EUCHILD · Understanding the impact of EU policies on the deinstitutionalization of child care in non-EU Eastern European countries
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-09-01 → 2020-08-31
- EU contribution
- €191,326
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-CAR
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Results in brief
Understanding the impact of EU policies on the deinstitutionalization of child care in non-EU Eastern European countries
At least 8 million children live in institutional care (children’s homes or orphanages) around the world. There is scientific evidence that child institutionalization is detrimental to child’s development and highly negatively effects the child’s future. The policy of childcare deinstitutionalization (hereafter DI) concerns children without parental care. It aims to ensure that every child grows up in a family or in a family-like environment. The deinstitutionalization of childcare is a globally recognized best practice, and a global movement, supported by the United Nations, the European Commission, and many other international players. However, the cross-national progress has been highly uneven. Even more surprising is the pattern in which countries have been adopting DI policy. For example, poor, conflict-ridden and authoritarian countries were among early DI adopters, while some rich Western European countries have fallen behind. Strikingly, while the European Union and various international actors have been actively investing in DI policy promotion, our knowledge about DI policy adoption across countries has been rather patchy to-date. This gap was addressed by this project. I asked three broad questions: Which countries have adopted the policy of childcare deinstitutionalization? When did they do so? What factors can help explain the emerging pattern of policy adoption? In particular, what role did the European Union play? The new data and analysis help understand the drivers behind the uneven global progress towards child wellbeing, as well as the roles of national and international actors in ensuring children's rights.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
The project will investigate the effects of EU policies on the deinstitutionalization of child care in non-EU countries of Eastern Europe. These countries have large numbers of children in orphanages and, in recent years, have been moving towards family-based child care policies. The study will be conducted in two parts. Firstly, a unique dataset on national deinstitutionalization reforms and relevant EU interventions in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Belarus, Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia will be gathered. After conducting a correlation analysis on these data two countries will be chosen by the positive deviance method, that is, by finding particularly successful countries. These will be further studied using in-depth interviews of NGOs, government officials and international agencies in order to understand how progress has been achieved and what combinations of factors were key to the success of the reforms. This analysis will lead to an in-depth understanding of the drivers of deinstitutionalization in these countries, and will help inform EU policies towards the region.The research will be carried out in the Tampere Research Group for Cultural and Political Sociology at the University of Tampere, led by Prof Pertti Alasuutari, which specializes in the influence of global policy changes on local policy making, and is therefore an ideal base for this project. The applicant, Olga Ulybina, has wide experience in the field of international development, having gained a PhD at the University of Cambridge studying the impact of international movements on Russian forestry reform and received a prize postdoctoral fellowship from WZB Berlin to study international aid interventions in Kyrgyzstan. This background along with the training and support from the research group at the University of Tampere make her ideally placed to conduct this research.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- TAMPEREEN KORKEAKOULUSAATIO SR · TampereCoordinatorFinland
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union