Social Innovation and Welfare State Retrenchment

In this introduction we present early childhood education and care (ECEC) as the topic of this book and how we position it in relation to the wider theoretical and conceptual debate on social innovation. We carry out an extensive review of the main concepts on which this book is based (social innovation, policy learning and institutionalisation), and we present the conceptual model that lies behind the instrumental case of Barcelona that connects these three concepts. This chapter will also introduce the content of this book, presenting Part I and Part II, and their role in this book's argument.

This chapter focusses on how early childhood education and care (ECEC) has been extended and configured in recent decades in advanced capitalistic countries. We will first set out the main societal benefits associated with public investment in ECEC and then discuss how neoliberalism and cutbacks in social services have coexisted with the expansion of ECEC as a social policy in recent years.

In particular, we will delve into the role of Social Investment as a policy framework that supports the expansion of ECEC in advanced capitalistic countries, and then we will highlight the challenges that ECEC faces in terms of universalisation and diversity of needs, areas in which social innovation (both citizen and institution-led) is playing an emergent and growing role.

Since the year 2000, the provision of early years education and care for the under-threes (hereafter 0–3 ECEC) has undergone a steady increase in Spain. This growth has taken place in all 17 Autonomous Communities, albeit not in a uniform way. We analyse how state regulations regarding ECEC have evolved from the first National Education Law in 1990 (LOGSE) to the most recent one in 2020 (LOMLOE). We compare seven Autonomous Communities and assess the impact of their different management models and levels of coverage on equality of opportunities, both in how families access the services and in how much they pay. We try to ascertain under what conditions ECEC can go beyond being a policy that helps families juggle work and family responsibilities and become a redistributive and equal opportunities policy that helps the most socially disadvantaged groups. Our study concludes that although there are differences in both access criteria and in the price of services, all the regions studied have progressively moved towards services that aim to be more equitable, with an explicit recognition of the particular difficulties caused by low incomes, disabilities, single parenthood, or gender-based violence. Even so, certain structural characteristics of ECEC – such as the fluctuating nature of its financing, its weak public regulation and monitoring, and significant outsourcing to private providers – make it difficult to universalise the service in order to make it a truly redistributive policy.

Research has defined social innovation as citizen-led initiatives that offer new products and services that satisfy self-defined social needs that are not met by the current public or private provision. This means that policy intervention would be at loggerheads with the aims and means of social innovation projects, as it involves institutional leadership. However, numerous studies have demonstrated that social innovation might foster new solutions that could provide inputs for policy learning. We provide evidence of policy changes in early childhood education and care in Barcelona between 2015 and 2023, where the ‘new municipalist’ city council developed socially innovative services that were partially inspired by citizen-led projects. This chapter will show how policy change occurred by institutionalising innovative practices to meet an increasingly diversified demand for 0–3 services from an inclusive perspective.

Government and councils in Catalonia have adopted a clear-cut 0–3 education and care model involving bolstering the network of public nursery schools and thereby increasing the number of public places available alongside the existing private options. The goal is to increase the availability of formal early childhood education, serving the dual purpose of enabling parents to work while providing education and care for young children. Enrolment rate at the age of two rose by 10 percentage points between 2003 and 2017 and since then it has remained at 60%. From 2017, a sliding-scale fee system was introduced in Barcelona and other cities to reduce economic barriers to accessing public nursery schools. However, this policy has not led to a corresponding rise in enrolment rates for this age group. Our analysis concentrates on mothers opting for school-based services, with the goal of identifying the factors that influence the use of institutionalised early childhood education and care (ECEC) services in Barcelona. Our findings reveal that sliding-scale pricing has increased the enrolment of children of mothers with low incomes in public nursery schools, while the quality of services has attracted middle and upper-class families. Nevertheless, public ECEC services are not adapted to meet the needs of working-class mothers who, although they are not in socially vulnerable situations, cannot afford private nurseries. In sum, family circumstances, primarily factors related to social class, employment status, and the availability of family support, are linked to the likelihood of choosing school-based public ECEC services.

