Abstract
Despite its three-decade history, social work lacks professional status in Nepal. Drawing on authors’ own critical reflection, this article documents strategies to advance social work’s professional status through a process of social legitimation. Following a brief discussion of social work in Nepal, it reports on issues pertinent to, and efforts, thus far, to professionalise social work noting strategies to advance professional identity, status and recognition in Nepal.
Introduction
Nepali social work’s history began with the introduction of social work training by US Jesuit missionaries in 1987 and, subsequently, as an academic discipline at St Xavier’s College in 1996. St Xavier’s College is an institution of higher learning established and managed by the Nepal Jesuit Society. Thus, from the start Indian and religious influences shaped Nepali social work. From there, as shown in Table 1, social work education programmes proliferated, from one in 1996 to five universities currently offering social work education either at their own premises or through their constituent and affiliate private colleges. In the absence of formal statistics, it is believed that there are currently more than 80 social work institutes from where an estimated 1000 professionally trained social workers have graduated thus far. These graduates have mainly found employment in local and international non-government organisations (NGOs). Records show that, as of 2019, there were 50,358 local and 245 international NGOs, affiliated to the Social Welfare Council, working in various development sectors (see Table 1). Social work graduates are valued as highly trained human resources in the country, able to contribute significantly to the programmes and activities of these organisations. More recently policy makers have also begun to recognise the important roles that social workers can play; and thus, they have briefly mentioned about social workers in the 2018 ACT Relating to Children. Yet, social work lacks official status and recognition, despite professionalisation efforts, thus far. This article begins with a general discussion of factors shaping social work’s professional identity before introducing the authors’ positionalities, method and analytic framework for the discussion of Nepali social work and its attempts to gain professional recognition and status.
Social work educational institutes and their programmes and development organisations in Nepal.
Adapted from Karki et al (2024), Social Welfare Council (2024a, 2024b) and Yadav (2019).
Factors shaping professional identity
Although the focus of this article is the examination of professional identity and status in Nepal, prior scholarship on professionalisation serves as a backdrop to the discussion. Internationally, social work considers itself a profession because it has codes of practice, regulatory frameworks, registration and accreditation systems and educational programmes teaching specialised knowledge and skills to ensure sound professional conduct. It is committed to high-practice standards, ethical practitioner behaviour and having the status to influence public policy and social change. Issues surrounding professional identity, recognition and status have long been a feature of the social work discourse beginning with debates about whether it was a profession at all – starting with Abraham Flexner’s seminal paper delivered at the 1915 Conference on Charities and Corrections republished in Research on Social Work Practice in 2001. Professional identity is not just how a profession defines itself or how social workers think of themselves. Broader forces shape what social work is and what it stands for. External rather than internal professional forces lead to recognition, sanction and legitimation in any particular society. Challenges to the formation of a strong professional identity for social workers include, among others, social work’s subordinate status relative to other professions, its inability to demarcate a clear role and distinct knowledge base for itself and neoliberal changes in the organisation of services that threaten social work values. Although education contributes significantly to the development of a professional identity, what these programmes teach is often at odds with the practice reality and the jobs available for social workers, especially in the Global South. As Mackay and Zufferey (2015) found:
Social work educators drew on professional, helping/caring, emancipatory and social control discourses to highlight the ‘typical’ story of ‘social work’ and construct social workers and social work educators as ‘a who doing a what’, to distinguish social work from other professions (p. 644).
Furthermore, the nature and context of practice varies from country to country, which, in turn, influences what counts as appropriate knowledge and vice versa. For example, references to a US-influenced knowledge base in relation to Nepal signify the strong clinical bias in curricula introduced via the West. For the most part, professional identity derives from definitions of the social work role within service and organisational contexts. Much social work knowledge, and social workers’ professional identity, develops within defined fields or contexts of practice – child protection, mental health, disability, rural social work and so on. In many of these contexts, other professions’ perceptions of the social work role shape their area and scope of practice.
