No One Left Behind? How Neoliberal GenAI Governance Undermines SDG 9 in Higher Education: Higher Education and SDG 9

Over recent decades, the neoliberal restructuring of higher education has fundamentally altered how universities govern themselves and manage their relationships with staff and students. The emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) has intensified this dynamic, leading to institutions rapidly adopting and then mandating new technologies in ways that deflect institutional risk downwards onto the individuals least equipped to bear it. This chapter argues that dominant models of GenAI governance in higher ed reproduce a logic of responsibilisation, constructing teachers as self-managing adopters of institutionally imposed technology. It also frames students as individually accountable for correctly interpreting often inadequate and authoritarian guidance. Drawing on Critical Discourse (CDA) analysis of GenAI policy documentation across eight UK universities and empirical research into GenAI adoption in Sino-Foreign Cooperative Universities (SFCUs) contexts in China, the chapter traces how these patterns are not incidental but structural, reflecting the broader commercial logics of the neoliberal university. Situating this critique within the framework of SDG9, which calls not merely for technological expansion but for inclusive, equitable and participatory innovation, the chapter proposes Engeström's Change Laboratory (CL) as a democratic and deliberative methodology through which university stakeholders can collectively surface the contradictions embedded in current GenAI governance and become active codesigners of technology integration. The chapter concludes that sustainable and equitable GenAI adoption in higher education requires treating inclusive participation not as an optional supplement, but as a structural necessity for achieving meaningful technological change.