Social innovation in early childhood education and care (ECEC) in the city of Barcelona has emerged from two different sources. On the one hand, from citizens' initiatives that have developed over the past 20 years, including childminders, care groups, and free-education nurseries. On the other hand, from the local council, which has put together a network of municipal ‘family spaces’ as part of its 0–3 policy. Over the past decade, family spaces have had a scant presence and a complementary aim in relation to the municipal nurseries network, but ever since the approval of the municipal ECEC Plan in April 2021, they have become one of the pillars of an innovative local policy in which an intensified effort has been made to expand them and redefine them to construct a new model. This is a case of policy learning where the local council has incorporated features of citizen-led social innovation into a new type of municipal ECEC services. Both strands of social innovations are alternatives to school-like environments and share aspects that address pedagogical models, the balance of care and education, and approaches to parenting. However, they differ in their definition of social innovation, the needs they respond to, the costs for families, and therefore, the public they aim to serve. This chapter explores and compares the motivations of families who opt for citizen-led social innovation in ECEC and those of families who opt for institution-led social innovation, to identify the challenges faced by each model. The empirical data used to elaborate this chapter comes from 56 interviews and 4 direct observations.

This chapter explores social innovations in childcare policies in France, focussing on their role and their institutionalisation process. Despite France's robust national family and early years childcare policies, marked by theoretically high coverage rates for children under 3 (59.8 places per 100 children under 3 in 2019), local governance complexities and persistent social and territorial inequalities have led to the appearance of social innovations at the grassroots level. Historically, these initiatives have gradually gained recognition and become institutionalised into public policy. However, recent policy reforms have prioritised managerial efficiency and competition among public, non-profit and for-profit providers, and implemented a growing number of top-down instruments such as calls for projects to support innovative projects. In this context, social innovations aim to address various social needs, such as territorial inequalities, social diversity, integration of vulnerable mothers into employment, and provision of childcare during non-standard hours. The case of the department of Seine-Saint-Denis exemplifies how social innovations can emerge in response to insufficient local provision to address the needs of disadvantaged families, and how they manage to combine childcare and work integration. It illustrates the fact that social innovation can be driven both from the bottom up and, when serving as instruments of public policy, from the top down. Nonetheless, this case also shows that, while innovative, these local initiatives do not fundamentally transform the institutional framework of national childcare policy.

The Israeli state has always offered minimal early childcare (ages 0–3) provisions, basically intended as welfare services for underprivileged mothers joining the labour market. With restrictive eligibility criteria, the majority of the population has no access to these services and resorts to the private childcare market, notorious for its poor conditions and high costs. In this unsupervised domain, innovative early childhood education and care (ECEC) solutions have been introduced, typically led by middle-class families. Paradoxically, although these innovative arrangements promote ECEC as an educational (rather than as a welfare) project, they remain a world apart from the educational system. Rather than studying these dynamics as an economically driven phenomenon, we examine them as a culture-distinction mechanism that forms an exclusive, however vague, extra-system space, based entirely on local actors' activism and inspired by global ‘progressive’ educational agendas. Following a historical review of Israel's ECEC policies, we investigate the sociocultural motivations and concerns of proponents of alternative kindergarten schemes for children aged 0–3 (both parent-involvement projects and private enterprises) through an analysis of their identity discourse, self-imaging, and self-positioning. We show how these actors claim moral capital by dissociating themselves from the domain of ‘regular kindergartens’ by reconstructing an alternative sense of ‘being an educator’ that is ‘in the person’, entwined with a sense of communality, thereby impeding the institutionalisation of innovative ECEC initiatives.

