Without borders: fostering development studies in social work

Development discourse is incorporated in mainstream professional education programmes to a limited extent only. This article argues that development education should not be confined to educational settings focusing directly on development studies but ought to be incorporated in other human services training, given that practitioners within the health and community services sectors are increasingly employed in the development sector as well as being exposed to calls to commit to global justice. Accordingly our definition of development is a global one. We use social work as a case study of the potential for a profession to engage more robustly with an international agenda, with an emphasis on social work education in Australia. In doing so we acknowledge that many of the activities of social work are linked to strong cultural and social institutions that are practised in localised variations