New and reconfigured structures of policymaking and governance present fresh challenges to gender equality seekers, especially in federal systems. In a world in which policy functions are increasingly being “uploaded” to international or supranational levels, “downloaded” to meso-level units, or “offloaded” to civil society and private enterprises (Banaszak, Beckwith, and Rucht Reference Banaszak, Beckwith, Rucht, Banaszak, Beckwith and Rucht2003), the links among institutional design, policy activism, and policy outcomes provide fruitful opportunities for empirical research and theory building. This essay asks what impact state architectures have on women's political mobilization around child care. How might we theorize the effects of different types of federation and multilevel governance on child-care activists' political opportunities and achievement of policy outcomes? How adequate are existing frameworks for explaining links among policy actors, state institutions, civil society, and international business? We sketch some preliminary answers and show how recognizing the significance of the multiple scales and layers involved in contemporary governance can expand feminist research agendas and promote gender-sensitive policymaking. Child care is increasingly understood as an essential component of contemporary welfare states (Michel and Mahon Reference Michel and Mahon2002). Well-designed child-care programs help time-pressed earner parents reconcile work and family life and make it possible for lone parents to improve their economic situation through paid work. Universal early childhood education and care (ECEC) also lays the foundations for lifelong learning, indispensable for success in knowledge-based, postindustrial economies. Adequate public support for ECEC systems generates good postindustrial jobs for early childhood educators who work in publicly financed, regulated settings instead of in low-paid, informal, caregiving situations (Esping-Andersen Reference Esping-Andersen1999). Developing high-quality, universal ECEC in federal systems with divided jurisdictional responsibility, however, faces particular challenges. Most comparative social policy and welfare regime literature ignores state architectures by assuming that unitary state forms are the norm and focusing purely on nation-state governments and policymaking (Esping-Andersen Reference Esping-Andersen1999). Advocacy and policy initiatives on international or meso-level scales typically are ignored or underexplored.

This essay begins to correct this oversight by focusing on child-care advocacy and policymaking in Australia and Canada. These two federal systems differ in many ways, including how relations between central and other scales of government (international, meso level, and local) are structured (Brennan Reference Brennan, Haussman, Sawer and Vickers2010; Chappell Reference Chappell2002). Their child-care policy trajectories also differ. In Australia, after a period in the 1970s when high-quality, nonprofit child-care services were expanded by a Labor federal government, both Labor and the conservative coalitions increasingly encouraged the growth of for-profit child care, which is far less likely to deliver high-quality services and good jobs (Sosinsky, Lord, and Zigler Reference Sosinsky, Lord and Zigler2007). In Canada, the regulated child-care sector remains largely nonprofit and is supported primarily by subsidies targeted at low-income families, except in Quebec, which provides universal access to “$7 a day” public child care.

Is there a connection between the liberal cast of child-care policies in Australia and Canada (except Quebec) and resistance to universal, public provision and their federal structures?Footnote ¹ Does the distinctive nature of federalism in each country make it more difficult for feminists and their allies to obtain universal child care? Alternatively, do federal structures create meso-level opportunities, as in Quebec, that might be expanded to the federal level or to other meso-level governments? Our research, which explores how federal state architectures shape women's policy activism around child care (Brennan Reference Brennan, Haussman, Sawer and Vickers2010; Mahon Reference Mahon2007; Mahon and Collier Reference Mahon, Collier, Haussman, Sawer and Vickers2010), shows substantial policy variation over time within and between the two federations. With the important exception of Quebec, second-wave feminists and their allies have been strong advocates of central government child-care initiatives. Yet neither Canada nor Australia was necessarily frozen into liberal, market-oriented responses. Federalism did not prevent the foundations of a social democratic type of child-care policy in Australia in the 1970s or in Quebec in 1977.

