Global Engineering Accreditation Frameworks: A Systematized Literature Review of Their Impacts in Engineering Education Research

In recent decades, international systems for the mutual recognition of engineering degrees have been established to facilitate the mobility of engineering professionals. Some of these systems are now globally influential, notably the EUR-ACE system and the International Engineering Alliance (IEA) accords: Washington Accord, Sydney Accord, and Dublin Accord. These systems are enacted by providing frameworks for the accreditation of engineering programs, specifying general guidelines and outcomes for programs. Given the high level at which these global engineering education accreditation frameworks operate, this study set out to understand how such frameworks are represented in the engineering education literature. To accomplish our goal, we conducted a systematised literature review in which we synthesised publications that analysed the frameworks. We collected publications from four databases, totalling 359 unique results. Of those, 244 mentioned the frameworks in their abstracts only for contextualising or justifying their studies. We selected 33 publications that met all our inclusion criteria for a full-paper synthesis. Our results show that publications that deeply discuss the frameworks are mostly concerned with historical documentation and comparisons among them. The publications that analyse the frameworks tend to examine the frameworks' criteria through specific lenses, such as sustainability or communication. Other analytical papers promote discussions about the overlap of these frameworks in the context of transnational accreditation, and around the balancing of local, regional, and global interests within engineering programs. Our findings suggest there is space in the literature for scholars to further debate these accreditation frameworks with a more critical perspective.