This article is about the transnational movement of policy discourses on childcare. It considers whether the spread of neoliberal ideas with their emphasis on marketisation, on the one hand, and a social investment discourse on the other, are leading to convergence in childcare arrangements in Nordic countries (Finland and Sweden) and liberal Anglo-Saxon countries (Australia and Canada). We find points of convergence around both themes at the level of policy discourse and continued diversity in the way these ideas are translated into actual policies. In other words, convergence is mediated by institutions and political realignments.

Child care is central to contemporary welfare state redesign. The emergence of the dual-earner family challenges states to take on new responsibilities as families can no longer provide full-time care, nor can they afford to rely exclusively on markets. There are, however, different ways of addressing the care deficit, and each holds different implications for equality. This article examines the three dominant alternatives being pursued in Western European countries, arguing that each establishes a different "horizon of legitimate expectations." Welfare state redesign no longer takes place exclusively within national boundaries, however. The struggle to build a "social Europe" is engaging member states in reflexive practices, opening them to new and different ideas. The article thus concludes by examining which, if any, of the competing models of care provision has come to define "best practice" for Europe and what this tells us about the emergent contours of social Europe. This article examines the changing and variable mix of child care arrangements within the European Union. The first section argues that child care is central to contemporary welfare state redesign. The "defamilialization" of care, resulting from women's rising labor force participation rate, is one of the "new" developments generating demands for states to take on new responsibilities, as families cannot rely exclusively on markets to meet these needs. As the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) noted, "In many Social Politics Fall 2002

If ‘knowledge is power’, it is unsurprising that the production, legitimation, and application of social scientific knowledge, not least that which was designed to harness social organization to economic growth, is a potentially contentious process. Coping with, adapting to, or attempting to shape globalization has emerged as a central concern of policy-makers who are, therefore, interested in knowledge to assist their managerial activities. Thus, an organization that can create, synthesize, legitimate, and disseminate useful knowledge can play a significant role in the emerging global governance system. The OECD operates as one important site for the construction, standardization, and dissemination of transnational policy ideas. OECD staff conducts research and produces a range of background studies and reports, drawing on disciplinary knowledge (typically economics) supplemented by their ‘organizational discourses’. This paper probes the contested nature of knowledge production and attempts to evaluate the impact of the OECD’s efforts to produce globally applicable policy advice. Particular attention is paid to important initiatives in the labour market and social policy fields – the Jobs Study and Babies and Bosses.

The dominant welfare regimes approach, like the historical‐institutionalism on which it draws, predicts path‐dependent responses to contemporary challenges. According to this, Canada's social policy regime clearly belongs to the (mainly Anglo‐American) ‘liberal’ family, where markets and families retain a key role, supplemented by modest state supports. Yet, as some have recognized, there are important differences among liberal regimes and within a particular welfare regime over time. There are, in other words, ‘varieties of liberalism’. This article argues, moreover, that in the contemporary period Canadian welfare reform has been characterized by warring principles for redesign. While some have sought to deepen the postwar social project, the main trends have been neo‐liberal restructuring and, more recently, policies inspired by ‘inclusive liberalism’, though less deeply than under Blair's government in the UK. The continued existence of such alternatives suggests the need for a more nuanced conception of path‐dependent change, consistent with recent revisionist trends in historical‐institutionalism.

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Scalar theory has recently come under attack for its emphasis on hierarchy. Yet the notion of scalar hierarchies cannot be abandoned if we want to understand actually‐existing social relations and the governance structures in which they are enmeshed. The conception of hierarchy employed by political economists is also more complex than that suggested by the ‘Russian dolls’ metaphor. A multiplicity of diversely structured, overlapping interscalar hierarchies operate in and across diverse policy fields. While these arrangements clearly influence what happens at the local scale, sufficient room often exists for local actors to modify the effects. The complexity of scalar hierarchies is illustrated through an analysis of the governance of child care provision in Canada. Child care arrangements are becoming integral to social reproduction in post‐industrial economies, where women form an increasingly important part of the labour force. This paper focuses on child care in three of Canada's largest cities, each of which is subject to a distinct provincial regime through which federal contributions are filtered. Yet, as we shall see, these cities are more than ‘puppets on a string.’

The last two decades have witnessed the restructuring and rescaling of the welfare regimes consolidated in the postwar era. More is involved, however, than rollbacks justified by neoliberal globalization and engineered via downloading to subnational scales. States are also being pushed to assume new responsibilities for social reproduction as a result of the ‘care crisis’ stemming from the death of the male breadwinner/female caregiver family form. This article focuses on the interaction between national welfare regimes and subnational sites — namely two important urban nodes in Canada (Toronto) and Sweden (Stockholm) where changing gender relations began to disrupt post‐war patterns of social reproduction earlier than in the rest of their respective countries. Both cities experimented with childcare programs that posed a challenge to their respective national policy regimes. In one case, local mobilization contributed to a significant policy shift at the national scale whereas the other experiment, having failed to induce change in the national regime, found its very viability increasingly imperilled. Les deux dernières décennies ont vu la restructuration et le redimensionnement des régimes de protection sociale élaborés dans la phase d’après‐guerre. Pourtant, il ne s’agit pas seulement de réductions justifiées par une mondialisation néolibérale et opérées en se déchargeant sur les niveaux subnationaux. En effet, les Etats sont forcés d’assumer de nouvelles responsabilités à l’égard de la reproduction sociale, du fait de la ‘crise des soins’ provoquée par la disparition de la configuration familiale de l’homme‐soutien de famille et de la femme‐pourvoyeuse de soins. Cet article se consacre à l’interaction entre systèmes sociaux nationaux et sites subnationaux à savoir deux nœuds urbains, Toronto au Canada et Stockholm en Suède, où l’évolution des relations entre genres vient perturber les schémas de reproduction sociale de l’après‐guerre plus rapidement que dans le reste du pays. Ces villes ont expérimenté des programmes d’aide à l’enfance qui ont remis en cause leurs systèmes respectifs de politique publique nationale. Dans un cas, la mobilisation locale a contribuéà un important changement politique au plan national tandis que l’autre, n’ayant pas réussi à susciter d’évolution nationale, a vu sa viabilité de plus en plus menacée.

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