Promises and Limits of Social Innovation in the French Childcare System
Résumé
This chapter aims at understanding the role and evolution of social innovations within childcare policies in France. Compared to other European countries, France has a long tradition of national family and early childcare policies as well as one of the highest theoretical rate of coverage of children under 3 years of age (59.8 places in 2019 for 100 children under 3, all types of external childcare included ). Nevertheless, the complex local governance of childcare services, fragmented among different public authorities, and the persistence of social and territorial inequalities give room to social innovation at the local level. Public policy reforms in the last decades have combined a managerial performance within the childcare system and competition among public, non-profit and for-profit providers with a growing number of calls for projects to support innovative projects. In this context, social innovations have tried to address various social needs, such as reducing territorial inequalities, social diversity, the inclusion of precarious mothers seeking employment, childcare at atypical times. We will present the case of the department of Seine-Saint-Denis, which is one relevant example of social innovations as responses to insufficient local provision to address the needs of the most precarious families and to combine childcare and work integration. However, by contrast with social innovation in other countries included in this book, these initiatives are supported by public funds granted through national and local qualitative programs. It therefore illustrates the fact that social innovation is not always grassroots or bottom up but can also be an incentive and top-down instrument of public policy. However, this example also shows that the respect of managerial norms and the current crisis of childcare professions make local initiatives, as innovative they are, more functional than transformative of the institutional framework.
