Globalising child rights, localising childhood governance: A comparative analysis of CRC implementation architectures

The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) is widely recognised as a shared global framework for protecting and advancing children’s rights, yet it has not generated a uniform model of implementation. This article examines how child-rights commitments are translated into nationally specific forms of childhood governance through a qualitative comparative document analysis of New Zealand, Mexico, Indonesia and Pakistan. Informed by the Theory of Practice Architectures, the study analyses twelve publicly available documents: four State party reports, four corresponding concluding observations and four domestic or civil-society monitoring sources used for limited triangulation. State party reports are treated as governance texts through which states narrate, justify and institutionalise child-rights commitments. The analysis shows that, although all four states invoke the CRC as a common normative reference point, they differ markedly in how they organise coordination, link rights to planning and finance, build monitoring infrastructures, recognise children’s participation and distribute accountability. The article argues that the globalisation of child rights is better understood as differentiated institutional translation than as straightforward convergence. It offers a governance-centred framework for analysing implementation and shows how childhood is organised through distinct national architectures of public authority, administrative visibility and policy coordination.