Abstract
Persistently high rates of childhood poverty, ill-health, injury, and inequities have prompted concern that multiple aspects of children’s wellbeing have not been appropriately prioritised in public policy in Aotearoa New Zealand in recent decades. Yet the crucial process of policy development for children’s wellbeing and childhood equity is not well understood and is under-researched in Aotearoa. In contrast, Sweden is renowned for children’s health and comprehensive children’s wellbeing policies.
This macro-level policy research sought to understand the extent to which children have been a priority in public policy, the key influences shaping policy development, including the influence of the Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 (UNCRC), through in-depth case studies of Sweden, Australia, and Aotearoa, to 2015. Abductive cross-case synthesis aimed to produce new insights for contemporary and future policy-makers and advocates in Aotearoa and other jurisdictions into how to make children a priority policy consideration for the decades ahead. Each case study included consideration of the historical context and involved three data sources: a stocktake of key children’s policies; a narrative literature review; and key informant interviews. Data collection, analysis and cross-case synthesis were informed by existing political theories and sociology of childhood theory. From August 2014 to December 2015, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 46 past or present senior politicians, political advisors, bureaucrats, children’s commissioners, advocates, and academics from across the political spectrum and policy sectors, and included perspectives from Indigenous peoples, and for Aotearoa, Pasifika peoples. NVivo11 data-management software assisted thematic analysis of the interview data.
Analysis revealed that in Sweden, prioritisation of children’s wellbeing was coherently embedded across public policy, primarily because of a decades-long societal and political consensus that children and their parents/caregivers were a national priority. Whereas in Australia and Aotearoa, despite some positive policy developments, children and caregivers were not a primary consideration, particularly in major policy decisions, except for issues explicitly about children. As a result, policy tended to be narrow, disjointed, deficit-oriented, reactive, and was not usually child-centred. The lack of culturally appropriate policy for Indigenous children was problematic in all three countries but the impact appeared worse in Australasia. Children’s wellbeing was much less important than the economic considerations which powerfully overshadowed policy-making in Aotearoa and to a lesser extent in Australia. Institutional fragmentation hindered coherent children’s policy in Australia and to a lesser extent in Aotearoa. Neoliberal ideology had multi-pronged negative effects on children’s policy, strongest in Aotearoa. In Australia, children benefited by some perceived electoral pressure on politicians to support families. Unlike in Sweden, UNCRC was largely perceived as irrelevant in Australia and as a reporting exercise in Aotearoa, which limited the policy impact. In Australasia there were few systemic mechanisms to ensure consideration of children in policy development other than children’s commissioners.
Creating child-centred policy is multifaceted but achievable. The Swedish experience demonstrates the powerful and enduring impact on policy of a high-level societal consensus that children are important which becomes embedded as a cultural norm over the longer-term. A society that values and prioritises children begets child-centred policy and vice versa, setting up a virtuous cycle, propelled by active community advocacy, political and organisational leadership, and progressive implementation and normalisation of UNCRC. Child-centred policy is enabled in a more equal social democratic society, but cultural and Indigenous rights must also be realised.