Community and environmental challenges: How research and practice interlink

The role of social work in sustainable community development

Social work is a dynamic profession. It interacts with people and their environments: physical, emotional and psychological. Change happens all around us, all the time. How we adapt and how we work with that change will make the difference between inclusive, sustainable community development and fragmentation, conflict and the abuse of power and control.

The work of social workers throughout the world is complex. The need for clear analytical thinkers is key to good social work practice. A high-level educational attainment is critical to social work professionals.

The natural response from most people is to resist change. We all tend to prefer the familiar, the status quo. Overcoming inertia, whether that path of change is forced or chosen, requires social workers first to accept and engage with people with dignity and respect. The challenge of change is complex, engaging, exciting; it keeps us all active and healthy.

How we measure the outcome of that change process depends on our perspective. Social workers engage with people through that journey of change, working with them to achieve a better place to be; how a researcher measures the success of that change may be markedly different from how the practitioner or the person or people directly involved assess that change. All is in the eye of the beholder.

Understanding this dynamic process is critical to understanding the role of social work. It is critical in measuring what is a successful outcome. Understanding social work leads to understanding the role social workers can take in issues of climate and environmental change and the impact on community development.

The concept that economic health can only be achieved with social health underpins the approach of the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) to the alleviation of poverty and the fight against inequality. It places social work as a human rights profession that seeks social justice for all. The key question for the profession lies in how social work education and social work practice can use our practice knowledge and wisdom together with social work research to influence the effective development of the profession.

What social workers do in community development

The current theme of the Global Agenda, the impact of climate and environmental change, is part of a 10-year project with three other themes: addressing inequality, exploring the reality of the dignity and respect of all people, and the importance of human relationships.

Over the last 2 years, social workers and researchers have been collecting data on how the profession contributes to community development, focusing on environmental and climate change. Some of it is reported in the Global Agenda Report, to be published in July 2018, some in journals and books published over the last 2 years and some in this edition of ISW. The growing literature complements practice knowledge that social workers regularly take into consideration as they undergo their assessments and workplans with the people they are working with in traversing the complexities of adapting to and helping people be in control of the changes in their lives.

Social workers have always had a keen interest in the social and economic conditions in which people live. Growing awareness of these realities was the initial motivation for many people going into the profession. This awareness is one of the reasons that social workers not only work with individuals, families and their communities, but also why many get involved in politics outside of their professional role. Social work has moved from a welfare model, rescuing the vulnerable and poor, to the development of interactional work that leads to people experiencing transformational change (IFSW, 2016).

The profession has listened to people and economists articulating that ‘trade not aid’ lifts people from poverty. Post-disaster work, which involves the people most affected from the outset in rebuilding communities, is just one example of how this co-production works. In the 3S Housing project in Japan, rebuilding safe communities after an earthquake (Global Agenda Report 2, 2016), co-production was key. This increasing knowledge fuels scepticism of humanitarian aid models promoted many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and the United Nations (UN), across the developing and developed world, which sustain the dependency model and fail to achieve sustainable, peaceful, community development.

Social work, social administration, social engineering and social work education

Pressure on social work practice has increased under neo-liberal policies; it is critical in understanding the environment in which social work in some countries is now being practised. Many social workers find themselves being pushed into proscribed tasks, concentrating on social administration or social engineering at the behest of their employers. They become frustrated and either find routes to circumvent the ‘rules’ or give up and leave the profession.

These processes are not social work. In these processes the strength of grassroots knowledge and academic research are often downplayed in the workplace, replaced by tick boxes created by the expectations of employers and politicians, whose agenda is often about short-term gains versus long-term sustainability, fuelling the public perception that social work may be ineffective. This type of working environment will be recognised by many social workers around the world. It is not constructive in building sustainable communities and we need to work together to change this direction of travel.

The environment of where social workers work has not yet fully been explored, but the structural context of delivering social work in many of its current forms is flawed in failing to support the workforce in achieving positive change in our societies. There have been some studies that illustrate the complexity of the matrix. Barney (2017), describing the delivery of HIV/AIDS services in South Africa, explores some of the issues in terms of the power distance between employer and employees within organisations.

In Social Work and Social Development in Botswana (Mupedziswa et al., 2017), the first chapter illustrates the main obstacles to developing social work education in Africa as it moves out from the shade of colonial and post-colonial straitjackets into rediscovering indigenous knowledge. It stresses the importance of teamwork, not individual competition. This presentation of the issues is as relevant to the developed as to the developing world.

