Local autonomy: what does it mean for social services?

The last of these posts that contain my thoughts on issues raised by the new Spanish social work journal, Azarbe.

An interesting question is raised for Britain about the social services legislation enacted by autonomous regions in Spain. If we want to devolve governments anywhere, as we are doing in the UK, what are the consequences of having diverging social care systems? A lot of countries, including the US and many European countries, have experience of this. 

In Britain people are worried about post-code lotteries, in which people in one area get better services because of the political choices in healthcare. They haven’t started to be concerned so much about social care, but perhaps they should be in view of the growing number of older people and the focus on cutting benefits and social services by our government (another example of putting the consequences of inadequate theories of economics onto the poor). You can't have real devolution without having differences in the services available in different places, and we need to work out this tension in every country's social care system.

Young people need new kinds of work, not just education to boost the present economic system

Another post with my thoughts on issues raised by the new Spanish social work journal, Azarbe.

This article also notes the ‘invisibility’ of young people’s needs in the Spanish welfare state: this must be a big issue for many European countries when there are high rates of youth unemployment. When I worked on unemployment projects in the last financial crisis of the 1980s, there was a real concern for young people’s life chances, even if the projects were a bit self-serving for the organisations providing them.

But do we really think that just having some work experience or improving people’s education is enough. I think we need to develop new kinds of work that allow young people to make a contribution to their society, not just improve their education to fit our current economic models. After all, young people’s education has been strongly targeted in developing countries on the assumption this will strengthen those countries’ economies, but the result is that many African countries have a lot of highly educated unemployed young people. Education doesn’t develop economies without government and entrepreneurs developing activities in the economy that can actually employ young people.

Being relaxed about immigration: we should not manage cultural diversity, but value it

Another post with my thoughts on issues raised by the new Spanish social work journal, Azarbe.

What country is relaxed about immigration? An article in Azarbe on public policy on immigration says this is a fairly recent issue for Spain, but I wonder whether any country has really relaxed about the changes that increasing migration across the world has raised. We are all exercised in various ways by this issue because of its cultural consequences. As another article here questions: should we be less concerned about immigration and more about how we manage the cultural diversity that, in various aspects, we all have to cope with? But is it just about managing, or should it be about valuing cultural richness in our societies?

Azarbe: new Spanish journal social work journal

A handsome new Spanish social work journal: Azarbe: Revista Internacional de Trabajo Social y Bienestar, published by the Faculty of Social Work at the University of Murcia arrives on my desk. Handsome even if the logo is yet another example of loving hands representing social work. Can't artists think of another metaphor?

It’s in Spanish of course, but there are English, or sometimes French, abstracts, and reading them raised some broader issues in my mind, as I interpret a sometimes brief account of what is probably a complex article into issues that I think about in my own national context. So in a series of posts on different topics this week, I have offered some thoughts about a range of issues that came up for me as I read through the journal abstracts. I haven’t covered everything.

Link to the journal website. 

You can download pdfs of the papers if you speak Spanish or just want to read the abstracts.