Definition of Social Work | International Federation of Social Workers

Definition of Social Work | International Federation of Social Workers

Definition of Social Work | The International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW)

The social work profession promotes social change, problem solving in human relationships and the empowerment and liberation of people to enhance well-being. Utilising theories of human behaviour and social systems, social work intervenes at the points where people interact with their environments. Principles of human rights and social justice are fundamental to social work.

Commentary

Social work in its various forms addresses the multiple, complex transactions between people and their environments. Its mission is to enable all people to develop their full potential, enrich their lives, and prevent dysfunction. Professional social work is focused on problem solving and change. As such, social workers are change agents in society and in the lives of the individuals, families and communities they serve. Social work is an interrelated system of values, theory and practice.

Values

Social work grew out of humanitarian and democratic ideals, and its values are based on respect for the equality, worth, and dignity of all people. Since its beginnings over a century ago, social work practice has focused on meeting human needs and developing human potential. Human rights and social justice serve as the motivation and justification for social work action. In solidarity with those who are dis-advantaged, the profession strives to alleviate poverty and to liberate vulnerable and oppressed people in order to promote social inclusion. Social work values are embodied in the profession’s national and international codes of ethics.

Theory

Social work bases its methodology on a systematic body of evidence-based knowledge derived from research and practice evaluation, including local and indigenous knowledge specific to its context. It recognises the complexity of interactions between human beings and their environment, and the capacity of people both to be affected by and to alter the multiple influences upon them including bio-psychosocial factors. The social work profession draws on theories of human development and behaviour and social systems to analyse complex situations and to facilitate individual, organisational, social and cultural changes.

Practice

Social work addresses the barriers, inequities and injustices that exist in society. It responds to crises and emergencies as well as to everyday personal and social problems. Social work utilises a variety of skills, techniques, and activities consistent with its holistic focus on persons and their environments. Social work interventions range from primarily person-focused psychosocial processes to involvement in social policy, planning and development. These include counselling, clinical social work, group work, social pedagogical work, and family treatment and therapy as well as efforts to help people obtain services and resources in the community. Interventions also include agency administration, community organisation and engaging in social and political action to impact social policy and economic development. The holistic focus of social work is universal, but the priorities of social work practice will vary from country to country and from time to time depending on cultural, historical, and socio-economic conditions.

Adopted by the IFSW General Meeting in Montréal, Canada, July 2000.

*This international definition of the social work profession replaces the IFSW definition adopted in 1982. It is understood that social work in the 21st century is dynamic and evolving, and therefore no definition should be regarded as exhaustive.

Ref: http://ifsw.org/policies/definition-of-social-work/

Towards Sustainable Development

A major premise motivating the evolution of the Encyclopedia is that economic and other development policies should be based on the principles of sustainability, namely: intergenerational equity, intragenerational equity, precautionary principle (risk aversion strategies) and conservation of biodiversity. 
In this respect, several knowledge resources are essential for an integrated and comprehensive understanding of the sustainable development paradigm. Naturally, scholars from diverse fields of specialization tend to use different nomenclature to characterize this knowledge. However, the following broad framework has received wide acceptance:

Natural Resources or Natural Capital (The Environmental Dimension) 
Economic Resources or Built Capital (The Economic Dimension) 
Social Resources or Social Capital (The Social Dimension) 
Institutional Resources or Institutional Capital (The Institutional Dimension )

The complex interactions among the various subsystems are shown in Figures 1(a) and 1(b). Figure 1(a) shows the various fundamental dimensions of the sustainable development paradigm, which relies on a wide spectrum of disciplines. Figure 1(b) suggests what has to be sustained by human policies aimed at better quality of life.

