Global and Transnational Governance of Out-of-home Childcare: Towards a Theorisation of Cross-border Agency in Child Institutionalisation

This article aims to contribute to framing and theorising of cross-border processes affecting residential childcare, specifically the institutionalisation of children. Existing studies of global trends around child institutionalisation tend to have two limitations. They either pay little attention to cross-border actors influencing domestic residential childcare systems or take a normative view of cross-border agency, largely disinterested in its inner workings and dynamics. Drawing on studies in other policy areas, we argue that these two features of existing research limit our understanding of the global dynamics of out-of-home childcare. We propose framing the issue of child institutionalisation as a global politics issue and analysing it in terms of global and transnational governance. We argue that future research on child institutionalisation needs to refocus towards issues of power, authority, and normative contestation among transnational actors. We highlight the hybrid and fragmented nature of global and transnational governance, whose further investigation promises to shed brighter light on the global landscape of child institutionalisation.