Some of our colleagues have found ways out of this dilemma and it is from them that we need to learn. The creation of co-operative working arrangements, peer support and supervision are some of the structural changes that social workers have found more conducive to promoting co-production. The pursuit of indigenous knowledge has seen family group conferencing becoming a norm in developed countries. This analysis can be transposed into many other cultures in understanding the reality of social work today.

Some social work educators have questioned why we need people who have qualified in and continue to practice in social work as core in the training of social work. Would we ask this same question in law or medicine?

While, for example, the disciplines of sociology, social policy and criminology have been and continue to be key components of training courses and are critical in developing analytical thinking, they are not the critical elements in helping a social worker develop a complex skill set. Alongside the ability to understand competing factors, it is the ability to engage with people, to understand the impact of their environments, to accept people without condoning negative behaviour, that is key to helping people through change. It is therefore logical that the final theme of this phase of the agenda process will concentrate on the understanding of human relationships in achieving positive change.

The seriousness of the threat to the confidence and commitment of social workers is illustrated in the haemorrhaging of a third of the graduates in social work within 5 years of qualification; it is a serious concern for the sustainability of the profession and a symptom of a larger issue we need to address.

The need for action was addressed in the IFSW (2017) paper ‘Bridging the Gap between Social Work Education and Practice’. It explores how current training and management arrangements are diminishing the strength of the voice of the profession and how this affects frontline social work practice. This has led to the setting up of the Interim IFSW Education Commission to explore and report to the General Meeting in July 2018. The aim is to explore and develop how social work practice and social work education can come together to support each other through the consequences of a major structural flaw in our profession.

Evaluation by people who are engaged in using a social work service, social work research

The key evaluators of our work are the people who use our services. Listening to people and their journeys and working with them on improving our skills and knowledge will be key to the future of realising our true potential in our role in sustainable community development.

An example is found in recent research in British Columbia (Drolet and Sampson, 2017) which illustrates the importance of listening to communities affected by climate change that result in downturns in the local economy leading to negative impacts on individual, family and community functioning – because a particular insect breeds more profusely in warmer air and destroys forests. They illustrate the complexity of community and individual consequences of this natural reaction in nature to climate change, including key factors such as living conditions, relationships with family and community, income levels and health. These are not fixed entities but are in constant change. This is the day-to-day reality of any social worker’s task.

Just as the working environment of social workers is being challenged and is open to change, so too is the traditional measurement of the outcome of social work. Silo research that only measures short-term outcomes is of extremely limited value to the practitioner and the people with whom we work. The growth of participatory research, as demonstrated by Quinn (2016), is a refreshing challenge for practitioners who can begin to see evaluation that informs and is close to the reality of frontline work. It takes on the reality that people have multiple issues, some more important at a particular time than at another.

Now is the time, in the closing stages of this phase of the Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development, to consider how we will address the gaps in our own professional development so that we can all contribute to making that difference that motivated us, and that will continue to motivate people, to become social workers.

Complexities of balancing competing human rights to achieve social justice

As the profession advances in its understanding of the complexities of the world we all live in, so too do the challenges. Not least among these is a growing of the different components of human rights, for example civil, social, political, cultural or economic. To the social worker, this means the necessity of including in any assessment or work process the centrality of competing human rights in working with people to achieve their sense of social justice.

In recent years, some of the big challenges for the profession have come from civil conflicts and the mass migration of people moving to try and find stable, peaceful places to live. We know that people measure whether they have reached that safe place by when they feel valued. This includes not just feeling safe, making social relationships in the community, recovery from traumatic journeys – but above all, the essence of belonging includes knowing that you are a contributor to the community in which you live.

The future of social work

Social work has grown beyond the debate about the ‘deserving’ and the ‘undeserving’ poor. It has gone way beyond ‘rescuing’ people. Social work is a universal service, like health and education, a key pillar in challenging inequality and a real power in creating inclusive, sustainable communities. As social workers, we too are part of our communities. All of us will use services in our lifetime and we all have a duty to make sure that those services are of a standard that we and our families would want to use.

One of our member associations recently questioned why the International Definition of Social Work focuses not on the prevention of social ills but rather on intervention after the problems had developed. This is a key question for us to consider as we reflect on what we have collated and how to move forward.

Social work is not social administration; it is not social engineering. It is about supporting healthy growth in our social networks, and this will in turn lead to social and economic health.

Change happens at the local level; it is shaped by our shared knowledge that knows no national borders. The role of our international organisations is to help promote that communication and coordinate our joint actions so that those outside the social work professions can understand what we have to contribute to the world in which we live together.