Swedish Reggio Emilia-inspired pedagogy has been decribed as a democratic paradigm shift for Swedish preschools. A grassroots movement based on the same resistance to traditional authoritarian pedagogy and political alignment that the Italien example entailed in the post-fascist Reggio Emilia. However, unlike the local and citizen-initiated birth in Italy, the Swedish implementation was sanctioned at a central political level and took place in close relation to leading academic institutions. Swedish Reggio Emilia thus belongs to a completely different historical context than the original educational and democratic movement.

This essay tells the story of the pedagogical and organizational development of Swedish childcare from the preschool expansion in the 1970s up to the founding of the Swedish Reggio Emilia Institute in 1993. Based on a theory of path-dependent continuity and change, it analyzes how the conditions successively made it possible to implement the Reggio Emilia philosophy, with its socialist and cooperative origins, in Sweden at the time of a neoliberal and individual-centered change in political discourse during the early 1990s. The analysis describes the earliest influences in Sweden during the 1980s based on its function as exotic cargo: a rich aesthetic framework but with little theoretical content. The conveyed ideas and values mirrored already established counterparts in Sweden, but despite this, it managed to capture both fascination and interest among educators as well as politicians. Its pluralistic and decentralized ideals also came to relate to the neoliberal turn when the Swedish welfare state left its long tradition of collective democrazy.