results, that disregards the complexity of educational processes and the specificities of institutional contexts. This logic, transposed to the field of higher education, manifests itself in the fetishization of quantitative indicators and in the devaluation of the qualitative and processual dimensions of academic formation.
Within the specific domain of graduate education, the evaluation conducted by CAPES developed historically in a relatively autonomous manner in relation to SINAES. The graduate evaluation system, structured from the 1970s and 1980s onward, consolidated itself as one of the most sophisticated and comprehensive in the world, frequently pointed to as a determining factor for the country’s scientific and technological development. Nevertheless, this same system has been the object of growing criticism, which points to its excessively regulatory character, to the disproportionate emphasis on productivity indicators and to the insufficient valorization of the formative and social dimensions of graduate education.
The CAPES Evaluation Form, the instrument that synthesizes the criteria and weightings used in the quadrennial evaluation of PPGs, paradigmatically expresses the tensions among different conceptions of academic quality. Although it contemplates dimensions related to student formation and social insertion, the Form assigns preponderant weight to indicators of intellectual production and international insertion, frequently operationalized in quantitative terms. This configuration induces programs to prioritize strategies that maximize the valued indicators, at times to the detriment of less measurable but equally relevant dimensions of the quality of formation.
Dias Sobrinho (2008a) argues that an authentic evaluation of higher education must be capable of apprehending the complexity of formative processes, resisting the reductive simplifications imposed by indicator systems. For the author, educational quality cannot be captured by standardized metrics, requiring evaluative approaches that consider institutional singularities, historical trajectories and the specific pedagogical projects of each institution. This perspective confers centrality on selfevaluation as a reflective practice that enables institutions to elaborate their own criteria of quality, in critical dialogue with external referents.
The potential of self-evaluation as a device for managing internationalization lies precisely in its capacity to articulate external regulatory demands with internal institutional projects. Unlike external evaluation, which operates according to standardized criteria and comparative rankings, self-evaluation enables the academic community to critically examine the internationalization processes underway, interrogating their formative meanings and their articulation with the objectives of the program. This collective reflection can distinguish the internationalization strategies that effectively contribute to the quality of formation from those that merely accumulate indicators without producing substantive transformations.
2.3 The constitutive tension: heteronomous regulation versus institutional autonomy
The preceding analysis allows us to identify a constitutive tension that traverses the evaluation and internationalization policies of Brazilian graduate education: the tension between heteronomous regulation, exercised through externally defined indicators and criteria, and institutional autonomy, which presupposes the capacity of institutions to define their own projects and quality parameters. This tension is not merely conjunctural but structural, inscribed within the broader contradictions that characterize the relations among State, market and university in the contemporary world.
The concept of institutional isomorphism, developed by DiMaggio and Powell (1983) in the field of organizational theory, offers an interpretive key for understanding this phenomenon. The authors identify three mechanisms of isomorphism: the coercive, resulting from formal pressures exerted by organizations on which the institution depends; the mimetic, arising from the tendency to imitate organizations perceived as successful in contexts of uncertainty; and the normative, associated with professionalization and the diffusion of occupational standards. In the case of Brazilian graduate education, the three mechanisms operate in combination, inducing the homogenization of internationalization strategies around the parameters valued by the CAPES evaluation.
This homogenization represents a significant threat to the institutional diversity that characterizes - and should characterize - the Brazilian graduate system. Programs with distinct vocations, embedded in heterogeneous regional contexts, responding to specific social demands, are induced to pursue the same internationalization indicators, regardless of their relevance to their respective formative projects. The result is a “façade internationalization”, which fulfills the formal requirements of the evaluation without necessarily producing substantive gains for the formation of researchers or for the production of socially relevant knowledge.
Institutional self-evaluation emerges, in this context, as a device potentially capable of mediating the tension between regulation and autonomy. By constituting itself as a space for collective reflection on internationalization processes, selfevaluation can enable programs to develop a critical relationship with external indicators, distinguishing those that effectively contribute to their formative objectives from those that represent mere bureaucratic requirements to be fulfilled. This critical relationship does not necessarily imply refusal of, or resistance to, external evaluation systems, but rather a reflective appropriation of their criteria, translating them into the specificities of the institutional context.
