Maria Raciti

Australian higher education is again in transition. This is not unusual. The sector has long been shaped by reform, with each phase altering the relationship between government, universities and students. Since the late twentieth century, however, the dominant policy frame has been marked by student choice, performance measurement and quasi-market arrangements. Universities remained public institutions, yet were increasingly expected to position themselves, compete for students and operate in neoliberal ways.

What we are witnessing appears to be more than a comprehensive suite of policy reforms; it signals post-neoliberalism. Put simply, neoliberalism assumed that marketisation could do much of the organising work in higher education, whereby students would choose, universities would compete, performance would be measured and the system would improve through these pressures. While post-neoliberalism does not mean that markets have disappeared, it signals that governments are becoming less willing to leave the sector to market settings alone. The shift is from asking whether universities can compete effectively to asking whether the system itself is organised well enough to deliver wider participation, completion, capability and public value.

The Australian Universities Accord is one visible marker of this shift toward post-neoliberalism. The Accord does not remove marketisation from Australian higher education; rather, it appears to recalibrate the sector’s policy frame by giving greater weight to system design, public value, participation, student support and long-term national capability. At a sector level, the movement appears to be toward more deliberate system stewardship.

The move toward post-neoliberalism can be seen in policy vocabulary such as ‘managed growth funding’, ‘mission-based compacts’, ‘benchmarking’ and ‘responsive skills system’. These phrases matter because they shift attention from institutional competition to the active management of the whole tertiary system. By way of explanation, ‘managed growth’ implies that expansion will be steered, ‘mission-based compacts’ infer institutional compliance with agreed system purposes, ‘benchmarking’ introduces comparison as a tool of coordination, and a ‘responsive skills system’ links higher education more directly to national capability in a tertiary system. The Australian Tertiary Education Commission gives institutional form to this post-neoliberal shift, with a stronger oversight for how the system is organised and governed.

Australia is not alone in this movement. Across comparable systems, higher education policy is being pulled back toward questions of coordination, equity and social license. The United Kingdom’s 2024 comparative briefing on higher education notes the continuing importance of intermediary public bodies in steering system management, while the OECD’s Education at a Glance places renewed attention on tertiary attainment, completion, financing and labour-market outcomes. These international patterns suggest that Australia’s post-neoliberal turn is part of a wider recalibration in which governments are taking a more active role in shaping what higher education systems are for and how they should be organised.

What is the expectation now of universities?

The emerging post-neoliberal policy frame changes what is expected of universities. Institutional autonomy is more firmly tethered to sovereign capability, with universities positioned as part of the national infrastructure for skills, research, equity and regional development. In this frame, widening participation becomes a central measure of public value, which makes the definition and measurement of public value more consequential. System stewardship may sharpen priorities and funding, but it may also narrow institutional purpose if public value is defined mainly through workforce demand, benchmarking or short-term performance. For widening participation practitioners, this means they should expect equity to be drawn further into the workflows through which universities plan, fund, approve, deliver and evaluate their work. The emerging task for practitioners will be to ensure those workflows materially change what equity students actually experience. That is, they will need to resist the pull to translate equity rhetoric into plans, targets, reports and institutional claims that leave everyday conditions largely untouched.

What is emerging, then, is not the end of the marketised university but a more assertive public claim over its purposes and obligations. Post-neoliberalism is a useful frame for the present-day sector shifts in which governments are asking universities to validate their social license through their contribution to public value, national capability and the conditions students actually encounter. For widening participation, the test is whether this substantively changes the educational conditions students move through, or simply recasts equity in the ‘feel-good’ language of targets, benchmarks and reporting.

THE DESIGN FLAW AT THE HEART OF SOCIAL CHANGE

Maria Raciti, Janine Gertz and Sam Raciti

There is a design flaw at the heart of social change. In our editorial, we name it, explain it and show what can be done about it.

