The Local Market Makers: Swedish municipalities as preschool market organisers

Although there is a growing body of literature addressing different aspects of implementation and translation of market-oriented policies, privatisation and choice reforms in both Nordic and European educational research, such processes in pre-primary education have received limited scholarly attention. Indeed, as in other sectors of education, European pre-primary education systems display great variation with regards to, for instance, the extent to which public and private for-profit and/or not-for-profit actors are responsible for preschool provision. In addition, funding policies and regulation varies extensively as well (c.f. Eurydice 2019; Loyd & Penn 2014; Ruutiainen et al 2020; Trætteberg et al 2021). This paper focuses on the Swedish pre-primary education case and is part of an ongoing research project entitled The Preschool as a market (Carlbaum, 2020). Today, one out of five Swedish children attend a privately operated preschool. Even if there are national policies targeting for instance parental choice and right for private actors to provide pre-primary education, municipalities in Sweden have extensive local autonomy in organising and governing their ‘local preschool markets’ or, rather, quasi markets. By creating a market infrastructure via market shaping activities (c.f. Flaig et al 2021) including for instance to facilitate, support and police the market actors, the 290 municipalities have extensive discretion on how to organise the local market for private preschool provision. Thus, market freedoms do not just appear, they require institutions and rules as well as protection and maintenance from, in this case, local authorities (c.f. Wilkinson, 2013). As Brunsson and Jutterström (2018 p. 8) put it; “markets are formed by processes of organization. They are the objects of decisions. There are people and organizations that decide not only on their own actions in markets, but also on the actions of others”. In the Swedish pre-primary education sect