Social Development in Social Work

Practices and Principles

Richard Hugman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138017634
• eBook ISBN: 9781317702184
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Health Care Delivery

Social work has always been concerned with the development of society as the basis for achieving the well-being of individuals, families and communities. Interest in this important aspect of social work is now seeing a resurgence, not only in the 'developing countries' of the global South, but also in the global North. This innovative book provides an introduction to the area.

Using concrete examples taken from practice around the world, Social Development in Social Work address questions such as:

• How should social development be understood as a core aspect of social work practice?
• What is the significance of economics, politics and the environment for a developmental approach in social work?
• How may a comparative understanding of social welfare practices, programs and policies enhance social development in social work?
• In what ways does social development contribute to international and domestic social work?
• What skills, knowledge and theory do social workers need to practise in this field?

Arguing that social development should be at the centre of contemporary social work practice and theory, this book is ideal for social work students and academics with an interest in social development, international social work, social justice, social policy and community social work.

1 What is Social Development and What is its Significance for Social Work?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315780337-1

Introduction

Social development has emerged in recent decades as a distinctly defined approach to practice in social work. Yet the practice of social development often remains marginal to social work theory and debate. This book seeks to place social development more firmly in the mainstream of social work thinking by providing a clear account of the different issues and debates through which it is defined and understood. At the same time, this analysis offers a particular interpretation of the field. Thus, it not only explains the place social development has in the range of approaches to social work but also argues for a distinct understanding of social development theory, practices and values.

At the very beginning it is important to draw a careful distinction between social development and community development as complementary but separate approaches to practice in social work. Social development and community development are closely connected, but they are not synonymous. Their relationship is best understood by regarding social development as an overarching framework that brings together a range of practices, while community development is one of the practices that forms part of the social development perspective (Elliott, 1993). So the discussion that follows draws on what has come to be known as a ‘generalist’ approach to social work; although it clearly addresses community development, policy work and other ‘macro’ practices, it also includes ‘micro’ practices in social work with individuals, families and groups within a social development perspective.

This opening chapter examines the underlying definitions of development theories and practices and within that broad field the more specific area of social development. As it will be argued, this is important because the relationship between social work and development often rests on the claim that there is such a distinctive aspect, in which factors that cannot be seen simply as ‘economics’, ‘politics’ or ‘technology’ are recognised as crucial to the growing well-being of people, their families and communities and of countries as a whole. While social development is closely connected to these factors, and engages with them, it is also a separate area of theory and practice. Consequently, the way in which social development has been promoted as a necessary part of social work is to argue that social workers must become more aware of and able to work with economic, political and technological areas of social life, while bringing to such issues the knowledge, skills and values that are distinctive to all types of social work.

Material and structural need: a foundation and a debate

Many of the original proponents of social development as a distinct aspect of practice in social work argue it addresses a basic reality – namely that human life occurs in a material world (Midgley, 1984, 2014; Elliot, 1993; Lombard & Wairire, 2010). So for example at the most basic level the problems that people face in their lives may include access to water and food, and lack of shelter. As defined in the highly influential ‘theory of need’ (Maslow, 1954), these things are foundational to human life. In both an economic and a philosophical sense these are ‘goods’, because they enable people to live well (or simply to live) (Hölscher, 2008). One of the major points in Maslow’s theory is that it is very hard to be able to focus on the higher-level achievements in human life if the satisfaction of necessities such as water and food cannot adequately be met.

Throughout human history a considerable amount of people’s time has been occupied in activities to obtain these goods – that is in ‘work’ of a particular type. In the modern industrialised world, a great deal of work tends to be organised as ‘employment’, and so this also becomes a focus of concern for development as a basic need. Moreover, as societies become more complex there is an assumption that such work is increasingly specialised and dependent on technology. For example at least in general terms, the task of obtaining water can be compared between the countries of the global North and some rural parts of the global South. In cities such as Sydney, Paris, New York or London in order to obtain water most people expect simply to turn a tap in their home. Obtaining water thus becomes a transaction, in which the actual work performed is broken up between suppliers, those who construct and operate water supply systems (water catchment, purification, management of the pipework to deliver water to consumers, and so on), and consumers, who pay for the water supply. In contrast, in parts of Africa, Asia or Central America for example there are many places where individual members of the community, usually women and children, have to spend much of the day fetching and carrying water for each family’s daily use. In this situation ‘work’ includes the activity of physically obtaining the water, rather than earning money in order to pay someone else to deliver the water, as is the case in more industrialised contexts.