Daly et al.’s (2024) recent research found that Scottish social workers associated professionalism inter alia with a capacity to span professional boundaries. Boundary crossing was inevitable given social workers’ diverse multidisciplinary knowledge base. Furthermore, given social workers lacked a clearly defined role, they tended to cross professional and disciplinary boundaries to do what their organisations and practice required. In rural social work, for example, boundary spanning is a professional skill that requires a breadth rather than a depth of knowledge (Green et al., 2006). Second, social workers had a tendency to co-construct knowledge with service users, valuing democratic professionalism, believing it was an ethical imperative to co-create knowledge with people who use their services. As Drake and Hodge (2022) observed, traditionally social work has embraced theories and methods that seek to elevate the perspectives of those they serve. The co-creation of knowldge also enhances its cultural relevance (Gray et al., 2012). Finally, social workers favoured epistemological generalism and the capacity to be comfortable and capable of working with epistemological uncertainty and complexity. This reflected the ideologically and theoretically driven nature of social work knowledge (Drake and Hodge, 2022). It promoted standpointism as social workers’ aligned themselves with the emancipatory interests of the groups they served, as discussed later in relation to social work in Nepal (Ghimire et al., 2024). This is an important feature of the decolonisation discourse and its reactionary fervour in the Global South (Gray, 2017; Gray et al., 2013; Harms Smith and Nathane, 2018; Yadav, 2019, 2017; Yadav and Gray, 2020).
Authors’ positionalities, method and analytic framework
This section outlines the authors’ positionalities and analytical framework and, in doing so, to an extent also highlights the method followed to construct the social legitimisation of social work in Nepal. Four out of five authors of this article are part of the Nepali diaspora and have over two decades of combined experience in Nepali social work education, practice and research. First and foremost, they view social work as a profession in Nepal and, therefore, advocate for the professional recognition of social workers in Nepal. Their genuine concerns, more so their ethical and moral obligations as Nepali social workers, to professionalise Nepali social work instilled the idea of this article. After a series of discussions among themselves and consultations with like-minded Nepali social workers with an interest in professionalisation, they concluded that social legitimisation was the only way through which social work could be professionalised in Nepal. Drawing on their normative and sociological sensitivities, these authors viewed social legitimisation as a social process that, therefore, made it incumbent on Nepali social workers to ensure they earned the right to professional recognition by developing forms of practice responsive and conforming to Nepali societal values, beliefs and principles. It also meant that they needed to establish meaningful relationships with Nepali state agencies and influential groups in Nepali society if they wanted to gain their acceptance and endorsement of social work as a profession with a valuable contribution to make (Dellmuth and Tallberg, 2015). In researching their idea of social legitimisation, the authors were drawn to Gray and Amadasun’s (2024) R-lexicon, finding it ideally suited to their analysis of the social work profession in Nepal. They thus contacted the fifth author, who was familiar with the situation of social work in Nepal, to seek her support in adapting the R-lexicon to inform their analysis of the social legitimisation of social work in Nepal. Her collaboration not only offered intellectual guidance but also, to the maximum extent, critically enriched the main argument of this article. Thereafter, these authors’ back-and-forth involvement in critical discussions eventually resulted in the adaption of R-lexicon to strategise social work’s professional status and recognition in the Nepali context.
Gray and Amadasun’s (2024) recent historical exploration of approaches to professionalisation processes and the shaping of social work internationally identified the criteria and social integration approaches, the first following Abraham Flexner’s (1915) keynote address. Claiming social work had not yet qualified as a profession, Flexner noted the criteria it had to meet to do so. He claimed professions were intellectual operations that derived their raw materials from science and learning, applied them to practical and definite ends that were altruistic in nature and for which they assumed responsibility, through communicable techniques. Most importantly, professions were self-organising and regulating, and assumed status through demonstrated scientific knowledge and professional expertise. Promoted by Hamilton (1976), the social integration approach emphasised the social processes through which professions gained social recognition, legitimacy and sanction. Gray and Amadasun (2024) developed the R-lexicon based on the key strategies via which professions gained social legitimacy. These social legitimatisation processes included registration and regulation, relevance, recognition, representation, relational connection, rights and research. Drawing on their R-lexicon, this article applies these criteria to an analysis of the professionalisation of social work in Nepal.