Dias Sobrinho (2018) proposes the notion of “participatory evaluation” as an alternative to the hegemonic forms of regulatory evaluation. This is a conception of evaluation that recognizes the multiple actors involved in educational processes - faculty, students, staff, the external community - as subjects, and not objects, of evaluation. This participation is not limited to consultation or to the validation of previously defined indicators, but involves the collective construction of the criteria of quality themselves, on the basis of the purposes and values shared by the academic community. With respect to internationalization, participatory evaluation can constitute the institutional space for elaborating an institution’s “own policy” of international insertion, one that dialogues with regulatory requirements without submitting to them uncritically.
3 ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION: THE SIMULATED CASE OF AN EXCELLENCE GRADUATE PROGRAM
3.1 Methodological design of the theoretical-simulated case study
For the purposes of this analysis, we constructed a simulated case of a Graduate Program in the Humanities, designated PPG-Exemplar (Exemplary Graduate Program), located at a federal public university in the South of Brazil. The program, founded in the 1980s, obtained a grade of 6 in the most recent CAPES quadrennial evaluation, ranking among the excellence programs in its field. The choice of a simulated case is justified methodologically by the possibility of constructing a Weberian “ideal type” (Weber, 2016) that condenses the structural tensions identified in the theoretical framework, without incurring the ethical risks of exposing real institutions or of undue generalization from specific cases.
The analysis operates on two complementary planes. On the first, we examine the Strategic Plan of the PPG-Exemplar for the 2021-2024 quadrennium, a document that expresses the program’s institutional vision of its own internationalization, its formative objectives and its development strategies. On the second plane, we contrast this document with the field’s Evaluation Form at CAPES, identifying the convergences and divergences between the institutional logic and the regulatory logic. This comparative analysis makes it possible to highlight the tensions between the “output indicators” privileged by external evaluation and the “process and formation indicators” that emerge from institutional reflection.
3.2 The Strategic Plan of the PPG-Exemplar: internationalization as a formative project
The Strategic Plan of the PPG-Exemplar for the 2021-2024 quadrennium devotes a specific section to internationalization, conceived as a “transversal dimension of the pedagogical project, articulated with the research lines and with the demands of advanced formation in a globalized context”. The document makes explicit a conception of internationalization that transcends the mere accumulation of indicators, emphasizing its formative function and its articulation with the social responsibilities of the program. The declared institutional mission is to educate researchers “capable of dialoguing with the international scientific community, without losing sight of their commitment to local and regional issues”.
The Plan distinguishes three strategic axes of internationalization: qualified academic mobility, solidary institutional partnerships and internationalization at home. The first axis emphasizes the need for mobility experiences - sandwich doctorates, postdoctoral stays, work missions - to be organically articulated with ongoing research projects, avoiding the phenomenon of “academic tourism”. The document establishes qualitative criteria for the evaluation of these experiences, including the contribution to the thesis or dissertation, insertion into research groups abroad and the resulting collaborative production.
The second axis, that of solidary institutional partnerships, expresses a concern with the quality and reciprocity of international relations. The Strategic Plan explicitly criticizes the model of “asymmetric internationalization”, in which Brazilian institutions function predominantly as recipients of models and paradigms produced in the hegemonic centers. In contrast, it proposes the strengthening of South-South relations, particularly with Latin American and Lusophone African institutions, oriented by the principle of “solidary cooperation”. The document sets a target that, by the end of the quadrennium, at least 40% of active international partnerships be with institutions from countries of the global South.
The third axis, that of internationalization at home, recognizes that not all students are able to undertake physical mobility experiences, whether owing to financial constraints or to family or professional responsibilities. The Plan proposes alternative internationalization strategies capable of benefiting the entire student body: the offering of courses in foreign languages, seminars with visiting researchers, participation in international research networks by virtual means and access to international databases and publications. This expanded conception of internationalization expresses a commitment to equity in access to formative opportunities.
3.3 The participatory self-evaluation of the PPG-Exemplar: methodology and practices
The distinctive feature of the PPG-Exemplar lies in the development of a systematic process of participatory self-evaluation, which informed the elaboration of the Strategic Plan and continuously guides the decision-making of the coordination. The program’s Self-Evaluation Committee, composed of representatives of the faculty, the student body and alumni, developed its own methodology for evaluating internationalization, combining different strategies of data collection and analysis.
The first strategy consists of semestral “conversation circles” with alumni who undertook international mobility experiences over the previous five years. In these sessions, conducted through a semi-structured script, participants are invited to reflect on the impact of the international experience on their academic and professional trajectories, identifying formative contributions and perceived gaps. The accounts are systematized in analytical reports that inform the revision of the program’s mobility policies.