Such differences between countries or between locations within countries were not always historically the case. For example the reticulated supply of water to homes is part of the development of the societies of the global North that has occurred within the last 150 years. Although reticulated water supply was achieved in some pre-industrial civilisations, it was usually available only to elites and in small geographical areas. In the industrialised countries of the twenty-first-century global North all but the most poor might expect to have access to this good. Indeed, not having such access has in itself become a measure of poverty. (In the global North, however, there are also other aspects of work focused on meeting needs in households that continue to be gendered in the same way as noted earlier regarding access to water [Kothari, 2002; Alston, 2013], a point that will be examined in more depth in later chapters of this book.)

Clearly, from this example, advanced water-engineering assists in the development of societies. Yet, although there is a technical dimension to meeting these needs, judgements about how these technologies are to be used are inherently social, political and economic. That is, decisions about how the provision of necessities, such as water, food and shelter, will be provided are made on the basis of human knowledge and skills, applied through values and relationships. They include questions about the decision-making structures of a society and the distribution of financial resources as well as technical dimensions. Thus, the way in which societies organise material provision for their populations is political and economic, as well as social and cultural. Indeed, in thinking about questions of development, politics and economics are often assumed to be the bodies of knowledge that will provide the solutions.

A field called ‘development studies’ now exists in a large number of universities (Haynes, 2008). In many cases these research and teaching programmes are grounded in political science, international relations, international studies or economics. Reflected in this is the current dominant focus on the eradication of poverty as the central goal of development. Indeed, if development is regarded in this way, then it is not surprising that the applied areas that derive from these disciplines are seen as the major contributors to development work. These include business, diplomacy, law, public policy and management, and more recently environmental science and engineering. Illustrative of this perspective, Kingsbury’s (2008a, pp. 134–8) review of the key organisations involved in development at an international level is largely devoted to the World Trade Organization (WTO), the World Bank (WB), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the political, legal and economic role of the United Nations (UN), with mention only in passing of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF). Agencies such as the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) are not identified at all. This is despite a growing critique, summarised by McGillivray (2008, pp. 30–40), that material needs and solutions were overemphasised by development theorists in the late twentieth century. Nonetheless, McGillivray’s own discussion of ‘what is development?’ continues to centre on income and wealth as the key indices of the way in which a better human life is to be pursued. Kingbury’s (2008b) separate discussion of community development, while mentioning the importance of education, identifies this as an investment for economic growth and political change rather than as development seen in other ways, such as the foundation for greater human achievement in non-material aspects of life, such as gender equity. In this way, discussion of other factors, such as education, health and family and community life, appears to be seen in terms of the background conditions of development defined as material and structural improvements and not as development issues in themselves.

Of course, living in a stable society and having an adequate income are essential for being able to live a decent human life. While the detail of what makes a human life ‘decent’ varies between cultures (a point that is addressed further ahead in this chapter and in detail in Chapters 5 and 6), having the physical necessities to meet the basic level of need mentioned at the beginning of this section is a prerequisite across all cultures. Poverty eradication thus makes sense theoretically and practically as a starting point for development. So the contribution of Midgley (1984, 1995, 2014), Sherraden (1991), Mohan (1992), Elliot (1993) and Cox and Pawar (2013), among others, in their emphasis on structural and economic needs and responses can be seen as an important step in making the connection between social work and social development.

However, more recent advances in the field of development have grown from arguments that not all human needs can be understood in material terms. In particular, the concept of social development has emerged out of the realisation that although politics and economics are highly relevant, change in these areas does not necessarily lead to improvements in people’s lives, which in many ways can be regarded as the goal of development (M. Green, 2002, p. 58). To put it in very simple terms, if human life does not ‘get better’ in some tangible way, then development cannot be said to have happened. This critique suggests that education, health, family relationships, community structures and cultural expression are all central aspects of human life that cannot be seen solely in material and structural terms (even though they have material and structural dimensions). These facets of what it is to be human are inescapably social.