Read more: http://www.eolss.net/Eolss-Inspiration.aspx

Forget post-2015 development goals – a global new deal is what's needed

Many familiar problems were raised at the Liberia meeting of the UN high-level panel tasked with drafting global post-2015 development goals: extreme poverty, lack of productive employment, environmental degradation and growing inequality. But these big questions are still being met with small answers, suggesting that the international community remains in the wrong frame of mind to meet such major challenges.A recent Guardian editorial noted how "small", "technocratic" and "fragmented" the discussion within the international development community has become. But it missed a major reason for this: the continued but misplaced faith in "market fundamentalism". This adds to the perception that globalisation is an irresistible force beyond the control of governments, a process driven by countless invisible hands, infallible business acumen and continuous technological revolution, and reaching its zenith with the unleashing of finance.

Over the past three decades, open markets and global capital were supposed to raise savings, bolster investment, create jobs and spread new technologies; this would release a tidal wave of economic prosperity, above all in the poorest countries. But finance-led globalisation has not lived up to its billing: debt-riven global growth has trended downward, capital formation has been sluggish, and recurrent crises have destroyed jobs and threatened livelihoods, even as those at the very top enjoyed soaring incomes. Some big emerging economies have enjoyed sustained and even rapid growth, but it is no longer credible to think deregulated markets, financial engineering or shareholder value will deliver inclusive economic growth.

Business as usual simply will not work any more. The UN has recognised this in its call for a new post-2015 development agenda. But to move the agenda forward, some hard truths will need to be recognised. There is a good deal more to development than poverty reduction. Simply adding human rights, peace and security – however important these challenges are – will not necessarily point things in the right direction. However understandable, devoting attention to those at the bottom has resulted in insufficient attention being paid to those at the top with access to the resources needed to drive investment and create jobs.

Development is less about deprivation and more about transformation – structural, institutional and normative – in ways that add to a country's wealth-creating potential, ensuring the gains are widely shared and extending the possibilities of future generations. For most developing countries, that still means building industrial capacity, providing secure livelihoods for rapidly growing urban populations, and guaranteeing food security.

David Cameron's calls for eradicating extreme poverty and more responsible capitalism are well-intentioned. But his call to use aid to strengthen the "golden thread" of open markets misses the point, ignoring the strategies that have actually worked in successful developing countries over the past half century, where the state plays an active role in mobilising resources and disciplining their use.

President Obama's inaugural address, which recognised that a successful economy mixes dynamic entrepreneurial effort with effective collective action and a strong social contract, provides a more reliable compass. Success, he insisted, does not follow "when a shrinking few do very well and a growing many barely make it".

Making inequality part of the development policy agenda has already gained traction. But to make lasting progress, it will be necessary to move beyond MDG-style targets and instead consider a global new deal allowing different economic strategies providing benefits for all.

To start with, rebalancing the global economy should follow an expansionary macroeconomic path based on productive employment generation and shifting labour to higher value-added activities in developing countries. The rising threats posed by food and energy insecurity and environmental degradation require a strong investment response, which must necessarily be led by public action. International institutions should support countercyclical fiscal policy and public investment by making adequate funding available and attaching fewer conditions to their lending.

Second, unruly markets, especially financial markets, must be tamed. Even before the crisis, it was clear that stable and inclusive development is incompatible with speculative market behaviour and boom-and-bust cycles. Finance everywhere needs to get back to the business of providing security for people's savings and mobilising resources for productive investment. At the international level, that means promoting capital controls (something the IMF now seems ready to do), implementing a financial transaction tax (something the EU is now actively pursuing), and designing a sovereign debt workout mechanism that deals fairly with lenders and borrowers alike (a long-standing Unctad proposal).

Finally, growth is unlikely to be inclusive without effective measures for redistribution. Strengthening the position of labour to ensure wages match productivity growth is central, along with asset redistribution to prevent excessive concentration. Policies of universal social protection (including basic income policies) can help repair the social contract. Along with humanitarian aid for the poorest and most vulnerable, the international community needs to guarantee adequate policy space for countries to develop measures relevant to their own contexts.

