Emergence of National Collaborative Early Childhood Development Systems

• In Event: Strengthening ECD systems, financing and accountability

Proposal

In the field of early childhood development, it has increasingly been recognized that to achieve high quality ECD outcomes, and to support the effective and holistic development of young children, input and involvement from sectors and actors outside the traditional education sector is necessary in the planning and implementation of strategies, programs and initiatives as well as coordination at the national and local levels of government. Global policy documents have underscored the need to adopt multisectoral and holistic approaches to early childhood development, for example, the Nurturing Care Framework 2018 (World Health Organization, 2018) and more recently, the Global Partnership Strategy for early childhood 2021-2030 (UNESCO, 2022). These global strategies and frameworks have advocated multisector coordination and collaboration as key strategies for early childhood care and education (ECCE).

Achieving coordinated approaches to early childhood development is a difficult undertaking given the fragmented nature of governance in this field with responsibility for multiple and overlapping domains of child development falling in the purview of different sectors and stakeholders. Countries have attempted to coordinate sectors in different ways using various institutional arrangements and mechanisms. There has been scholarly engagement on the potential benefits of collaboration (Kagan, 1991; Neuman, 2007; Umayahara, 2004; Vargas-Barón, 2015), the challenges of implementing such an approach (Bruner et al., 2004; DiGirolamo et al., 2014; Myers, 1992; Vargas-Barón, 2015), and the costs of an uncritical acceptance of collaboration as a desired approach (Bruner, 2004; Olson, 2015). Studies that single out collaboration as a dominant focus for empirical investigation in early childhood systems constitute an emerging field of inquiry.

In the growing field of systems research into ECD, there has been research on the governance structures that pull together multiple elements of an ECD system, but less attention to a processual account of collaboration looking at how collaborative approaches emerge, what factors influence how persons within those sectors actually collaborate, and how the collaborative approach affects ECD systemic outcomes. In this paper, I present findings on the research question of how collaborative approaches emerge in national early childhood development systems.

The first part of the paper presents an analytical framework setting out the stages that precede establishment of a collaborative approach and identifies contextual factors that contribute to its emergence. The framework is based on a combination of theoretical insights from the fields of political science, policy studies, and collaborative governance literature including Jochim and May (2010), Bryson et al. (2006), Ansell and Gash (2008), and Emerson et al. (2012).

Based on empirical research, the second part of the paper applies the framework to a case study of two countries in the Comonwealth Caribbean, Guyana and Jamaica, and explores how the different contextual factors influenced the establishment of collaborative approaches to early childhood development.

While multiple factors converged to explain the emergence and nonemergence of collaborative approaches in early childhood policy and planning in the two countries, the political context (comprising political and policy and administrative factors) held the greatest explanatory value for why a formal collaborative process emerged in the Jamaican context and why a similar arrangement failed to take root in the Guyanese case. In my two case studies, I did not find much support for the economic factors that could support the emergence of collaborative processes. The counties’ historical and ideological factors were helpful in generating insights into the two different contexts, and the sociocultural factors were useful in understanding both establishment and receptivity of collaborative approaches. In this paper, I share my findings using the five-stage model of how collaborative approaches are established and discuss the combination of contextual factors that supported (or obstructed) the countries’ movements toward collaborative, multisectoral approaches in ECD policy and planning.

References
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Author

• Amlata Persaud, Childhood Education International