Abstract
Social Work in Asia, sits within a long-standing, and increasingly urgent, conversation for social work. How can a profession that was developed in the global North be taught, practised and remade in a region of the world that contains almost 60% of the world's population, across an astonishingly diverse set of cultures, beliefs, languages, and political systems? The editors attempt to deal with this diversity. This volume includes 29 chapters on Bangladesh, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam. These chapters are included under three major themes with a fourth chapter to draw together the threads: social work education, practice, and service.
The first chapter, written by Islam, sets the historical and theoretical context of the book, tracing the colonial history of formal social work in Asia, post-colonial social work's focus on building nation-states, and the more recent effort to indigenize social work, which involves incorporating indigenous knowledge systems, religious practices, and community-based caring practices into mainstream social work education and practice. Framing this chapter, and the country-specific chapters that follow it, creates an analytic horizon inviting attention to regional commonalities as well as the stubborn particularities of each of our countries.
Part I, “Social Work Education in Asia,” is arguably the best developed and most coherent section of the book. The chapters on India, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Taiwan, China, South Korea, and Vietnam do an effective job of detailing similar structural issues such as the dominance of Western textbooks, slow indigenization of the curriculum, shortage of capable field supervisors, and social work's lack of professional recognition. The most original chapter, on Buddhist social work, anticipates a regionalized epistemology that is resistant to translation into the secular, rights-discourse regulatory framework found in U.S. accreditation documents. Readers familiar with the CSWE (Council on Social Work Education) competency model or with recent critiques of field education generated by social work scholars (see Drolet et al., 2022) will find related, yet dissimilar, critiques here.
The strongest part, Part II is a section on Social Work Practice in Asia. A couple of chapters in this part stick their necks out and consider what we might term practice analysis. The Philippine chapter on peace-building and pro-people development offers a welcome reminder that social work operates, in some instances, within and against contested political projects, not just alongside the state apparatus. The Indonesian chapter on social work with forest-edge communities shows how health behavior interventions can be embedded in ecologically and socially sustained practices. The chapter on clinical social work in Pakistan highlights the institutional bottlenecks, shortage of clinical placements, lack of clarity in regulatory frameworks, and tradition of deferential relations to medically authorized expertise, that constrain even highly trained social workers throughout the health care system. The chapter on street children's self-evaluation and emotional regulation in Indonesia is one of the few in the volume to foreground the voices of direct service users, along with the chapter on the public social service sector in Bangladesh.
Part III, “Social Work Services in Asia,” is less consistent. Some chapters, such as Huraerah and colleagues’ on social protection in Indonesia, give illuminating critiques of policy and practice, discussing issues such as the targeting inefficiency of Indonesia's national social assistance scheme, its exclusion of informal sector workers, and clientelistic patterns of benefit allocation. Others are more of an analytic survey of welfare provision at the national level. For example, the Hong Kong chapter on uncertainties facing the profession and the Singapore chapter on technological innovation in social service empowerment sit uncomfortably with chapters focusing on service-user experience. Yet this unevenness is, in some ways, a testimony to the character of the region as a whole: Singapore and Pakistan differ so widely in their institutional positions on social work that any single approach would obscure important differences.
Several themes run across chapters and can be seen in the book at its most useful: the continuing gap between the legacy of Western theory and the application of these ideas in specific local contexts, a topic also taken up in adjacent literature discussing the decolonizing the curriculum debate (Hölscher et al., 2023). In contrast, there is less attention paid to the intersecting global phenomena, such as climate displacement, the platform economy, and regional care work politics, that will shape Asian social work in the next decade and beyond. Although the structuring implications of the pandemic for service delivery, supervision, and digital practice are discussed throughout the book, they are not fully theorized, which is a regrettable oversight, considering that the book published in 2026.
The final, concluding chapter by Islam draws together the problems, prospects and way forward. Its taxonomy of challenges, of governance and political will, institutional capacity, socioeconomic tensions, cultural fit, the digital divide and environmental sustainability provides a useful orienting summary. Though the recommendations made here may strike anyone looking for editorial judgment a little too anodyne. A more critical concluding voice, prepared to adjudicate between some of the competing views put forward in the chapters, would have helped.
But these are minor quibbles. Overall, Social Work in Asia fills a real, and long unfilled, gap in the literature. It is not the last word on the subject, how could it be? but it is a substantial, geographically inclusive, and intellectually serious one. For social work educators outside the region, the book counters the implicit Anglo-American framing of much accreditation discourse. For Asian-based scholars, practitioners and students, it also treats their context, as sites of theory, rather than as cases to be analyzed. It is a text that should be on any graduate reading list for international and comparative social work, or on the shelves of libraries that take seriously the global character of the profession.