The authors found the conceptualisation underlying Gray and Amadasun’s (2024) R-lexicon and its application to professionalisation in Nigeria, not only systematic, well researched, and intellectually sound, but also potentially enriching for social work’s professional identity in Nepal. Nepal and Nigeria experienced similar sociostructural issues and the beginnings of social work in both contexts were a product of colonialism and imperialism. The authors found the R-lexicon a pragmatic strategy that, if embraced collectively, systematically and appropriately, could further Nepali social workers’ professionalisation agenda. Thus, the ensuing discussion begins with a brief historical account of social work in Nepal, with the next section discussing Nepali social workers’ professionalisation efforts thus far and the issues hindering their efforts, while the final section applies Gray and Amadasun’s (2024) R-lexicon to outline strategies to further Nepali social workers’ quest for professional status and recognition.
Brief historical overview of social work in Nepal
Prior scholarship on the development of social work in Nepal notes its ideological emergence through the colonial transfer of knowledge, helping methods and processes, imported via India from the West (Dangal et al., 2021; Ghimire et al., 2024; Nikku, 2010, 2012, 2014a, 2014b; Yadav, 2019, 2017, 2023; Yadav and Yadav, 2020). Yadav (2019) described Nepali social work as Western cuisine with an Indian flavour. The profession’s architects, mainly Jesuit missionaries oblivious to Nepal’s rich sociocultural history, imported medical and psychiatric versions of social work to Nepal in 1996. Unaware of the collective nature of Nepali society, these missionaries believed – quite wrongly – that individualistic medical and psychiatric social work methods could address the structural social issues deeply rooted in Nepali historical, cultural, traditional and political practices. Their pedagogically driven Western (mainly the United States) knowledge equipped social work graduates with tools and techniques irrelevant to Nepali contexts. Such is the dominance of Western social work knowledge that this blueprint Western university curriculum remains much the same today. Thus, Nepali social work, in a technological sense, has been unable to translate its imported methods and interventions to respond to local societal needs. Rather than using Western perspectives and concepts, the collective action of relevant stakeholders ‒ academics, practitioners, government agents and service users ‒ is necessary to develop context-specific approaches (Dangal et al., 2021; Yadav, 2019). Given Nepal is one of poorest and most underdeveloped nations in the world, it requires a relevant technological framework to address poverty and developmental issues. Complicating the terrain for the professional social work sector are the thousands of untrained so-called ‘social workers’ working in the more than 30,000 NGOs that have been ‘promoting development for more than 30 years’ (Dangal et al., 2021: 150). These so-called ‘social workers’ have diverse educational backgrounds in community development, sociology, psychology and management, among others, and have no knowledge of client-focused, ethical social work practice (Adhikari, 2011; Nikku, 2010; Yadav, 2017). Hence, despite the millions of dollars in foreign aid to Nepal’s community development sector, the developmental impacts have not matched the large numbers of NGOs and their investment in ‘social workers’ working within them. Many charitable and developmental projects initiated by national and international NGOs have proved unsustainable once funding runs out. Thus, developmental NGOs have been unable to effect lasting change or improve the quality of life of Nepali people (Dangal et al., 2021; Yadav, 2019). The professional social work sector thus has to surmount not only the history of ineffective untrained NGO workers calling themselves social workers but also critiques that imported social work does not align with these agencies’ developmental agendas and the work they do. Thus, despite its potential significance, professional social work remains an isolated, misunderstood occupation that has failed to gain a strong practice foothold and remains a mainly academic enterprise in Nepal.
Efforts to professionalise social work in Nepal
Table 2 lists Nepali social workers’ episodic efforts to professionalise social work thus far. It shows that, since its inception as an academic discipline in the mid-1990s, Nepali social workers have attempted to professionalise social work. Supported by overseas social workers in the diaspora with direct experience of the Nepali situation, they organised two successive social work conferences in 2006 and 2008 and celebrated the first-ever World Social Work Day, also in 2008. Despite these positive initiatives to strengthen Nepali social work and provide hope to Nepali social workers in their quest for professional recognition and an established social position in the country, its significance remained marginal. In 2010, Nepali social workers began in earnest to organise themselves formally and informally, taking simultaneous initiatives to strengthen their professional standing through the establishment of a national social work body in 2013 and lobbying for recognition.
Efforts to professionalise social work in Nepal since 2000.
Compiled from information in the public domain and consultations with Nepali social work stakeholders.
