Early childhood education and care (ECEC) services are currently under variable and intensive government regulation (Osgood, 2004). Governments through rules and sanctions seek to guarantee quality standards. Consequently, there has been an increase of regulation regarding ECEC services in countries both within and without Europe (Vincent and Braun, 2011). Since standardization has become prominent, the OECD has inevitably been established as a global ‘bench-maker’ of standards between nation-states and their education institutions (Rinne and Ozga, 2013: 98). Apparently comparison becomes a principal procedure structuring and explaining educational realities and through categorization and classification proposes best practices. The rise of this 'transnational policy orthodoxy' (Jones, 2013: 1) developed by the EU and the OECD and expressed in regulation mechanisms of governance, calibrates the policies of member-states and leads to a constraining of policymakers and educators' autonomy.

Since 2010 Greece has undergone strict fiscal consolidation and budgetary cuts are still taking place under the economic-adjustment programs. Inevitably the Greek education sector has been strongly affected by the very low and constantly decreasing public spending. Greece is among the bottom-performer countries (76.4% in 2013-EU-average-93.1%) regarding ECEC participation and well below the ET2020 benchmark of 95% (European Commission, 2015). These figures could be explained if we consider that family poverty reduces the likelihood of children's participation in ECEC (Bennett, 2013), while there is no doubt that it hampers their access to quality provision (Gambaro et al, 2013). Austerity, a consequence of globalizing processes, may lead to shrinking childcare provision, since its "clientele" is affected by growing unemployment. This inevitably generates the risk of ECEC becoming out of reach (Lloyd and Penn, 2014) and of low quality for deprived children (Vandenbroeck and Lazzari, 2014) because of the concomitant relaxation of quality standards.

This peculiar deregulation, driven by the economic crisis, collides with the urge for regulation - as suggested by the present study - of the rather chaotic field of the Greek ECEC provision and brings to the fore a problematic about how other European countries affected by austerity measures might cope with it. It appears that the OECD's view of education - and particularly ECEC - as a market, creates risks exacerbated by the current economic austerity. The outcomes of such market-efficient models range from social equity and state solidarity risks to lurking privatisation, which is suggested as a universal panacea to issues of funding and quality (Peters, 2012).

This paper is oriented towards the global/European debates surrounding policies related to ECEC and practices in Greece. The aim is to research the role of International Organizations in the 'economization' of education policy and the 'educationalization' of economic policy (Sellar and Lingard, 2013: 200). Hence, the processes of regulation and deregulation, the way they are decontextualized and recontextualized at national and local levels and the consequences for ECEC pose as key issues of this research. The claim of this study is that several key-players of this field seek regulation through the dissemination of good practices mainly suggested by supranational organizations. Through policy networking their aim is to exchange practices and influence service delivery in the ECEC sector. Following Ball and Junemann (2012) it is important to identify the actors and interactions within and across this network and also how governance networks bring into play particular kinds of expert knowledge. Therefore basic research questions are: How autonomy and external regulation are played out in the Greek ECEC in times of economic crisis? Who defines quality in ECEC? Through what processes and which contexts? With what consequences for those participating in such institutions and with what impact on the identities of the professionals in this field?

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