Although there is a growing body of literature addressing different aspects of implementation and translation of market-oriented policies, privatisation and choice reforms in both Nordic and European educational research, such processes in pre-primary education have received limited scholarly attention. Indeed, as in other sectors of education, European pre-primary education systems display great variation with regards to, for instance, the extent to which public and private for-profit and/or not-for-profit actors are responsible for preschool provision. In addition, funding policies and regulation varies extensively as well (c.f. Eurydice 2019; Loyd & Penn 2014; Ruutiainen et al 2020; Trætteberg et al 2021). This paper focuses on the Swedish pre-primary education case and is part of an ongoing research project entitled The Preschool as a market (Carlbaum, 2020). Today, one out of five Swedish children attend a privately operated preschool. Even if there are national policies targeting for instance parental choice and right for private actors to provide pre-primary education, municipalities in Sweden have extensive local autonomy in organising and governing their ‘local preschool markets’ or, rather, quasi markets. By creating a market infrastructure via market shaping activities (c.f. Flaig et al 2021) including for instance to facilitate, support and police the market actors, the 290 municipalities have extensive discretion on how to organise the local market for private preschool provision. Thus, market freedoms do not just appear, they require institutions and rules as well as protection and maintenance from, in this case, local authorities (c.f. Wilkinson, 2013). As Brunsson and Jutterström (2018 p. 8) put it; “markets are formed by processes of organization. They are the objects of decisions. There are people and organizations that decide not only on their own actions in markets, but also on the actions of others”. In the Swedish pre-primary education sector, municipalities are such key organisations and organisers of the local preschool market.

The aim of this paper is to explore the different ways in which Swedish municipalities create their local preschool markets to analyse how they act as market organisers and facilitators in the pre-primary education setting.  At this exploratory stage of the analysis, we ask: How do municipalities translate national regulations into a local market system? What are the characteristics of different modes of local market infrastructure? How are municipalities presenting themselves to stakeholders such as private preschool providers and parents? What information and support is given to private providers? What variations can be identified and how can these variations be understood?

Theoretically, we turn to literature on governing, policy enactment and relations between public and private. We acknowledge that municipalities in many ways act as brokers (Ozga et al 2011), i.e., they organise, regulate and limits the local markets. Through processes of translation (Sahlin & Wedlin 2008), municipalities interpret and reconstruct national regulations and policies, they pick up and imitate ideas and modes of organisation to fit their local context. Local market governance architectures may constitute different forms of governance hybridity and organizational hybridity (Grohs 2014). The former denotes the type of organisation and the instruments by which municipalities are governed, e.g. approaches that gravitate towards state-centered (command and control), market-oriented (contracts and competition), and community-centered (trust and cooperation) modes. Organizational hybridity refers to the basic structural features of internal municipal steering, resource allocation, and policies and practices in terms of more classic bureaucratic organisation or market-oriented organization with internal contracts etc. (Grohs 2014). Here, we expect differences between municipalities when it comes to how and to what degree market mechanisms are integrated or fused with core municipal organisation and governing processes. 

Beginning with data collection, an initial mapping of the 290 Swedish municipalities provided an indication of the varying level and extent of private pre-primary education provision measured as the amount of municipal pre-primary education budgets paid as a voucher to private providers. Next, we selected 30 municipalities characterized as having either a large private pre-primary sector (N=10), medium-sized (N=10) or few private preschool services (N=10). In this selection, we also strived for geographical variation and each of the three groups include municipalities located in different geographical areas of Sweden, with different contextual and demographical characteristics, etc. After these 30 municipalities were identified, we moved on to collect data from additional databases and statistics, as well as harvesting the municipalities’ websites to retrieve documents and information. This formed the basis for the construction of an interview guide directed to municipal officers with responsibility for the ECEC sector. These representatives were interviewed and asked, among other things, about how the municipality support, licence and inspect private pre-primary operators, informing us on different modes and densities of market infrastructure that serve to create choice, commercial appeal, trust, quality, control and competition. The documents and interviews have been analysed qualitatively via thematic content analysis involving several steps and including continuous discussions and interpretation between the project members on emerging categories and second order themes.

Our preliminary findings show that there are large variations on how municipalities act as market organisers. Some municipalities have developed rigorous and detailed systems where distinctions between private and public are blurred and appear dissolved. There are examples of purchaser/provider models, and one municipality applies this also for its public municipal preschools as a means to create equal competition between the private and public preschool providers. Private preschool friendly policies and extensive support to new and existing private preschool providers is often also accompanied by local rules and quality standards. At the other side of the continuum, we find municipalities with very limited private pre-primary involvement with both smaller ECEC-administration with low level of role differentiation in its administration. In addition, there are a number of municipalities with very varying contextual characteristics in which private preschool services is to be balanced or even held back by local policies and practices in various ways. Based on these findings, the paper elaborates three (ideal typical) modes of organising local preschool markets: Endorsers are municipalities that actively promote, support and sponsor market actors. Frontiers denotes municipal territories that are unattractive or not yet fully explored by private preschool actors. Keepers are municipalities that strive to maintain balance or status quo between both public and private providers, using various strategies and tools to this end. In sum, this paper seeks to contribute to the discussion on varying local enactments of market-oriented policies and addresses questions relating to the organisation, production and delivery of pre-primary education. Such issues are high on political agendas in several national contexts around Europe and how public actors (whether states, municipalities/local authorities or others) work to organise, enable or limit, private actor involvement are relevant topics not only in Sweden but also in a wider European perspective.

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