The flaw

Most social marketing programs are typically funded for one to three years. Meaningful behaviour change usually takes longer. People need time to notice a problem, try something different and keep doing it. Programs need time to understand participants, work with partners and learn from results.

When funding horizons are shorter than change horizons, three predictable distortions follow.

• Output capture. Highly visible deliverables such as workshops run, people reached and resources distributed become funder-encouraged proxies or signals for behaviour change.
• Outcome drift. Program goals quietly shift toward what can be funded and measured within the contract period.
• Performative evaluation. Measures of success begin to drift towards that needed to secure the next round of funding.

Each of these follows logically from the incentives built into short-term social change funding. The system with an increasing focus on communicating impact rewards visible activity over durable change, and we adapt accordingly.

Projectification: complex change, sliced thin

There is a name for the bigger pattern too. Projectification means turning long-term social change into a string of short projects, each with its own deadline, milestones and reporting cycle. It makes the work easier to manage on paper, but harder to sustain in practice. Staff contracts end just as relationships mature. Audience insight leaves with departing teams. Communities are asked to start again with a new project name and a fresh set of promises.

For social marketing, this matters because participant trust, insight and partnership are part of how successful change happens. When funding stops and starts, those critical mechanisms are weakened.

Elections move the goalposts

Government funding adds a second layer of volatility. When governments change, policy language and priorities change with them. A program can remain vital to the people it serves yet no longer fit the new funding framework. Organisations then spend scarce time reframing their work for the next round. This dynamic plays out in every country where social programs depend on public funds.

What better looks like

Better funding would be designed around change horizons, not just budget and election cycles. That means longer commitments where the problem demands them, staged learning milestones instead of premature outcome claims. It also means funding the infrastructure of authentic impact, such as relationships, local capability building and evaluation that helps programs improve while they are still running.

In such instances, accountability matches how change actually occurs. Sharper measurement and better theories of change matter, but they cannot compensate for funding structures that keep pulling programs back to the start.

Feels familiar? Read more

If this feels familiar, the editorial gives language to a problem many people in social marketing, policy and community work already recognise. It synthesises learnings from collaborative governance, resource dependence, distributive politics and nonprofit resilience scholarship and practice.

The editorial is open access: Raciti, M., Gertz, J. and Raciti, S. (2026), "Navigating short-term funding and government election cycles to achieve sustainable, transformative social impact", Journal of Social Impact in Business Research, Vol. 2 No. 4, pp. 73-82. https://doi.org/10.1108/JSIBR-03-2026-0004

This paper reframes Indigenous student success beyond sector metrics to focus on quality of life while enrolled, which is operationalised as students’ capacity to be, become, and belong. Drawing on mixed-methods data from two universities, the research reveals that peer classroom cultures function as pedagogical infrastructure, significantly impacting Indigenous students’ wellbeing independent of lecturer intent. Culturally ignorant peers substantially harm quality of life, while knowledgeable peers support it. Where cultural safety is compromised, Indigenous-Indigenous connection becomes essential for sustaining wellbeing. This work challenges staff-centric approaches and positions peer cultural competence as foundational to equitable learning environments. The presentation will solicit feedback on cultivating non-Indigenous peer capability without instrumentalising Indigenous students.

This paper reframes Indigenous students’ university experience through the concept of resonance, examining how students navigate institutional alignment through strategic identity positioning and how Indigenous Centres support this navigation in ways that exceed service utilisation metrics. Resonance refers to Indigenous students’ experience of institutional attunement, recognition, and responsiveness. Resonance is Indigenous students’ capacity to find themselves reflected and affirmed within university structures and relations. Drawing on mixed-methods data from two universities, the study first reveals that many Indigenous students strategically foreground professional identity over cultural identity in everyday university contexts. This pattern reflects adaptive navigation seeking resonance with dominant institutional norms. The second key finding challenges conventional assumptions: Indigenous Centres are highly valued by low-use Indigenous students. Thus, Indigenous Centres provide ambient institutional resonance, signalling recognition and responsiveness even without active service engagement by some Indigenous students. These findings reframe understandings of the Indigenous student experience in Australian universities.

