Enabling conditions for early childhood development in urban policy agendas

How can cities make the needs of young children and their caregivers a lasting part of urban policy? This project examines what enables local governments to turn commitments to early childhood development into coordinated decisions, funded services and changes that last over time.

About 1.18 billion children live in urban areas, and that number is set to grow (UNICEF, 2024). The first five years of life shape health, learning and wellbeing for decades. Yet the needs of young children and their caregivers are rarely visible in the planning and governance decisions that shape cities: the design of streets, parks, housing and services, and the budgets behind them.

City officials say so themselves. Research from LSE Cities’ Urban95 Academy, shows that officials consistently point to a lack of political visibility, fragmented departments and a lack of joined-up policy as the main obstacles (Beck and Kaune, 2025). We know the problem exists at scale. What we do not yet know is which conditions in local government help cities overcome it.

Research on how early childhood development (ECD) becomes a political priority has mostly looked at the global and national levels. Shiffman and Smith (2007) show that priority depends on the power of actors, the framing of ideas, the political context and the nature of the issue. Applying this to ECD, Shawar and Shiffman (2017) identify framing and governance as unresolved challenges. National studies find that governments have responded to global advocacy, but that limited capacity and fragile systems restrict what follows (Neuman and Powers, 2021).

At city level, research on child-friendly cities has long argued that change is a governance question, requiring legal, institutional and budgetary reform (Riggio, 2002). Studies of local agenda-setting (Liu et al., 2010) and of cities in the Urban95 Academy network (Cordero-Vinueza et al., 2025) show how these topics reach city agendas. National and international programmes often spark attention, but projects can stall when budgets go unspent or a new mayor takes office.

These studies explain how a topic reaches the table, not what happens afterwards. None focuses on children aged 0–5 or on cities that have succeeded. This project starts from those cities. It asks what conditions in local government turn attention into policies, budgets and services that last.

How we are doing the research

The project is a 12-month pilot with four stages:

• Literature review. We review research on early childhood policy and on child- friendly cities to build a framework for explaining how early childhood development becomes embedded in urban governance.
• Scoping survey. A short survey sent to cities already engaged with Urban95 asks about things that can be documented: a policy, a dedicated unit, a budget, a facility. This lets us identify cities where change has actually taken place, rather than relying on self-assessment.
• Four city case studies. From the survey we will select four cities that differ in context and in the policy area through which change happened, such as housing, care, education or public space. In each we will analyse policy documents and hold five interviews with officials from different departments, 20 in total.
• Outputs. The findings will feed a journal article and a first draft framework of enabling conditions for city governments, shared through the Urban95 Academy network. We will also send a short brief to every city that answers the survey. The project is a pilot. It aims to build the evidence, method and partnerships for a larger study across a much wider set of cities.