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Following massive socioeconomic reforms over the past three decades, social work in the People's Republic of China (hereafter China) has developed at an unprecedented pace. To respond to social issues arising from accelerated economic development, the government has launched a large-scale programme to train a professional social work workforce of 1.45 million by 2020. Social work in mainland China has developed, and continues to develop, rapidly in major urban centres, while rural areas remain largely neglected. This article describes developmental issues in rural China and argues that social work requires indigenised knowledge and interventions to address context-specific problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a study that examined how fieldwork education in Southern and East Africa was responding to the developmental social work agenda. The study used semi-structured qualitative interviews with key informants from 15 social work programmes in 11 different Southern and East African countries. It investigated whether the social work fieldwork placements on offer provided practical experience of a developmental approach to social work practice. The study showed the creativity and enthusiasm with which social work educators were embracing the goals of developmental social work education, despite the pitfalls and limitations of doing this within fieldwork resource constraints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses ‘the making’ of the Global Agenda in social work by situating the process of agenda-setting itself as an object of critical reflection. It discusses the way in which the agenda positions social work as part of a global civil society network somewhat removed from grassroots social work and raises concerns about its failure to address the causes of or possible solutions to social and economic inequality. The authors deploy recent empirical research relating to object-oriented politics, particularly the ‘no issue, no public’ debate on political mobilization as a more viable alternative in contributing to structural change. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]