CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2023
| Author | Tsintsadze, Lika |
|---|---|
| Title | Bridging the Gap: Analysing the Discrepancy between Policy Design and Implementation in Georgia's Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) |
| Summary | The years children spend in Early Childhood Education and Care significantly impact their social, emotional, and cognitive development, as well as their life-long success and educational outcomes. However, not only is the ECEC the least prioritised and funded policy field in the world, but also the least researched in many countries. In Georgia, the only available resources for analysing ECEC policy are reports from UNICEF, and local studies have never been conducted on ECEC in any municipality across Georgia. To close this gap in the literature and provide evidence for the Georgian policy-makers responsible for designing and implementing the ECEC policies, this dissertation aims to study the complex policy and governance landscape of early childhood education and care in Georgia. It explores how different levels of government and key stakeholders interact, coordinate, and address the policy processes and their accompanying challenges in Batumi, the second-largest city in Georgia. The dissertation also intends to study existing implementation and governance gaps in the ECEC and the impact of these gaps on policy outcomes. The results indicate that there is a stark contrast between Georgia’s ECEC policy’s design and its implementation in practice; that out of seven governance gaps discussed in the literature, five are present in Batumi: Information, Capacity, Fiscal, Objective, and Accountability gaps; and that the primary actors involved in Batumi’s ECEC policy are unaware of most of these governance gaps and are reluctant to address the rest. Moreover, the lack of an independent regulatory body ensuring alignment of policy objectives and national standards with the implementation on the ground seriously hinders the successful implementation of the policy. |
| Supervisor | Davidescu, Simona; Zentai, Violetta |
| Department | School of Public Policy MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2023/tsintsadze_lika.pdf |
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