The second strategy involves the longitudinal analysis of alumni trajectories, tracking their professional insertion and scientific production over a period of ten years after graduation. This analysis makes it possible to identify correlations between different modalities of international experience and long-term outcomes, distinguishing substantive formative impacts from merely credential effects. The results have revealed that mobility experiences articulated with research projects present a significantly higher correlation with subsequent scientific productivity than disarticulated mobilities.
The third strategy consists of the qualitative evaluation of institutional partnerships, carried out through questionnaires administered to the coordinators of joint projects and interviews with visiting researchers. The objective is to identify effectively active partnerships - characterized by bidirectional flows of mobility, copublications and joint research projects - distinguishing them from formalized agreements that remain inactive. This evaluation grounded the program’s decision to reduce the number of formal partnerships, concentrating efforts on relationships of substantive cooperation.
The fourth strategy involves focus groups with enrolled students, addressing perceptions of the internationalization opportunities offered by the program and the perceived barriers to their use. These groups have revealed the importance of “internationalization at home” strategies for students who cannot undertake physical mobility, as well as the need for more robust institutional support for first-generation university students who wish to undertake international experiences.
The results of these evaluative processes are systematized in an annual report presented to the program’s collegiate body, informing decision-making on resource allocation and strategic priorities. The coordination of the PPG-Exemplar has used these data to justify choices that, although they may generate fewer immediate “points” on the CAPES Evaluation Form, present greater potential for long-term formative impact.
3.4 The CAPES Evaluation Form: internationalization as an output indicator
The CAPES Evaluation Form for the Humanities field in the 2021-2024 quadrennial evaluation is organized around five main criteria: Program, Formation, Intellectual Production, Social Insertion and Internationalization (the last applicable only to programs with grades 6 and 7). Each criterion unfolds into items and sub-items, with specific weights in the composition of the final grade. Internationalization appears both as a specific criterion for excellence programs and as a transversal element in other criteria, particularly in Intellectual Production.
In the Intellectual Production criterion, the Form explicitly values publications in journals of international circulation, classified in the upper strata of the Qualis system (A1 and A2), as well as co-authorships with researchers affiliated with foreign institutions. The underlying logic is predominantly quantitative: the greater the number of international publications and cross-border co-authorships, the better the program’s evaluation in this criterion. The quality of publications is assessed mainly by the journal’s classification in Qualis, a system based on bibliometric metrics such as impact factor and the h-index.
The specific Internationalization criterion, applicable to programs with grades 6 and 7, contemplates indicators related to student and faculty mobility, formalized institutional partnerships, participation in international research networks and the attraction of foreign students and researchers. The indicators are operationalized predominantly in quantitative terms: the number of students on mobility, the number of cooperation agreements in force, the number of visiting researchers received. The quality of internationalization experiences - their formative impact, their articulation with research projects, their contribution to the production of knowledge - is rarely the object of systematic evaluation.
3.5 The revealed tensions: quantity versus quality in the evaluation of internationalization
The contrast between the Strategic Plan of the PPG-Exemplar and the CAPES Evaluation Form reveals structural tensions that warrant in-depth analysis (Chart 1). The first and most evident tension concerns the nature of the indicators: whereas the Strategic Plan privileges process and formation indicators - articulation, impact, reciprocity, pertinence - the Evaluation Form operates predominantly with output indicators - number of publications, number of agreements, number of mobilities. This distinction is not merely technical but expresses divergent conceptions of what quality means in the internationalization of graduate education.
Dias Sobrinho (2008b) argues that the emphasis on quantitative indicators stems from a positivist epistemology underlying evaluation systems, which privileges the measurable over the meaningful. In the case of internationalization, this epistemology translates into the capacity to count articles, agreements and mobilities without necessarily understanding the formative meaning of these experiences or their impact on the quality of the formation offered. The result is an evaluation that captures the “extension” of internationalization but not its intensity or depth.
The second tension identified concerns the geopolitics of knowledge underlying the evaluation criteria. The Evaluation Form implicitly values internationalization oriented toward the hegemonic centers of scientific production: high-impact journals are predominantly edited in the global North; university rankings privilege AngloSaxon institutions; English is assumed as the lingua franca of science. The Strategic Plan of the PPG-Exemplar, by contrast, makes explicit a concern with the geographical diversification of partnerships and with the strengthening of South-South cooperation. This divergence expresses distinct conceptions of the place of Brazil and Latin America in the world scientific scene.