Shrestha’s (2013) research on the history of social work in Nepal highlighted its lack of recognition and identity. Nepali scholars, like him, researching and publishing on Nepali social work provided intellectual credentials to support their quest for status and recognition, bolstered by the establishment of Nepal’s first PhD programme in Social Work in 2015. In time, PhD candidates’ exploration of the context of Nepali social work would contribute to the recognition, legitimacy and sanction vital to the professionalisation of social work in Nepal. However, despite these efforts, Yadav (2019) found social workers disenchanted with their profession, describing its predicament as a stage of disillusionment.
As described in Table 2, efforts towards professionalisation involved professional organising, as well as research and publication. Yet, professional legitimacy and sanction remains a work in progress. As discussed below, hampering these efforts has been:
1. An inability to enhance social work’s relevance by translating its imported knowledge, methods and approaches to local cultural contexts.
2. A lack of effective systematic, collective organising and sustained dialogue to keep the momentum going.
3. An inability to capitalise on international ties and networks.
4. A deceptive glamourised and romanticised celebration of social work day.
5. The lack of a strong, inclusive professional association.
6. Power relations and political interference.
7. Minimal local research and publications.
1. Inability to translate imported social work to local contexts. Akin to many non-Western contexts, social work is an imported, colonial concept to Nepal. Despite its humanistic, liberatory and emancipatory nature and mission (International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) and International Association of School of Social Work (IASSW), 2014), the terms ‘social work’ and ‘social workers’ are contentious concepts in Nepal, while the ‘being’ and ‘doing’ of imported social work conflicts with Nepali society’s unique positionalities and traditions (Yadav, 2019; Yadav and Gray, 2020).
2. Lack of effective systematic and collective effort and sustained dialogue. Rather than effective systematic, collective organising for professional recognition and legitimacy, spasmodic efforts by individuals or groups of Nepali social workers, such as the formation of the first so-called National Association of Social Workers in Nepal by St Xavier College graduates in 2000 (Shrestha, 2013) and the subsequent National Association of Social Workers by employees of Nepal School of Social Work in 2013, led to the furthering of sectional interests (Thomas et al., 2016). Fragmented dialogues by sectors of social work stakeholders dissolved after a time and disappeared from the social work domain. Thus, it has proved difficult to build the momentum for, and sustain discussions on, professionalisation.
3. Inability to capitalise on international ties and network. Having representation on an international platform did not convert to support for Nepali social work’s causes, given the express aims of international social work bodies is to promote international rather than local social work interests (Gray and Webb, 2008). Pushes for professionalisation of social work come from inside and only social workers at home, familiar with the territory, can do this.
4. Deceptive, glamourised and romanticised celebration of social work day. To an extent, organising and celebrating social work day helped Nepali social workers popularise social work, especially in the capital city of Kathmandu, where most social work institutes operate, as it drew media attention (The Himalayan Times, 2018). However, by promoting imported rituals, social work used exaggerated and deceptive glamourising and romanticising ploys that failed to contribute substantially to internal professionalisation processes. Rajopadhyaya (2020) illustrated this:
Every year on the third Tuesday of March, World Social Work Day is celebrated globally. Even in Nepal, this day has been celebrated since 2013 though many events were cancelled due to coronavirus fears this year. And, every year on this day, concerned institutions, teachers and thousands of students of social work, which as an academic course has become a fashion for the urban freshers, raise the agenda of professionalisation of the discipline and state licencing of ‘social workers’ (n.p.)
In addition to once-off events such as this, a more effective internal professional organising agenda should involve ongoing liaison with influential government and non-government stakeholders to showcase the need for, and contribution and significance of, social work in Nepal.
5. Lack of a strong, inclusive professional association. Through their internal organising, in 2014, social workers formed a so-called National Association of Social Workers to gain registration with the IFSW (2014), the international representative body for social work practitioners across the world. However, this external recognition was matched by internal resentment arising from the Association’s exclusive sectional representation. Its lack of transparency led to its failure to include one of the biggest universities that produced most social work graduates, thus the limited reach of the professional association with many social work graduates remaining unaware of its existence (Amit Yadav, Lecturer in Social Work at TU Affiliated Colleges (past) and Assistant Professor of Social Work at Far-Western University (present), personal communication, October 15, 2023). Moreover, this association’s lack of inclusivity and representativeness hampered its ability to play an active role in promoting professional social work interests in Nepal (Karki et al., 2024; Shrestha, 2023). Furthermore, professional associations are self-supporting, through membership fees. Most social work graduates struggle to find social work positions and those who do earn low salaries that make membership dues unaffordable for them.