The challenge in building such development-led globalisation is not so much the shortage of big ideas but their scaling up through international collective action. Current arrangements cannot serve this purpose, and have already lost legitimacy. A small number of economic powers, home to the world's largest corporations and financial institutions, continue to exercise a controlling influence at the IMF and the World Bank, driving negotiations at the World Trade Organisation and on the climate challenge. This dominance is no longer assured, but conditions for stable international economic co-operation remain elusive. Only a global new deal can help build the levels of trust needed to tackle shared problems and broaden the scope for effective development partnerships.....

Ref:http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2013/feb/05/post-2015-development-global-new-deal?CMP=twt_gu

Our Common Future: Towards Sustainable Development

Our Common Future, Chapter 2: Towards Sustainable Development 
From A/42/427. Our Common Future: Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development 

The Concept of Sustainable Development
Equity and the Common Interest
Strategic Imperatives

# Reviving Growth
# Changing the quality of Growth
# Meeting Essential Human Needs
# Ensuring a Sustainable Level of Population
# Conserving and Enhancing the Resource Base
# Reorienting Technology and Managing Risk
# Merging Environment and Economics in Decision Making

Conclusion:-
1. Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. It contains within it two key concepts:

the concept of 'needs', in particular the essential needs of the world's poor, to which overriding priority should be given; and

the idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs.
2. Thus the goals of economic and social development must be defined in terms of sustainability in all countries - developed or developing, market-oriented or centrally planned. Interpretations will vary, but must share certain general features and must flow from a consensus on the basic concept of sustainable development and on a broad strategic framework for achieving it.

3. Development involves a progressive transformation of economy and society. A development path that is sustainable in a physical sense could theoretically be pursued even in a rigid social and political setting. But physical sustainability cannot be secured unless development policies pay attention to such considerations as changes in access to resources and in the distribution of costs and benefits. Even the narrow notion of physical sustainability implies a concern for social equity between generations, a concern that must logically be extended to equity within each generation.


I. The Concept of Sustainable Development
4 The satisfaction of human needs and aspirations in the major objective of development. The essential needs of vast numbers of people in developing countries for food, clothing, shelter, jobs - are not being met, and beyond their basic needs these people have legitimate aspirations for an improved quality of life. A world in which poverty and inequity are endemic will always be prone to ecological and other crises. Sustainable development requires meeting the basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to satisfy their aspirations for a better life.

5. Living standards that go beyond the basic minimum are sustainable only if consumption standards everywhere have regard for long-term sustainability. Yet many of us live beyond the world's ecological means, for instance in our patterns of energy use. Perceived needs are socially and culturally determined, and sustainable development requires the promotion of values that encourage consumption standards that are within the bounds of the ecological possible and to which all can reasonably aspire.

6. Meeting essential needs depends in part on achieving full growth potential, and sustainable development clearly requires economic growth in places where such needs are not being met. Elsewhere, it can be consistent with economic growth, provided the content of growth reflects the broad principles of sustainability and non-exploitation of others. But growth by itself is not enough. High levels of productive activity and widespread poverty can coexist, and can endanger the environment. Hence sustainable development requires that societies meet human needs both by increasing productive potential and by ensuring equitable opportunities for all.

7. An expansion in numbers can increase the pressure on resources and slow the rise in living standards in areas where deprivation is widespread. Though the issue is not merely one of population size but of the distribution of resources, sustainable development can only be pursued if demographic developments are in harmony with the changing productive potential of the ecosystem.

8. A society may in many ways compromise its ability to meet the essential needs of its people in the future - by overexploiting resources, for example. The direction of technological developments may solve some immediate problems but lead to even greater ones. Large sections of the population may be marginalized by ill-considered development.

