This chapter considers how Northern Ireland’s experience during and after Brexit informs our understandings of multi-level governance orders and interactions between and within those orders. A traditional view of governance structures would regard Northern Ireland as having little say in negotiations on trade. Nonetheless, the negotiations on the Withdrawal Agreement have repeatedly seen all parties refer to and return to governance in Northern Ireland as a core concern. This piece will utilise scale theory – originating in political geography – to consider how Northern Ireland became central to the Brexit negotiations.  Scale, as a geographical and political idea, incorporates a range of concepts (core and periphery, population size, majorities and minorities, temporality (linear and nonlinear), geographic governance size), as well as questions of local, national, regional and universal spaces to consider how governance is constructed and the role law plays in constructing scales. Whereas traditional accounts of scaled governance orders deploy “nested” constructs to place Northern Ireland in a tidy frame, organised like a series of Russian dolls, this chapter challenges this narrative by interrogating the slippage between the governance orders and their methods of interaction, and what extent of ‘voice’ that ultimately leaves for Northern Ireland.

Scholarship on higher education has been dominated by organizational and functionalist literatures, leading to a ‘republic of scholars’ ontology which has denuded the prospects for theory development or explanatory models to account for the configuration and changing patterns of higher education governance. This chapter proposes three correctives to traditional analogical frameworks. First, abandoning standpoint-guildism perspectives and adopting political economy and market segmentation lenses of inquiry. Second, abandoning methods of enquiry that situate the locus of change in higher education governance in mechanistic institutional-group processes and instead adopting frameworks that focus on the sociology of goods, their classification, and value construction as central drivers in market stratification and coextensive processes of divergence and convergence. And third, adopting more analytically rigorous conceptions of convergence and governance to overcome what we view as a false empiricism – the tendency to conflate policy labels and political rhetoric with policy instruments and governance tools to produce over-inflated images of convergent higher-education governance trajectories.