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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.

This paper aims to identify thematic issues in public sector accrual accounting and financial reporting that learn from the past and provide lessons for the future by reflecting on the warnings in Olson et al.’s seminal 1998 book Global Warning.

Methodologically, this paper takes insights developed by an experienced pool of public sector accounting scholars and refines them via frames of thinking such as accountability, democracy, decision-making and governance. The discussion follows a medical analogy of an organ transplant in which the public sector was diagnosed as an ailing patient and a for-profit accounting system (business accrual accounting and reporting) has been transplanted to it as a cure. We discuss the relation of accrual accounting as a tool of neoliberal policies in the health sector (diagnosis ailment and organ transplant), technical issues regarding accrual accounting and those implementing it (technology of the transplanted organ) and the effects of that accounting on the public sector (the progress of the patient after the transplant).

From the topics and examples addressed, we conclude that the transplantation of business accounting and reporting to the public sector carries wider implications for large-scale accounting change and requires vigilance. Transplanting to new fields of accounting technology that is itself undergoing constant change may be more problematic and challenging than previously recognized.

Critical challenge and assessment of whether Global Warning’s concerns are still valid today and whether the public sector faces new “warnings” regarding its accounting and reporting.