Social work as a policy actor: understanding social policy as an open-ended democratic practice

A long-standing critique on social work is that it is ‘a dog that doesn’t bark’ meaning that social work doesn’t live up to the challenge of changing unjust policies, and as such is merely an affirmative practice of the status quo. This article builds upon the premise that social workers still lack the conceptual frames and knowledge to enable them to fully understand what social policy is about and how social policy measures are formulated, shaped and evolve over time. Starting from an interdisciplinary perspective in which we incorporate knowledge from the field of political sciences and public administration literature, we identify the differing tools, strategies and allies that might assist social workers to deploy their political role when making their way through each phase of the policy cycle: agenda setting or policy initiation, policy development, policy implementation and policy evaluation. We conclude by stating that social work should consider the entire policy process as an open-ended and democratic practice in which they might intervene in several ways to realize their social justice mission.