Santos (2008) offers an interpretive key for this tension in developing the notion of the “coloniality of knowledge”. The sociologist argues that the structures of colonial power, although formally overcome at the political level, persist in the epistemological field, hierarchizing knowledges and loci of enunciation. Hegemonic internationalization, oriented by bibliometric indicators and global rankings, tends to reproduce this coloniality, naturalizing the parameters of excellence produced in the metropolitan centers. A counter-hegemonic internationalization, by contrast, would question these parameters, constructing criteria of quality rooted in local issues and epistemic traditions.
The third tension concerns the dimension of equity. The Evaluation Form privileges indicators that, to a large extent, depend on financial resources and structural conditions: international mobility requires funding for travel and maintenance; publication in high-impact journals frequently involves translation costs and processing charges; participation in international networks presupposes resources for travel and events. Programs located at institutions with more resources, frequently in the South and Southeast regions, find themselves in a privileged position to meet these indicators. The Strategic Plan of the PPG-Exemplar, by contemplating internationalization at home as a strategic axis, seeks to democratize access to opportunities for international formation.
3.6 Self-evaluation as mediation: from reactive response to propositional construction and strategic resource management
In the face of the identified tensions, the central question of this study emerges: in what way can institutional self-evaluation constitute a device for mediating between external regulatory demands and internal formative projects? The analysis of the simulated case suggests that self-evaluation, when adequately conceived and implemented, can perform a function of critical translation between these two logics, enabling the program to develop internationalization strategies that simultaneously meet the requirements of external evaluation and the objectives of its pedagogical project.
The PPG-Exemplar, as evidenced in its Strategic Plan and in its participatory selfevaluation processes, developed a critical relationship with the CAPES indicators. This process made it possible to distinguish, within the universe of international-insertion activities, those that effectively contributed to the quality of formation from those that represented mere compliance with regulatory formalities. Self-evaluation thus functioned as a “qualitative filter” that guided the selection and prioritization of internationalization strategies, avoiding the dispersion of efforts in high-cost, lowformative-impact actions.
This perspective has direct implications for the program’s budgetary management. The PPG-Exemplar, a beneficiary of the Academic Excellence Program (PROEX), has discretionary resources for funding internationalization activities. The program’s coordination, informed by the results of participatory self-evaluation, has opted to allocate a significant share of these resources to South-South partnerships, even when these yield slower returns in terms of quantitative indicators. The justification lies in the longitudinal data demonstrating the differentiated formative impact of these experiences, characterized by greater reciprocity and by more horizontal epistemological dialogues.
Concretely, the program decided to allocate 35% of student mobility resources to experiences at Latin American and Lusophone African institutions, even though publications resulting from these cooperations frequently appear in journals classified in lower strata of Qualis. Self-evaluation provided evidence that these experiences produce differentiated formative impacts, particularly in the development of competencies for collaborative research and for dialogue among different academic traditions.
Afonso (2009) argues that effective institutional evaluation presupposes the constitution of “interpretive communities” capable of attributing meaning to the available indicators and metrics. In the case of the PPG-Exemplar, the Self-Evaluation Committee constituted itself as an instance of this nature, fostering dialogue among different perspectives on the meaning of internationalization and on the criteria for assessing its quality. The indicators of the CAPES Evaluation Form were not simply rejected but resignified in light of the program’s formative objectives, transformed from targets to be achieved into instruments at the service of a broader project.
This perspective implies conceiving self-evaluation not as a bureaucratic stage of accountability but as a permanent formative practice, integrated into institutional daily life. In the PPG-Exemplar, collegiate meetings came to regularly include moments of reflection on the internationalization activities underway, their results and their challenges. The reports of students on mobility became the object of collective analysis, making it possible to identify good practices and correct distortions. International cooperation agreements were periodically reviewed, with their effectiveness assessed in light of institutional objectives.
The result of this process was the transformation of the institutional posture toward internationalization: from a reactive posture, oriented by compliance with external criteria, to a propositional posture, oriented by the construction of an institution’s own project that critically dialogues with regulatory requirements. This transformation expresses what Lima and Maranhão (2009) call the passage from “passive internationalization” to “active internationalization”: it is not a matter of ignoring the indicators of external evaluation, but of subordinating them to an institution’s own logic, which confers formative meaning on international-insertion activities.