Students enter university with expectations shaped by media narratives, social networks and institutional marketing about what university life will be like. These representations often form simplified ‘gist-based’ understandings that shape expectations of the university experience (Reyna, 2021). During the transition to university, students’ lived experiences may diverge from these expectations, creating expectation-experience mismatch. Insights from a national study of over 400 first-year, first-time university students indicate mismatches are common and that students often attempt to reconcile these discrepancies through autonomous self-management, either through action or inaction. These coping responses influence students’ confidence, perceived control and overall satisfaction with the university experience. This paper proposes an emerging initiative that highlights the importance of supporting constructive, action-based coping responses when expectation-experience mismatch occurs.

Indigenous economic sovereignty in Australia remains constrained by colonial labour systems that position Indigenous peoples in extractive relationships. While industrial relations scholarship has examined European settler interaction with Indigenous peoples, the relationships between non-European migrants and Indigenous Australians remain under-examined. Hence, this paper proposes a transcultural employment framework that supports Indigenous economic sovereignty. 

Historical, sociological and policy literatures reveal precedents for Indigenous–non‑European migrant collaboration, including longstanding patterns of reciprocity and solidarity that were later obscured by protectionist and assimilationist regimes. The increasing participation of non-European migrants from post-colonial contexts in Australia’s workforce and entrepreneurial sectors enables the reactivation of these relational legacies.

Three conceptual pillars comprise the framework:

• Pillar #1 Recognising intersecting yet distinct colonial histories as the foundation for solidarity and relational repair;
• Pillar #2 Relational economic justice promotes reciprocal partnerships that deliver mutual benefit, respect Indigenous sovereignty and resist extractive logics; and
• Pillar #3 Transformative policy co-governance positions Indigenous and non-European migrant communities as co-designers of economic participation policy. 

Reframing employment relations through these pillars encourages a shift from deficit-based approaches toward collaborative, culturally responsive models that enhance the agency of both Indigenous and non-European migrant peoples. This aligns with Australia’s Closing the Gap Priority Reforms and the Indigenous Economic Empowerment agenda. Conceptually, the paper extends industrial relations and business scholarship by highlighting transcultural collaboration as a neglected site of innovation and social impact, inviting stakeholders to reimagine industrial relations in an increasingly plural and post-colonial world of work.

Indigenous peoples’ worldviews permeate the businesses they run, providing them with a unique competitive advantage to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) for success. Indigenous worldviews encompass understandings of complex, dynamic relationships. Such understandings position Indigenous businesses to better optimize economic sovereignty, well-being, and prosperity than mainstream businesses. AI-mediated marketing systems shape how businesses are recognized, ranked, and integrated into digital market streams. Indigenous worldviews understand the world as a complex constellation of relationships encompassing human and more-than-human kin that form an indivisible, perpetually fluxing relational ecosystem. As such, Indigenous worldviews provide Indigenous businesses with innate “relational fluency” with sophisticated understandings for engaging with AI as non-human kin within marketing systems. Anchored in the sister concepts of Indigenous survivance (an ongoing, self-determined Indigenous presence) and thrivance (flourishing grounded in Indigenous lifeways), this chapter presents the Indigenous Business Algorithmic Futures (IBAF) conceptual framework and a “blakprint” guiding its operationalization. The IBAF describes how Indigenous relational fluency interacts with algorithmic infrastructures through three intertwined dimensions. First, algorithmic recognition captures how AI systems detect and interpret Indigenous business identities; second, algorithmic mediation highlights how AI systems govern provenance and credibility signals; and third, algorithmic sovereignty concerns the governance frameworks for Indigenous custodianship of Indigenous data, cultural and intellectual property. Overall, Indigenous businesses are uniquely advantaged by their relational fluency, which positions them for success in marketing ecosystems increasingly characterized by non-human intelligence.