Knowledge, theory, and practice in Child Welfare and Protection: Reclaiming the social dimension

This article examines the knowledge base and underlying ways of knowing that guide professionals in Flemish (Belgium) Child Welfare and Protection (CWP). Drawing on a large-scale web-based survey, we analyse how practice-based, theoretical, and personal-experiential knowledge are used in daily work, and how educational background and institutional contexts are associated with their application. The findings show that practice-based knowledge occupies a dominant position, while theoretical insights are primarily applied within individual and group/context-oriented approaches. Structural and critical-emancipatory perspectives remain peripheral. This pattern is consistent with a broader technocratic orientation shaped by standardization, performance management, and risk governance. Professionals with a master’s degree report greater theoretical engagement; however, critical perspectives are not widely embedded in frontline practice and appear concentrated in supervisory and managerial roles. The analysis further indicates that policy and organizational frameworks play a decisive role in legitimizing particular forms of knowledge, often at the expense of social and ethical reasoning. We situate these results within international debates on the technocratization and de-intellectualization of social work and argue for a more pluralistic, critically informed knowledge culture. Strengthening the integration of theoretical, practice-based, and structural perspectives is essential to restore the interpretive, relational, and transformative capacities of CWP practice.