Fri til at skabe Danmarks bedste børneliv? Velfærdsaftalen på dagtilbudsområdet i Helsingør Kommune som afsæt for offentlig innovation

Abstract

In 2021, Elsinore Municipality acceded to “Welfare Agreement 2021-2024” (WA) with the Danish government. The WA is a pilot project, aimed at enhancing public innovation by means of deregulation within the daycare sector. It has become popularly known by the name “The Emancipation” (“frisættelsen”) and can be perceived as part of a national reform. This master thesis explores how the WA has been utilized as an opportunity to improve administrative processes and pedagogical practices, as well as to introduce new professional concepts.
The national daycare legislation is a framework law, and the daycare centers in Elsinore Municipality were, even prior to the WA, subject to few regulations. Nevertheless, the WA appears to have enhanced public innovation. This thesis suggests that deregulation (“freedom”) in combination with explicit high expectations (“responsibility”) have worked as drivers for change. The fact that external and internal stakeholders have paid attention to the WA enhances the effect of these drivers. Local daycare managers and staff have interpreted the WA as an expression of trust, and the trust granted has worked as a self-fulfilling prophecy, as managers and staff have strived to live up to expectations.
The process of converting the WA into welfare innovations has required extensive sense-making efforts by the local daycare managers. While, at the initial stages, the daycare managers found the sense-making process rather challenging, they later began to feel autonomous within their new obligations.
The thesis demonstrates how conditions for exercising power have also been changed by the WA.
The structural power, embedded in the organizational hierarchy, has been disguised due to discourse of
“Emancipation”. While the responsibilities of the municipal daycare department are formally unchanged by the WA, conditions for living up to the responsibilities are significantly altered: It has become less legitimate to exercise “hard power”, and thus “soft power”-strategies have to a larger extent than hitherto been applied. This appears to have led to a closer relationship between the daycare department and the local daycare managers.
With only one sector included, the WA, in its current set-up, holds a limited potential to generate solutions to complex cross-cutting societal challenges. However, the WA may impact professionals’ mindset and thereby indirectly enhance abilities to innovate, also across sectors.
The author suggests that future “emancipation-projects” may benefit from collaborative sense-making at the initial stages, from facilitated peer-learning mechanisms and from continuous capacity building aimed at enhancing innovation skills among the frontline managers.