Site of research: Faculty of Social Sciences, Tampere University
Project director: Dr Olga Ulybina
Sponsor: European Commission, Horizon 2020 (2018-2020)
Project description
At least 8 million children live in institutional care (children’s homes or orphanages) around the world. There is scientific evidence that child institutionalization is detrimental to child’s development and highly negatively effects the child’s future. It is also against the child’s right to a family, as provisioned in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Finally, institutional care tends to be more expensive for the state than family-based care. The policy of childcare deinstitutionalization (hereafter DI) concerns children without parental care. DI policy aims to ensure that every child grows up in a family or in a family-like environment. The deinstitutionalization of childcare is a globally recognized best practice, and a global movement, supported by the United Nations, the European Commission, and many other international players. However, the cross-national progress has been highly uneven. Even more surprising is the pattern in which countries have been adopting DI policy. For example, poor, conflict-ridden and authoritarian countries were among early DI adopters, while some rich Western European countries have fallen behind. Strikingly, while the European Union and various international actors have been actively investing in DI policy promotion, our knowledge about DI policy adoption across countries has been rather patchy to-date. This gap was addressed by this project. I asked three broad questions: Which countries have adopted the policy of childcare deinstitutionalization? When did they do so (i.e. were they among early or late policy adopters)? What factors can help explain the emerging pattern of policy adoption? In particular, what role did the European Union play?
The focus was particularly on DI policy adoption in Eastern European and Central Asian countries, which previously were republics of the Soviet Union. However, as the project unfolded and the first results were rather unexpected, the scope of the project was extended, so eventually the analysis was carried out on all fifteen ex-Soviet states, and some analysis even included all world countries.
The project had several objectives. The first objective was to create a unique dataset about DI policy adoption across several countries (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia). The second objective was to conduct statistical analysis, in order to understand the role of various factors in the cross-national variation in DI policy adoption. The third objective was to carry out a more in-depth, qualitative analysis of ‘successful’ DI cases, in order to understand how progress was achieved and what combinations of factors were key to the success of the reforms.