Child-Care Politics in Australia

The prospects for universal, high-quality children's services seemed particularly promising in Australia in 1972 when a Labor government with a basic commitment to gender equality was elected to power. Following criticism by Labor women and child-care activists that its electoral platform for universal preschool provision for four-year-olds was too restrictive, the government allocated additional federal funds to develop more child-care services. The new government built on the Child Care Act 1972, introduced by the previous conservative government in its dying days, to authorize federal provision of capital and operating grants to community organizations, regional authorities, or local governments willing to establish nonprofit, child-care centers. It used Section 81 of the constitution to bypass the states, offering direct federal funding.

On Labor's defeat, this child-care policy survived reelection of a conservative coalition government in 1975, partly because federal femocrats forged alliances with Liberal Party women in the coalition. There also was growing coordination among child-care advocates in the states. In 1983, Labor rectified its former reliance on submissions from local communities by planning the equitable spread of child-care places across the country, introducing state-level plans, drawing meso-level governments into implementing federal policy. Labor's commitment to nonprofit centers, restricting fee subsidies to users of nonprofit services and to expanding the community-based (nonprofit) sector through allocations of capital, continued until the late 1980s, by which time about three-quarters of Australian child care was nonprofit.

Labor abandoned its support of the nonprofit sector in the early 1990s, however, when the Finance Department advocated a more market-oriented approach. It did this by introducing quasi vouchers that parents could use to buy care in any regulated service, whether for-profit or not-for-profit. Labor, however, maintained most additional subsidies for nonprofit care. Following the election of a new conservative coalition government led by John Howard, support for commercial providers was strengthened and consolidated, while nonprofit provision was sidelined. The small subsidies that Labor had made available to nonprofit child care came to an end. The government's new funding system stimulated the emergence of stock market–listed child-care corporations, including ABC Learning, an Australian company that rapidly became the largest provider of child care in the world (Brennan Reference Brennan2007). Ironically, the centralized system of child care that advocates had achieved made Australian child care especially vulnerable to this aggressive corporation, which acquired almost a quarter of the country's child-care centers before its collapse in 2009 (Brennan Reference Brennan, Haussman, Sawer and Vickers2010).

With little prospect of changing the funding policies of the Howard government (1996–2007), feminist groups and child-care advocates turned their attention to a new site—the states' control of regulations governing child care. By pressing for improved staff/child ratios and higher staff training standards, they hoped to make the takeover of nonprofit services less attractive to commercial providers. Despite strong resistance from corporate providers, regulations were strengthened in both New South Wales and Victoria and, following the election of a federal Labor government in 2007, these were consolidated into a national quality framework—importantly, policy diffusion from periphery to center. Some state governments, including Victoria and Tasmania, also began to build nonprofit services without federal capital assistance (Brennan Reference Brennan, Haussman, Sawer and Vickers2010; Brennan, Blaxland, and Tannous Reference Brennan, Blaxland and Tannous2009).

Child-Care Politics in Canada: A Patchwork of Care

In Canada, the British North America Act (1867) assigned education and social services to the provinces, but in a period of expansive use of its constitutional spending power, the federal government included child care in the Canada Assistance Plan (CAP), a block funding program, enabling it to contribute, on a 50-50 cost-sharing basis, to income-targeted child-care subsidies. The Report of the Royal Commission on the Status of Women (1970), however, called for the federal government to enact day-care legislation and to work with the provinces to develop a pan-Canadian, universal system. Femocrats within the federal bureaucracy fought for day-care legislation, but while the Liberal government courted the feminist movement, hoping to counter the appeal of Quebec nationalism (Vickers Reference Vickers2010), their best offer was modest revisions to CAP, which nevertheless still only provided subsidies to those “in need.”

