The Role of Best Practice in Social Work: International Collaboration and Lessons Learnt

The concept of ‘Best Practice’ has been populated across various business, organizational and more recently, service-oriented fields with the rising belief that improving services and various project management schemes is best achieved through identifying, evaluating and facilitating the transfer and implementation of practices that seem to work successfully to other areas and strategies. Although a long-standing concept within business and the private sector, this idea began to globally infiltrate public agencies and non-governmental organizations in the early 1990s as a result of increasingly regulated service measures and the influence of new public discourse in advocacy for ‘excellence’. As a result, service providers and social workers have come under pressure to offer evidence for the nature of their practice in a manner that is accountable and regulated. However, the concept of Best Practice within social work is still highly debated. Many refer to the benefits of evidence-based social work, particularly for international social work research and collaboration; others argue that the concept is rooted in business management ideology, is task-orientated, and leaves little room for human interactions, contextual understandings and indigenous knowledge development. Over and above this, concerns have also been raised regarding the nature of Best Practice implementation in social work being somewhat unclear, with an uncertainty regarding the understanding of the terms 'excellence' and 'best practice' and how these might be operationally defined and implemented. This paper examines these arguments and the role of Best Practice in practice in social work, selected by partner teams from a Marie Curie EU- -FP7- International Research Staff Exchange Scheme (IRSES) concerning six EU and non-EU countries. These examples were selected to identify best practices and tools already used in participating countries, and to develop new tools for different social work contexts toward the development of frameworks and tools to improve the quality of social services delivered to service users. The authors of this paper highlight that the analysis of cases selected by partner teams is beneficial in shedding light on what they perceive to be the relevant social issues or social work/ social policy tools in their national contexts. Discussions about the necessity of best practice in social work, its benefits and its challenges for both on-the-ground practice and international collaboration and research are presented.