Dias Sobrinho (2008a) characterizes this form of self-evaluation as “emancipatory evaluation”, distinguishing it from the “regulatory evaluation” centered on control and classification. Emancipatory evaluation, according to the author, is committed to the construction of meaning and to the transformation of practices, mobilizing the academic community as a collective subject of reflection and action. In the field of internationalization, this perspective implies a permanent interrogation of the “what for” of international insertion, resisting the temptation to reduce internationalization to an end in itself or to a strategy of reputational accumulation.
3.7 The formative impacts of active internationalization: dimensions of analysis
A necessary deepening concerns the concrete impacts of active internationalization on student formation, scientific production and the social insertion of the program. Although the theoretical-simulated character of this study does not permit the presentation of empirical measures, the systematization of the participatory self-evaluation of the PPG-Exemplar makes it possible to identify, analytically, observable dimensions of impact that differ qualitatively from those captured by the quantitative indicators of external evaluation (Chart 2). In the domain of student formation, mobility experiences organically articulated with research projects are associated with the development of intercultural competencies and the capacity for collaborative research, while internationalization at home broadens the formative reach to the entire student body, in the direction proposed by Leask (2015). In the domain of scientific production, solidary cooperation tends to generate co-publications of greater theoretical density and greater geographical diversification of partnerships, in contrast to publication motivated predominantly by metrics (De Wit and Hunter, 2015). In the domain of social insertion, the redirection of efforts toward regional issues and South- South cooperation reinforces the social pertinence of the program and of the trajectories of its alumni (Brandenburg and De Wit, 2011).
These dimensions should not be read as measurable results but as categories of impact that participatory self-evaluation renders visible and that could orient future empirical investigations. Making these dimensions explicit fulfills a propositional function: it offers programs a vocabulary for qualifying internationalization beyond the counting of outputs, rendering communicable - including before external evaluation - the formative gains that would otherwise remain invisible.
4 FINAL CONSIDERATIONS: TOWARD AN EMANCIPATORY SELF-EVALUATION OF INTERNATIONALIZATION
The analytical path undertaken in this article allows us to formulate some propositional considerations on the role of institutional self-evaluation in the management of the internationalization of Brazilian graduate education. We began from the identification of a structural tension between the regulatory requirements of CAPES - operationalized in predominantly quantitative indicators - and the need for Graduate Programs to build internationalization policies endowed with formative meaning and institutional pertinence. This tension, we argued, cannot be resolved by mere conformity to external criteria, on pain of reducing internationalization to “academic tourism” or “sterile productivism”.
The central thesis we defend holds that institutional self-evaluation, when conceived as a collective reflective practice - and not as a bureaucratic formality of accountability - can constitute a political-pedagogical and managerial device capable of transforming “passive internationalization” into “active internationalization”. This transformation implies the passage from a reactive posture, centered on compliance with external indicators, to a propositional posture, oriented by the construction of an institution’s own project that critically dialogues with regulatory requirements without submitting to them uncritically.
The theoretical-simulated case study of the PPG-Exemplar evidenced the potentialities of this conception of self-evaluation. The detailing of participatory selfevaluation practices - conversation circles with alumni, longitudinal analysis of trajectories, qualitative evaluation of partnerships and focus groups with students - demonstrated that it is possible to build evaluative processes that capture the qualitative and formative dimensions of internationalization, frequently rendered invisible by the quantitative indicators of external evaluation. Self-evaluation functioned as an instance of mediation between regulatory requirements and formative objectives, informing budgetary decision-making and the strategic prioritization of actions.
In light of the theoretical framework mobilized, we argue that the emancipatory self-evaluation of internationalization should be oriented by certain fundamental principles. The first is the principle of participation: reflection on the meanings and practices of internationalization cannot be delegated to technocratic instances but must involve the whole academic community (faculty, students, staff, alumni) as collective subjects of elaboration. This participation is not limited to consultation or to the validation of previously defined indicators but involves the collective construction of the criteria of quality themselves.
The second principle is that of epistemological criticality. Self-evaluation must interrogate the presuppositions that orient the hegemonic conceptions of internationalization, problematizing the coloniality of knowledge inscribed in bibliometric indicators and global rankings. This implies asking: internationalization for whom? With which partners? According to which parameters of excellence? The perspective of the “epistemologies of the South”, developed by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, and the concept of “internationalization for the global common good”, proposed by Brandenburg and De Wit (2011), offer conceptual tools for this problematization, pointing toward forms of internationalization that value dialogue among different traditions of knowledge and contribute to confronting the great global challenges.
