Across Europe state and municipal governance of early childhood education and care is increasingly carried out by means of governmental strategies that emphatically employ the quality discourse (e.g. Dahler-Larsen, 2008; Henry et al., 2001; Larner & Walters, 2004; Mooney & Munton, 1998; e.g. Moss & Dahlberg, 2008; Munton et al., 1995). At a trans-national level OECD seeks to further this process by conducting country reports and establishing emerging standards for quality or improvement measures within the framework of Starting Strong 1+2 among other initiatives (e.g. Bennett, 2003). UNESCO and the EU are equally active (e.g. Blackburn, 2006; Network, 1996). This study zooms in on how this process unfolds in a Danish context of day care centres and kindergartens as municipal authorities, institutional leadership and professionals struggle among one another to come to terms with how the framework for quality work should be understood and enacted as a guideline for practice (e.g. Andersen et al., 2008). The study is extremely timely as the Danish centre-right government is currently implementing its large-scale quality reform which is meant to reform the public sector according to key-words like: better value for money, de-bureaucratization, responsibilization, communication, democratisation…. (www.kvalitetsreform.dk/): This strategy is analysed as a governmental strategy (Dean, 1999, 2007): On the one hand it steers decentrally by means of broad visions and goals. On the other hand it tightens up by creating feed-back structures at a hitherto unparalleled extensive scale from central to local levels. Documentation – quality assurance measures – are thus demanded which integrate learning plans for children, action plans for each institution and municipal quality reports, which are made public on the web. In our research we observe intensive activity in municipalities, at institutional levels among leadership and professionals, at municipal level, and at the level of Local Government Denmark (www.kl.dk), the association of Danish municipalities, trying to engage municipalities to commit to the required quality work in ways that serve local and trans-local needs. The study endeavours to map the quality discourse as it is currently being construed and enacted in struggles between municipal government and leadership as well as professionals at day care centres and kindergartens in Denmark. This is done with the explicit purpose of informing the early childhood education and care profession as a background to qualifying their position in the current struggle to define what is quality (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994; Foucault, 1993; Krejsler, 2005).

The study maps the space for manoeuvre that the quality discourse makes available for municipal authorities, institutional leadership and professional early childhood education and care workers. This is done through qualitative in-depth studies of two exemplary municipalities, supplemented by material/documents/literature that illuminates the national context. The study is conducted as a discourse analysis of documents, interview transcripts and field notes. It draws on work of Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari and the growing governmentality literature. The study is positioned within a double strategy to an Enlightenment approach (Deleuze & Guattari, 1994; Foucault, 1971, 1978, 1993). I.e. first one must acquire comprehensive understanding of the complex strategic situation that is subject to scrutiny, i.e. the current struggle about what defines quality. Second, this knowledge should serve as a sort of topographic mapping enabling the subjects of the quality discourse to experiment with ways of thinking the current situation differently.

We observe already a host of varied strategies to handle ‘quality’ among different stakeholders as a response to central demands. We observe that new central strategies do not on beforehand determine what will happen in detail at the local level, as the gap of implementation as well as the gap of interpretation between the central policy-making level and the various local levels appear to be too large in their contextual differences to warrant any monolithic quality model nationally. We do, on the one hand identify fierce political battles between central and local policy-makers, between municipal authorities and leadership of institutions, between leadership and professionals in institutions as implementation and distribution of resources are at stake. On the other hand, however, we also observe indifference and avoidance at the institutional level of demands that are perceived as just another bunch of endless demands from distant governing bodies.