Women’s empowerment and social innovation in childcare: the case of Barcelona, Spain

ABSTRACT

Social innovation and empowerment are complex concepts that, from an analytical point of view, are not necessarily related. One explicit goal of social innovation is to empower communities, as well as the individuals that are involved in activities within those communities, but this does not necessarily always occur. Here we address the question ‘Does social innovation in early childhood education and care (ECEC) empower women?’ First, we explore whether the projects we examine can be defined as social innovations. Second, we analyse to what extent arrangements that are identified as innovative in ECEC empower the mothers who choose them. We argue that if the characteristics of a particular social innovation project enhance or reinforce the capabilities of the women who participate in it, that experience will most probably empower them; if not, this is unlikely to occur. Our empirical material includes 37 interviews with key informants, educators, and mothers involved in these non-institutionalized projects, collected in Barcelona. Our results reveal the socioeconomic bias in these projects, as well as the costs derived for both sets of participants (mothers and educators). They also show the wider social impact that stems from these projects being under-regulated.

KEYWORDS:

• Social innovation
• women’s empowerment
• early years education and care
• ECEC
• Barcelona

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Alejandra Peña, who conducted 11 of the 47 interviews on which this analysis was based, and are also very grateful to her, Marina Moreno, Raquel Motos and Erika Garrido for their transcriptions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Free-education pedagogies are inspired by the work of Montessori, Waldorf, Pikler (and many others). They uphold that a non-institutionalised environment is more favourable to a child’s development, and that learning should be respectful with the different learning speeds of all children. Please find extended information on this teaching philosophy here, in an informative page in Spanish provided by one of the associations we have studied: https://educaciolliure.org/es/la-educacion-libre/.

2 The project was entitled ‘Models of education for the under-threes and participation in the labour market: A study of social innovation in the city of Barcelona’ (2017ACUP04). It was carried out from 2018 to 2021 and was funded by the RecerCaixa programme, launched by the private ‘la Caixa’ foundation and the Catalan Association of Public Universities (ACUP). The project website is: https://blogs.uab.cat/primerainfancia/.

3 Although we were not selecting educators based on their gender (unlike the mothers), we interviewed only one man: this is due to the fact that almost all educators working in the social innovation projects sampled for our research were women.

Additional information

Funding

Part of the empirical evidence presented in this article comes from the ‘Models of education for the under-threes and participation in the labour market: A study of social innovation in the city of Barcelona’ (2017ACUP04) research project, carried out from 2018 to 2021. This was funded by the RecerCaixa programme, launched by the private ‘La Caixa’ foundation.

Notes on contributors

Raquel Gallego

Raquel Gallego holds a Ph.D. in Government and a M.Sc. in Public Administration and Public Policy by the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). She also holds a Master in Political Science and a Degree in Political Science and Sociology by the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). She is Full Professor of Political Science and Public Administration at UAB, Senior Researcher and member of the research group Analysis, Management and Evaluation of Public Policies at the Institute of Government and Public Policy (IGOP) at UAB, and Academic Coordinator of the Master in Public Management organized by UAB, Universitat de Barcelona, and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Her research interests are: public policy analysis, public administration and public management reform, welfare policies, welfare state and decentralization. She has worked as free-lance international consultant for the Inter-American Development Bank.

Lara Maestripieri

Lara Maestripieri holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Research, granted by the University of Trento (2011). She is distinguished researcher ‘Ramon y Cajal’ in the Department of Political Science at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. She is also a member of the Research group Analysis, Management and Evaluation of Public Policies (AGAPP), through her affiliation to the IGOP (Institute of Government and Public Policies). Her main interests of research concern social change in post-industrial society and in particular: public policies and intersectionality, economic insecurity in Southern European countries, social innovation and emerging professions.