During recent decades a strong interest has grown in actively involving service users in social work education, research and policy development. Drawing on a major European Social Fund project, this book presents an overview of inspiring collaborative models that have proven their efficacy and sustainability. Contributions from service users, lecturers and researchers from across Europe provide detailed case studies of good practice, exploring the value framework behind the model and considering their added value from a user, teacher and student perspective.
The book concludes with a series of reflective chapters, considering key issues and ethical dilemmas.
Introduction and conclusion available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence.
The turn towards a Social Investment approach to welfare implies deploying resources to enhance human capital and mobilise the productive potential of citizens, starting in early childhood.
This edited collection brings regional and local realities to the forefront of social investment debates by showcasing successes, challenges and setbacks of Social Investment policies and services from ten European countries: Italy, UK, Sweden, Finland, Greece, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands, Hungary, and Spain. It provides practical, accessible illustrations of good practice, routes to success, and lessons learned. The book is informed throughout by engagement with service users and local communities, and features many previously unheard voices including front-line workers, local decision makers, volunteers and beneficiaries.
Known as ‘the land of fire’, Azerbaijan’s politics are materially and ideologically shaped by energy. In the country, energy security emerges as a mix of coercion and control, requiring widespread military and law enforcement deployment.
This book examines the extensive network of security professionals and the wide range of practices that have spread in Azerbaijan’s energy sector. It unpacks the interactions of state, supra‐state, and private security organizations and argues that energy security has enabled and normalized a coercive way of exercising power. This study shows that oppressive energy security practices lead to multiple forms of abuse and poor energy policies.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Paul Spicker’s new book takes the three founding principles of the French Revolution - Liberty, Equality, Fraternity - and examines how they relate to social policy today. The book considers the political and moral dimensions of a wide range of social policies, and offers a different way of thinking about each subject from the way it is usually analysed.
The book is in three main parts, one part devoted to Liberty, Equality and Fraternity in turn. Each part explores the elements and dimensions of the key concept, its application to policy, its interrelationship with the other two principles, and how policies have developed to promote the principle in society. The conclusion outlines three models of radical politics, based on the main concepts.
Liberty, equality, fraternity is an original, thought-provoking book, addressing perennial themes with many topical examples drawn from policy in practice, and offering distinctive insights into socialist and radical thinking.
As the Arab Spring continues to work through changes, the Occupy Movement is agitating for change and many are looking for alternatives in the face of global financial and political challenges, community organising offers a realistic way forward for many communities: a tried and tested way of improving people’s lives. This book is the first to explore the diverse history of community organising, telling stories of how it developed, its successes and failures, and the lessons that can be applied today.
It analyses contemporary examples of practice from the USA, UK, India, South Africa, Cambodia and Australia against both wider theoretical frameworks and their ability to contribute to sustainable social change. It will be useful for a wide range of practitioners, students and researchers engaged in the struggle to develop new ways of doing community.
More than 15 years have passed since the law regarding sex workers in New Zealand has changed. As a model it has been endorsed as best practice by international organisations, leading scholars and sex worker-led organisations. Yet in some corners, speculation is ongoing regarding its impacts on the ground.
Written by an international group of experts, this groundbreaking collection provides the much needed in-depth research into how decriminalisation is playing out in sex workers' lives and how different groups of sex workers are experiencing it, while uncovering the challenges and tensions that remain to be negotiated in this field.
Using the evidence from New Zealand, it makes an invaluable contribution to the international debates regarding sex work laws and the global struggle to realise sex workers' rights.
In 1990, disturbing television footage emerged showing the inhumane conditions in which children in Romanian institutions were living. Viewers were shocked that the babies were silent. The so-called ‘Romanian orphans’ became subjects of several international research studies. In parallel, Romania had to reform its child protection system in order to become a member of the European Union.
This book sheds light on the lived experiences of these children, who had become adults by the time the country joined the EU. Uniquely, the book brings together the accounts of those who stayed in institutions, those who grew up in foster care and those who were adopted, both in Romania and internationally. Their narratives challenge stereotypes about these types of care.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. This comprehensive collection discusses topical issues essential to both scholarship and policy making in the realm of lifelong learning (LLL) policies and how far they succeed in supporting young people across their life courses, rather than one-sidedly fostering human capital for the economy.
Examining specific yet diverse regional and local contexts across Europe, this book uses original research to evaluate differences in scope, approach, orientation, and objectives. It examines the embedding of LLL policies into the regional economy, the labour market, education and training systems and the individual life projects of young people, with a focus on those in situations of near social exclusion.
Using a broad international comparative perspective spanning multiple countries across South America, Europe and Africa, contributors explore resident-led self-building for low- and middle-income groups in urban areas. Although social, economic and urban prosperity differs across these contexts, there exists a recurring, cross-continental, tension between formal governance and self-regulation.
Contributors examine the multifaceted regulation dilemmas of self-building under the conditions of modernisation and consider alternative methods of institutionalisation, place-making and urban design, reconceptualising the moral and managerial ownership of the city. Innovative in scope, this book provides an array of globalised solutions for navigating regulatory tensions in order to optimise sustainable development for the future.
Building on the recent initiative to truly globalize the field of international relations, this book provides an innovative interrogation of regionalism.
The book applies a globalizing framework to the study of regional worlds in order to move beyond the traditional conception of regionalism, which views regions as competing blocs dominated by great powers. Bringing together a wide range of case studies, the book shows that regions are instead dynamic configurations of social and political identities in which a variety of actors, including the less powerful, interact and partake in regionalization processes and have done so through the centuries.
