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Abstract

Abstract Many countries have committed in law to including young children with disabilities in mainstream early childhood education. Yet formal commitments often yield little more than scattered enrolment, and enrolment does not in itself secure participation, belonging or developmental support. Existing research documents the barriers well: inaccessible settings, unprepared staff, negative attitudes and household poverty. It has done less to explain how these barriers combine to turn a policy promise into unequal and fragile provision, particularly in decentralised and resource-constrained systems. This conceptual article asks why formal inclusion so often fails to become meaningful participation in the early years, and what kind of capacity is needed to close that gap. It integrates literature from inclusive education, disability studies, implementation research and institutional theory, and draws on a documentary analysis of Indonesian legal instruments and national evidence. The article proposes an inclusion chain of four stages: formal inclusion, access, participation and developmental support. Movement between stages depends on three conversion points, and each conversion draws on five capacity domains: governance and financing, setting capacity, workforce and specialist capacity, cross-sector coordination, and family and community conditions. Indonesia illustrates the argument. Legal commitments are extensive, but responsibility is split across levels of government, preschool provision is overwhelmingly private, and national data record inclusive status in only a very small fraction of preschools. The analysis suggests that where system capacity is thin, inclusion becomes contingent on committed individuals and on household resources. It is then decoupled from policy and risks reproducing the inequalities it is meant to reduce. The framework offers a set of propositions for comparative research. It also shifts attention from counting placements towards building and monitoring the distributed capacities that allow young children with disabilities to take part in, and benefit from, early learning.