9. Settled agriculture, the diversion of watercourses, the extraction of minerals, the emission of heat and noxious gases into the atmosphere, commercial forests, and genetic manipulation are all examples or human intervention in natural systems during the course of development. Until recently, such interventions were small in scale and their impact limited. Today's interventions are more drastic in scale and impact, and more threatening to life-support systems both locally and globally. This need not happen. At a minimum, sustainable development must not endanger the natural systems that support life on Earth: the atmosphere, the waters, the soils, and the living beings.

10. Growth has no set limits in terms of population or resource use beyond which lies ecological disaster. Different limits hold for the use of energy, materials, water, and land. Many of these will manifest themselves in the form of rising costs and diminishing returns, rather than in the form of any sudden loss of a resource base. The accumulation of knowledge and the development of technology can enhance the carrying capacity of the resource base. But ultimate limits there are, and sustainability requires that long before these are reached, the world must ensure equitable access to the constrained resource and reorient technological efforts to relieve the presume.



Read more:-http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-02.htm

Rethinking Education in Development: What role for education in the future?

Education needs to be relevant to all sectors, including health care, the environment and job creation. Panelists in this session are asked to imagine what role education can play in creating the world we want to see, and how education can respond to changing needs in society. Learners need to be ready to question what they learn, and to understand knowledge as dynamic and evolving.

Read more:- http://www.wise-qatar.org/content/rethinking-education-development-what-role-education-future

Effects of Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Education on Economic Growth

Abstract:      
This paper investigates the impact of human capital on economic growth in Guatemala during 1951-2002 using an error-correction methodology. The results show a better-educated labor force having a positive and significant impact on economic growth. Consistent with micro studies for Guatemala, primary and secondary education are most important for productivity growth. These findings are robust while changing the conditioning set of the variables, controlling for data issues and endogeneity. Due to an environment of social and political conflict, however, total factor productivity has been slightly negative for the past decades, and there is evidence of a missing complementarity between the country's skills and its technology base. A growth-accounting framework is presented, which takes into account quality changes of physical capital, and differentiates by level of education. It shows that the human capital variables explain more than 50 percent of output growth. Of these, secondary schooling was the predominant determinant of growth.

Read more:-
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=753647&rec=1&srcabs=1137541&alg=1&pos=3

Moving Toward Knowledge-Based Economies: Asian Experiences

At the Asian Development Bank’s (ADB) 39th Annual Meeting in 2006, a seminar was held on knowledge-based Economies (KBEs). The seminar was well attended. The key message from presenters was that developing countries that fail to transform effectively into knowledge-based economies will fall further behind more advanced countries, widening the disparities between developed and developing economies. To succeed in this increasingly competitive and global economy, countries must have advanced information and communication technology infrastructure, a highly educated workforce, dynamic research and innovation programs, and supportive regulatory environment. ADB and its shareholders need to understand the ingredients of the global knowledge economy and develop better methods to help local Asian countries become players in emerging KBEs.
With this in mind, we requested Prof. Dr. Serafin Talisayon of the University of the Philippines’
Technology Management Center to review existing literature on KBE and review country initiatives with respect to KBE initiatives and approaches. Contributions to this paper have been made by Daan Boom, principal knowledge management specialist at ADB; David Sobel, senior results management specialist, East Asia Regional Department; Luigi Bodda, senior energy specialist, Pacific Regional Department; and Jun Tian and Ian Anderson, both advisors, Regional Sustainable Development Department. I would like to thank them for their contributions to this paper.
Shyam Bajpai
Acting Director-General
Regional Sustainable Development Department
Asian Development Bank

