Dual competence : Navigating expert knowledge and power relations in early childhood policy development in local government

This thesis examines the work of policy actors in local government at a time of significant early childhood policy reform in Australia. The study is situated in a globalised context of policy implementation and policy trends in early childhood where the psychological and developmental theories of child development, and human capital and neoliberal ideologies dominate. It is also situated in the context of traditional policy science research that marginalises local government in Victoria, Australia as a legitimate site of policy development and implementation. The study is an institutional ethnography of the work of early childhood policy actors in Victorian local government. The aim of the research has been to explore policy processes by starting with the lived experiences of people involved in policy work to understand how policy is developed and implemented, and how policy work is governed. The research is conceptually framed by Feminist Standpoint Theory and it has explored issues of power and how knowledge is constructed. It has critically examined how policy texts coordinate and govern the work of policy actors. This study has investigated alternative forms of knowledge about policy development that are not present in policy science literature that claims authority about how policy is developed and implemented. Traditional policy science literature presents policy scholarship as a distinct discipline and draws on positivist ideologies to argue that policy problems can be solved through the application of objective, measurable, and evidence-based solutions (Adams, 2016). By adopting a feminist standpoint, this thesis argues that policy science is incomplete due to its silence on how policy is developed in local government and the roles that policy actors play. The analysis is grounded in the participants’ standpoint and their lived experiences as policy actors (Smith, 1999). The thesis argues that early childhood policy actors’ work in local government is governed by powerful early childhood texts and powerful local government texts through the concept of institutional circuits. It demonstrates that early childhood policy actors play an active role within these institutional circuits to create local policy texts that are part of the processes of policy development and implementation. The study’s data reveals that policy texts contain dominant discourses about early childhood and about local government, and that the ideologies underpinning these discourses are at times misaligned or in conflict with each other. The research findings show that early childhood policy actors need to be competent in early childhood discourse and local government discourse to be able to navigate multiple discourses, navigate power, and exercise agency as they undertake policy work. Early childhood policy actors need to simultaneously navigate these multiple discourses, specifically because the local government discourse that early childhood education and care services are high risk and expensive to operate can threaten the future of the services being delivered by councils, and potentially compromise quality. This research demonstrates how policy actors undertake policy work by using a sophisticated strategy that I have conceptualised as ‘dual competence’, which enables them to work simultaneously with different policy texts, exercise their own authority to resist local structures of power, and exert their own standpoints. Dual competence is an intellectual, strategic, and intuitive ‘tool’ comprised of competence in the discourse of early childhood, which they acquire through their professional training and from experience, and competence in the discourses in local government. It underpins their ability to make decisions and exercise professional judgement which are important parts of their work to develop and implement state and nationwide early childhood policies. Contrary to what is often presented by the policy science literature, this study did not identify clear processes that could be followed to develop and implement early childhood policy in local government. It challenges how policy science literature represents policy actor’s roles as an administrative one and demonstrates that policy work can be undefined, unpredictable, ambiguous, and that there are no set guidelines. It also exposes the sophisticated, often messy and ambiguous, and complex work of early childhood policy actors to contextualise state and nationwide policies for local implementation. This study contributes new knowledge about early childhood policy development and implementation, specifically the work of policy actors in local government, and the development of the concept of dual competence. Research about early childhood policy development in local government is limited, as is research about the role of policy actors. Policy actors’ work has largely been hidden and invisible in the policy literature to date. The early childhood policy work done in local government is often in between state and nationwide policies being developed by state/territory and federal governments and the policies being implemented in early childhood services (at the micro level) and it is important to understand all aspects of policy work (Pierson, 2005; Howlett & Wellstead, 2012; Logan et al., 2014). Exploring and examining the work of policy actors, and how their work is governed by policy texts allows us to better understand what happens with early childhood policies at the local government level.