The third principle is that of equity. Self-evaluation must attend to the inequalities of access to internationalization opportunities, considering the asymmetries of resources among programs and among students. Strategies such as “internationalization at home” (courses in foreign languages, seminars with visiting researchers, participation in virtual networks) can democratize access to formative experiences of an international character, preventing internationalization from becoming a factor in the reproduction of inequalities. Leask’s (2015) perspective on the internationalization of the curriculum offers important contributions to this dimension.
The fourth principle is that of processuality. Self-evaluation should not be conceived as a punctual event of report-writing but as a permanent practice, integrated into institutional daily life. This processual perspective makes it possible to follow the internationalization experiences underway, to identify good practices and to correct distortions, in a continuous movement of reflection-action-reflection. Quantitative indicators, in this perspective, cease to be ends in themselves and become instruments at the service of a broader formative process.
The fifth principle, emerging from the analysis of the simulated case, is that of the articulation between evaluation and management. Self-evaluation must produce knowledge that effectively informs institutional decision-making, particularly with respect to resource allocation. Data on the formative impact of the different modalities of internationalization can ground budgetary choices that prioritize experiences of greater quality, even when these do not maximize short-term indicators. This articulation confers on self-evaluation a managerial density, transcending its merely diagnostic role.
It is important to recognize the limits of this proposition. Institutional selfevaluation, however participatory and critical it may be, operates within a field of forces traversed by power relations that transcend it. PPGs are embedded in an evaluation system that distributes resources and prestige according to externally defined criteria, and nonconformity to these criteria may result in significant material consequences, such as the lowering of a grade, the reduction of scholarships and the loss of prerogatives. Emancipatory self-evaluation, therefore, cannot be naive about the structural determinations that condition institutional action.
Nevertheless, the recognition of these limits should not lead to conformism or paralysis. As Dias Sobrinho (2018) argues, evaluation is always an arena of disputes, a space of confrontation among different projects of university and of society. PPGs, through their self-evaluation practices, can contribute to tensioning the hegemonic criteria for evaluating internationalization, constructing evidence about alternative forms of international insertion that value integral formation, social pertinence and epistemological dialogue. This contribution, although necessarily limited at the individual level, can acquire transformative force when articulated in collective movements of reflection and proposition.
In terms of a research agenda, this study points to the need for empirical investigations that examine the actual practices of self-evaluation of internationalization in Brazilian PPGs, identifying successful experiences and obstacles to their implementation. Comparative studies among programs with different CAPES grades, located in distinct regional contexts and fields of knowledge, may reveal the diversity of strategies adopted and their relations with formative outcomes. Longitudinal research tracking alumni of programs with different internationalization profiles may offer evidence on the effective impact of these experiences on professional and academic trajectories.
At the level of public policy, the results of this study suggest the need to revise the criteria for evaluating internationalization adopted by CAPES. Without disregarding the importance of quantitative indicators as monitoring tools, we argue for the incorporation of qualitative indicators that capture the formative and processual dimensions of internationalization. The valorization of South-South cooperation, the recognition of internationalization at home as a legitimate strategy, and the consideration of regional asymmetries in the distribution of resources are elements that should be part of an evaluation policy committed to quality and to equity.
In concrete terms, we propose the incorporation of qualitative-processual indicators into the Evaluation Form, without suppressing the already consolidated output indicators (Chart 3). By way of illustration: in the Intellectual Production criterion, the recording of the number of publications in the upper strata of Qualis could be supplemented by the requirement of evidence of the articulation of that production with the program’s research lines; in the Internationalization criterion, the counting of agreements and mobilities could be supplemented by an assessment of the effectiveness of partnerships and of the formative impact of mobility; in the Formation criterion, the international insertion of alumni could be considered as an indicator; and, in the Social Insertion criterion, South-South cooperation and internationalization at home could be explicitly valued as strategies of equity.
We conclude by reaffirming the potential of institutional self-evaluation as a device for building autonomy in the management of internationalization. Between metric and meaning, between the indicator and formation, between heteronomous regulation and autonomous construction, self-evaluation can constitute a privileged space of critical mediation. It is not a matter of denying the importance of external evaluation or of refusing the indicators that orient graduate policy, but of subordinating them to an institution’s own logic, one that confers formative meaning on internationalization practices and preserves the university’s commitment to the production of socially relevant knowledge. This is, ultimately, the task of a truly emancipatory evaluation.
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