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In both higher education and other policy sectors, agencies have become a popular instrument adopted by governments to regulate the behavior of universities from a distance. This paper addresses this apparently common trend by proposing a typology of these agencies that assumes that evaluation agencies’ autonomy is dependent upon not only legal powers but also the government’s capacity to behave as a principal and to design, over time, coherent systemic governance modes. This typology is assessed through a comparative analysis of the roles and functions of evaluative agencies within the field of higher education in the UK, France, and Italy.