Moreover, there is evidence that in some respects social achievements, such as improvements in education and health, are necessary precursors to economic and material gains, rather than consequential benefits of greater prosperity. A well-known and highly influential example of such research is Summers’s (1994) report to the Economic Development Institute of the World Bank about the education of girls and young women. In brief, this careful analysis showed that increasing the years of schooling of girls and young women has demonstrable positive impacts on such phenomena as birth rates, child mortality, maternal mortality and HIV transmission. Summers justifies the policy and practice implications of his conclusions in economic terms, arguing that over a medium-term time frame the economic benefits to a country from these improvements in life experience are greater than the costs. Nevertheless, these findings have influenced the approach of social development practice in agencies such as UNICEF and UNESCO as well as more widely across the international non-government sector, precisely because they follow from changes in the way people live their lives and are seen as gains in the quality of life that they live.

Similarly, there is growing epidemiological evidence that health outcomes, like those of education, historically have not been produced as a consequence of economic growth, but have either preceded or occurred alongside increasing wealth. This understanding is now embedded as an assumption in arguments for planned health interventions in low-income countries, where people cannot afford the market costs of health services, as well as in higher-income countries (UNDP, 2013). The justification for this contains two parts. The first part is that health is a human right: without basic good health it is not possible to live a decent human life. The second is consequential: healthy people contribute more to their societies, both economically and in other ways. So although a developmental concern with health has close connections with economic concerns, the relationship is complex and cannot be taken as one based on economics as the necessary precursor to health developments or as the prime measure of the benefit of healthier lives.

Economics and social development

Yet we must begin by acknowledging that a major element in the promotion of social development as a distinct approach in social work comes from the claim that for much of the twentieth century social work had moved away from its origins of being concerned with material as well as psychosocial well-being. Midgley’s original description of social development is very informative in this respect, stating that the approach has as its goal ‘[a] process of planned social change designed to promote the well-being of the population’s whole in conjunction with a dynamic process of economic development’ (Midgley, 1995, p. 25, emphasis added). The implication is that social work either has been ignorant of the way in which its professional concerns have an economic dimension, and so has failed to engage with economic issues, or has at least failed to understand that human need has a material basis.

Elliott (1993) also makes this critique. However, her analysis argues that although the development agenda has been set around questions of the economic causes of and solutions to poverty, there is also a clear recognition of the social aspects of the changes necessary for the improvement of human life. Elliott (1993, p. 23) uses the example of the USA to point out that high gross national income (GNI) or high expenditures on social provision, such as health and education, do not necessarily produce better human well-being (defined in terms of development measures, such as child and maternal mortality). What is required is that social gains accompany material growth and therefore should be seen as having at least equal priority. So Elliott revisits and affirms the earlier United Nations definition of development: Consequently, Elliot then considers ways in which economic, political and social questions of human well-being can be integrated, in which social issues are not seen solely in terms of economic investment or creating conditions for particular political changes, but as a distinct contributor to the whole of development.

[…] the greater capacity of the social system, social structure, institutions, services and policy to utilize resources to generate favourable changes in levels of living, interpreted in the broadest sense, as related to accepted social values and a better distribution of income, wealth and opportunities.

(UN, 1969, p. 2, as cited in Elliott, 1993, p. 24)

Elliott also quotes other advocates of social development as saying either that it is too general and inclusive an idea (Khinduka, 1987) or that when it is theorised the ideas are expressed at an extremely high level of abstraction (Meinert & Kohn, 1987). In response, she argues that social development must be seen in terms of the actions in which practitioners working at all levels (from the ‘macro’ to the ‘micro’) can engage. In other words, it is not simply a philosophy, or an orientation, but a model of practice (Elliott, 1993, pp. 28–31).

More recently, Midgley (2014) has refined both his definition and the resulting model of social development. Social development, he states, is From this subtly broader definition, Midgley goes on to spell out eight elements of social development that are integral to practice based on this definition. His goal is to create a general framework that at the same time manages to be sufficiently concrete, as it both creates an overall understanding of what is involved in social development practice and provides a way of thinking about what practice should look like in action. Social development, as defined by Midgley (2014, pp. 13–17), is

a process of planned social change designed to promote the well-being of a population as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface and Acknowledgements
• 1 What is social development and what is its significance for social work?
• 2 The ‘macro perspective’, social development and the person in the social environment
• 3 Economics, social structures and social work practice
• 4 Environment, social development and social work practice
• 5 Comparative social work and social welfare
• 6 Social development as international social work
• 7 Social development in ‘developed’ countries
• 8 Skills, knowledge and theory for social development practice in social work
• 9 Values and ethics in social development practice
• 10 Advancing social development in social work
• References
• Index