Social innovation has played an important role in the expansion of the Norwegian kindergarten sector. Private non-profit organisations began to establish childcare institutions for single, working mothers from the late 1880s. The development of full kindergarten coverage depended on private initiatives, and up until the 2000s, these initiatives were predominantly social innovations. Since 2009, children aged 1–5 years have had the right to a place at kindergarten, and now 93% of children are enrolled during the pre-school period. Kindergarten services are currently provided by both municipal and (non-profit and for-profit) private actors, each enrolling about half of the children meaning private kindergarten service is now almost fully institutionalised. Being mainly publicly funded, all kindergartens are regulated by national law setting requirements for their basic values, content and pedagogical quality. The close interplay between public and private actors in expanding the kindergarten sector has contributed to the high female labour market participation that Norway enjoys today. This also enables families to have two incomes, thereby reducing the risk of poverty. While kindergartens established by social innovation have been institutionalised into a unitary system, municipal kindergartens tend to take on a broader social mandate than private kindergartens. This might have consequences for social equalisation, with private kindergartens more common in more affluent areas. No major differences in quality have been found between municipal and private kindergartens, but general challenges in terms of pedagogic quality may diminish the equalising effects of Norwegian kindergartens.

This chapter analyses social innovation in early childhood education and care (ECEC) services in Venice. The city of Venice has traditionally had a relatively high level of public expenditure on ECEC (compared to the rest of its region), with only a limited number of ECEC services being provided by private suppliers. In the wake of privatisation and innovative social policies, local public authorities have pushed social innovation, fostering public–private partnerships as well as service flexibilisation and expansion, while attempting to contain costs. This article presents two case studies of ECEC innovation, which show how the history of ECEC in Venice, the local and regional regulation of the services and the level of available public resources have structured social innovation experiences and have limited their institutionalisation and expansion.

Early childhood education and care (ECEC) in England is provided to children from birth to the age of five. Nursery provision is delivered as a mixed market economy partly financed by the government, with the remainder paid by stakeholders and/or families. Political changes over the past 20 years have resulted in significant shifts in the levels of support given to nursery provision and to children and their families, and the universal support that was once provided has become fragmented. COVID-19 lockdowns and global factors have brought a number of key challenges to the surface including financial sustainability for nursery provision and beyond, the development of young children's emotional and communication skills, children's ability to socialise and play, and how to support the families who are experiencing the most financial and social need. This is set against a backdrop of Portsmouth, a city of contrasts with both affluent and low socioeconomic status areas and diverse family needs. This chapter explores steps taken by two charity and voluntary organisations to support young children and their families and the ways in which these organisations take a socially innovative approach when working with very young children. The chapter reports on how these organisations provide approaches that bridge the gaps left by state retrenchment and shows how these local innovations can support young children to develop, learn and thrive, complementing existing nursery provision.

Japan's welfare regime, which is based on the traditional gender division of labour, needs to be transformed to overcome declining fertility and long-term economic stagnation. The government and policy community both recognise this and have promoted ‘childcare support’ through citizen participation and the market. The new childcare policy package launched in 2015 has institutionalised a number of community-based childcare support programmes developed by stay-at-home mothers. This chapter examines the interaction between policy and mothers' social innovation from a historical perspective, asking the following two questions: have there been changes made in the gender relations that position women as caregivers in the Japanese welfare regime? And are mothers empowered as citizens in the integration of mothers' programmes into public policy? By analysing representative examples of the integration and institutionalisation of childcare policies, the author argues that the state preserves existing gender relations around care while, in the era of welfare state restructuring, the state's institutionalisation of social innovation requires citizens to adapt to the logic of the market.

In this conclusive chapter, the authors summarise the main findings of the book by reviewing the empirical evidence of the seven cases of social and policy innovation in ECEC analysed and by comparing them in the context of their respective welfare regimes. The authors then review the risks of social innovation as well as the challenges for ECEC policy and for institutionalisation dynamics. The authors identify the factors that help understand the role of social innovation within the context of welfare state retrenchment and discuss implications in terms of the capacity of social initiatives to address social inequalities. The case of Barcelona, together with the other cities presented in this book, helps to understand how public bodies have innovated in ECEC policies by learning from social innovation and how they have become more capable of tackling the diversification of needs among citizens.