Chapter 7: Promises and Limits of Social Innovation in the French Childcare System

This chapter explores social innovations in childcare policies in France, focussing on their role and their institutionalisation process. Despite France's robust national family and early years childcare policies, marked by theoretically high coverage rates for children under 3 (59.8 places per 100 children under 3 in 2019), local governance complexities and persistent social and territorial inequalities have led to the appearance of social innovations at the grassroots level. Historically, these initiatives have gradually gained recognition and become institutionalised into public policy. However, recent policy reforms have prioritised managerial efficiency and competition among public, non-profit and for-profit providers, and implemented a growing number of top-down instruments such as calls for projects to support innovative projects. In this context, social innovations aim to address various social needs, such as territorial inequalities, social diversity, integration of vulnerable mothers into employment, and provision of childcare during non-standard hours. The case of the department of Seine-Saint-Denis exemplifies how social innovations can emerge in response to insufficient local provision to address the needs of disadvantaged families, and how they manage to combine childcare and work integration. It illustrates the fact that social innovation can be driven both from the bottom up and, when serving as instruments of public policy, from the top down. Nonetheless, this case also shows that, while innovative, these local initiatives do not fundamentally transform the institutional framework of national childcare policy.