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Something new is happening in local Asian economies.
An Indian farmer checks online the latest prices of farm produce, helping him make better decisions—thanks to e-Choupals that connects rural farms to commodity markets in India and abroad. A seaman from Tuvalu sends dollars back to his family—thanks to the Tuvalu Maritime School that builds upon indigenous Tuvalu aptitudes for seafaring. A Shakti Amma, a woman entrepreneur, has reached new income levels, and with it new confidence and pride—thanks to Shakti Community, a rural marketing system that leverages on existing local social networks.
Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. But teach a man how to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime. Provide him with technology and market linkages and you feed an entire region.
The old development metaphor becomes—using the new language of the knowledge economy—the enhancing human, structural, and stakeholders’ capital. New ideas or intellectual capital, more than savings or investments, are the new keys to prosperity and to the wealth of nations.
An example of how important knowledge can be in the development of countries is cited in the World Development Report of 1998/99. Ghana and the Republic of Korea started off with almost the same gross national product (GNP) in 1960. Thirty years later the Korean GNP had risen
more than six times. Half of the gap could be explained in terms of traditional factor inputs, the other half, according to the World Bank report was attributed to “knowledge” as a factor of production. Although knowledge has always been important for development, the concept of knowledge-based economies (KBE) gained awareness when the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) published in 1996 its report on KBE. KBE is now generally regarded as a meaningful economic concept, one worthwhile pursuing. At the same time it is seen as yet to be a proven successor to the industrial economy.
The past 10 years have seen a wide variety of visions, ambitions, concepts, strategies, policies and initiatives aimed at introducing and advancing the KBE. However, most people involved— both academicians as well as practitioners—would today still characterize the KBE as a largely theoretical concept for economic growth and wealth creation. This is believed to be the case due to the absence of a common—globally understood and accepted—framework for the KBE and a set of measurable models and indicators for successful performance. KBE is however
becoming more and more explicit, but for it to become a full reality, significant progress still needs to be made.
Adding to this, next to all the positive effects of worldwide growth and wealth creation the KBE is envisaged to bring forth, many economists now also point out the potential downsides of such an economy. Downsides are expected to occur once it becomes clear that substantial investments (e.g., in education and innovation) may not always lead to worthwhile economic growth and wealth creation, as new and unforeseen mechanisms—such as the offshoring of
knowledge—may prevent the KBE from realizing its full potential, i.e., of sustainable levels of economic returns and of competitive advantage.
It is gradually recognized that the KBE may well develop, at least to some extent, into a globally disruptive economy for those “welfare” states and companies currently enjoying a leading economic and competitive position. Hence, attention is increasingly drawn to a kind of “leapfrogging” effect, which is beneficial to those developing economies intending on gaining a globally competitive position. This effect occurs once these economies recognize that most commercially viable knowledge is of such a nature that it can more or less easily be “bought” everywhere in the world at low costs, from (highly) educated people, possessing a strong work morale and a flexible attitude. It is even envisaged that knowledge can eventually become a means of mass production—similar to manual labor in the industrial economy—once web-based
information and communication technologies (ICTs) have reached worldwide penetration levels, allowing individuals to work and provide routine knowledge in a virtually networked (global) environment. This situation seems yet to be far off from current-day reality, but many countries in the developing world are making rapid progress to become knowledge-based (Finland, Republic of Korea, Singapore, New Zealand, Taipei,China) and some developing countries
have started initiatives to become knowledge-based (People’s Republic of China, India, Malaysia). These developing countries have drafting plans which enable them to fully benefit from the mass production of knowledge. To counteract this, short-term protection measures
may occur, once countries and organizations find it difficult to sustain their existing competitive advantage. After the initial focus of the KBE on creating an ICT environment, the current focus has moved toward knowledge-based development (KBD) or identifying and realizing the
constituent elements of a social infrastructure which is supportive of the rapid creation, application, and commercialization of knowledge for sustainable development. A durable KBD can only be realized through linking the ”internal social cohesion” of countries to their ability in stimulating, developing, and nurturing education; research and development; entrepreneurship; networks and ICT infrastructure; and provision of seed capital and intellectual property rights.
Over the years, these ingredients have become recognized as being essential for KBD.

Read more:- http://www2.adb.org/documents/reports/technical-notes/knowledge-based-economies/knowledge-based-economies.pdf