The Rise of Private Equity in Childcare: A Legal Institutionalist Story of Its Causes and Responses

This seminar, coordinated by Laudine Carbuccia (CRIS / LIEPP) and Montserrat Botey (OFCE / LIEPP) as part of the Family Policies working group, is co-organised by the LIEPP socio-fiscal policies research group and the educational policies research group.

Tuesday 8 April
Sciences Po, Room H405
28 rue des Saint Pères, 75007 Paris
16h30 - 18h30

Speaker

Leanna Katz, PhD student at McGill University Faculty of Law. 

Leanna Katz is a doctoral student at McGill University Faculty of Law, an O’Brien Graduate Fellow at the McGill Centre for Human Rights and Legal Pluralism, and a SSHRC Doctoral Fellow. Her research interests include labour and employment law, social welfare law, contract law, administrative law, and critical and feminist legal theory. 

Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the Canadian Labour and Employment Law Journal, the Georgetown Journal on Poverty Law and Policy, the Windsor Review of Legal and Social Issues, and the Commonwealth Judicial Journal.

Abstract

In countries around the world, private investment has grown in social services from hospitals and health clinics to long-term care homes and childcare centers. As governments increased funding for childcare in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, private investors—especially private equity firms—increased their market share, linked to concerns about quality, affordable and accessible childcare services. This project asks: (1) how have social and financial legal reforms permitted or constrained the rise of private investment in childcare and other social welfare services? and (2) how are markets for childcare services structured and regulated in light of the growth of private investment? 

Based on case studies of the childcare sector in France, Canada, and the United States, this project seeks to answer these questions. Building on welfare privatization research, it first traces how both social and financial reforms contributed to the emergence and growth of private investors in childcare. In doing so, it supplements the dominant account of welfare restructuring to explain the prevailing direction of change in which private equity firms own many of the fastest-growing childcare providers, especially in France. In response to the growth of investors in social services, childcare regulations in the US and Canada now include limits on for-profit childcare providers' market share, as a supplement to familiar childcare regulation of quality, professional standards and cost. As governments invest in the childcare system, this project aims to propose ideas about how the legal framework can support quality, accessible care.