Imaginaries of ECEC: A comparison of policies of access in early childhood education in Brazil, Finland, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Nepal, and Serbia

Increasing access to ECEC has been on the agendas of international organizations and many countries in different parts of the world. Despite the clear global interconnectivity, this article shows that contextual factors are essential to understand educational policy developments. The study examines reforms related to policies of access to ECEC in seven countries. Brazil, Finland, Hungary, Indonesia, Iran, Nepal, and Serbia. We show how access policies plug into the understanding of the role of ECEC as producing future citizens. Even though the main idea of ECEC’s role in developing future citizens is present in each national context, it takes different forms: the roles frame access policies as a way to strengthen either human capital via focusing on learning and skill formation, and/or the national identity of future citizens. They materialize in differing ways, for example, as coercive legislative requirements, fee policies, and knowledge production schemes. In addition, national access policies adopt different relations to the policies of international organizations, reflecting the socio-political context of the country. We argue that the concept of the imaginary is useful in allowing us to examine the interplay between the semiotic and non-semiotic aspects of policy. To further unravel the complexity inherent in such policies in terms of their local diversity, we suggest the usefulness of case studies and the examination of local-level policies in their full variety instead of only national ones, as these might be fruitful avenues for future research.