Several opportunities for expanding the system would later arise. First was the federal Liberal government's 1976 plan to replace CAP with new social service legislation that would have permitted federal contributions to universal programs (Mahon Reference Mahon2000, 613–14). The legislation was withdrawn because of the Quebec government's increasing opposition to federal “interference” in areas under its jurisdiction and the federal Liberals' conversion to fiscal austerity. In the early 1980s, the Abella Royal Commission on Employment Equality and the Cooke Task Force on Childcare both called for a pan-Canadian child-care policy. The Cooke report was, however, received by a newly elected Progressive Conservative government, committed to a neoliberal agenda. Although it did introduce a child care bill, it faced mounting criticism from child care advocates for the opening it offered for-profit providers and from social conservatives opposed to child care outside the home, and so it let the bill die when a new election was called (Mahon and Collier Reference Mahon, Collier, Haussman, Sawer and Vickers2010).

Until abolished in 1996, CAP remained the federal government's primary way of contributing to child care, making its development across the country highly uneven. CAP did not require the provinces to invest in child care, with the result that some have spaces for fewer than 10% of children from birth to 5 years. Although nonprofit providers account for most of the country's regulated spaces, in oil-rich Alberta, commercial services provide more than 50% of spaces. Provinces under social democratic governments, such as Manitoba (Prentice Reference Prentice2004), pushed against the liberal, pro-market bias, but only Quebec established a universal “$5 a day” (now $7) child-care program.

In 2005, the Quebec program motivated the federal Liberal government to negotiate bilateral agreements with all provinces, laying the foundation for a high-quality, pan-Canadian, universally accessible child-care system. But the new Harper Conservative government repudiated the agreements, except with Quebec, offering instead a “universal” child-care tax credit to all families with children under 6, whether or not they used nonfamily child care. Had the Liberals entrenched their plan in legislation instead of using bilateral agreements, as the state of Canadian federalism then necessitated, the program would have been more secure.

The Cases Compared

Considerable scope remains for systematic, historical, and comparative research to map the connections among state architectures, political parties, bureaucracy, and other variables shaping this policy domain. Comparative research into the extent to which meso-level governments are used as laboratories for policy innovation is likely to prove particularly illuminating. Of particular interest are the strategies adopted by women's organizations in relation to cities and to meso-level and local governments, a neglected area of scholarship about the welfare state and federalism. Although cities have no constitutionally guaranteed powers in either federation, they can be important sites for mobilization; and in major cities like Toronto and Vancouver, feminists and their allies have had some success in establishing child care as a citizen right (Mahon Reference Mahon2007), as it is in Quebec.

Research into child care advocacy and policy development, however, suggests that changing scale is only partly a matter of “venue shopping”—a frame that implicitly makes activists into consumers seeking the best deal. Our work on Australia, Canada, and the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) suggests, by contrast, that child-care advocates often seek to reshape these fora and challenge their settled ways of operating (Brennan, Reference Brennan, Haussman, Sawer and Vickers2010, Mahon, and Collier, Reference Mahon, Collier, Haussman, Sawer and Vickers2010; Mahon, Reference Mahon2010). The Australian women's movement's success in having child-care policy taken up by the federal government in the early 1970s is an example of an institution's remit that was actively reshaped and reframed. Feminists chose to focus on the Quebec government because they identify it as “their” (national) government, not just because, like all provinces, it was assigned jurisdiction over education by the British North America Act.

International agencies such as the OECD, World Bank, and UNICEF are increasingly significant as sources of ideas, best practice, moral pressure, and comparative policy data (all critical resources for domestic policy advocates). This is another area where comparative research could shed light on the strategies of equality seekers and the ways in which different domestic state structures shape and constrain engagement with the international arena. How have advocates facing federal and meso-level governments deployed international reports, such as the OECD's Starting Strong study, which provided in-depth evaluations of child-care programs in 20 OECD countries, and UNICEF's Innocenti report (2008), which established a league table of ECEC in advanced countries in which Australia and Canada ranked near the bottom? As Louise Chappell and Mayet Costello (Reference Chappell and Costello2010) show in relation to domestic violence policymaking, advocates at the meso level, under certain circumstances, can draw strategically on the international scale almost as effectively as federal-level lobbyists.