6. Power relations and political interference. For the most part, local municipal and government support for social work is minimal. There are no positions for social workers in government so, for example, police officers and lawyers handle juvenile offenders (Dangal et al., 2021). The absence of statutory social work means cases involving child protection and family violence become criminal and legal matters without social work intervention (Parker et al., 2017). Furthermore, political interference makes it difficult for social workers to meet service-user needs. According to Dangal et al. (2021), conflicts arise due to the vested interests of corrupt local parties and youth groups and organisational agendas do not always cohere with professional social workers’ ethical mandate. Hence, ‘power relation between donor agencies and international non-governmental organisations (INGOs) leave the social worker in a vulnerable position’ (p. 151) vis-a-vis service users.
7. Minimal targeted research and publication. Although increasing, research and publications relevant to, or from within, Nepal are minimal. After a slow start, further publications followed Regmi (2001) in 2008. These have continued with scholars like Bala Raju Nikku and Raj Yadav highlighting the need for social work to respond to the contextual features of Nepali society to further the profession’s relevance and significance in Nepal. To date, these publications have not gained traction. Researchers need to serve or further the interests of internal professionalisation by gaining the attention of key decision and policy makers.
Strategies to professionalise social work through social legitimisation
Given myriad international scholarship on professionalisation and internal organising efforts to professionalise Nepali social work have not enhanced its professional status, Nepali social workers need systematic, targeted strategies to legitimise social work. This section applies Gray and Amadasun’s (2024) R-lexicon to provide guidance for Nepali social workers (and social workers in other contexts) to further professional recognition and status. To fit the Nepali political context and sociocultural conditions, the authors have added a new dimension to Gray and Amadasun’s (2024) R-lexicon, re-translation as a first step and placed registration and regulation as the final stage in achieving social legitimacy.
Re-translation
Etymologically, the English terms ‘social work’ and ‘social worker’ are problematic in the Nepali context. Since the imposition of borrowed, colonial social work education from the West to Nepal in the mid-1990s, its bearers were engaged in mimesis (or imitation). Thus, they sought a Nepali equivalent to these terms, namely, samajik karya and samajik karyakarta respectively. However, this is neither an authentic nor a rigorous translation of ‘social work’ and ‘social worker’ in Nepali language. From time immemorial, Nepali societies assigned the term samajik kary to mean benevolent social acts and, likewise, the term samajik karyakarta to refer to those who voluntarily, as distinct from professionally, involve themselves in these altruistic acts. Benevolence and altruism are endemic in Nepali culture, while the idea that a society needs a specialist profession to perform benevolent acts is quite alien to Nepali people. Thus, they do not have the language for it. As Dangal et al. (2021) noted, voluntary helping and social services provided by religious and cultural institutions have a long history with ethnic associations providing dharamshala (residences for poor and older people) and patipauwa (public recreational centres). By using the terms samajik karya and samajik karyakarta to refer to themselves and their activities, graduates of borrowed, colonial social work education have usurped the role these traditional institutions have played for centuries. Not only have they usurped long-standing Nepali historical, societal and cultural practices, but also they have also undermined and undervalued the significant roles and contributions of traditional institutions that have fared well and sustained themselves without professionally trained social workers. Significantly, social work is a product of modernisation and many of its aspects are foreign to, and alienating for, traditional Nepali peoples, steeped in tantric traditions. Nepal’s 125 caste and ethnic groups present a challenge for social work, especially since 80% of its population resides in rural areas. Social work’s urban bias means it is confined to urban places, where most social work services and institutes lie and their graduates operate, while Nepal’s majority rural population remains oblivious to concepts like professional ‘social work’ and ‘social worker’. The very idea of social work is bewildering to local Nepalis. Therefore, there is a need to re-translate borrowed English terms, like ‘social work’ and ‘social worker’ into Nepali such that they neither conflict with, nor devalue, long-standing Nepali traditions, leaving the terms samajik karya and samajik karyakarta for beneficent actors and benevolent acts. Finding alternative Nepali terms that capture social work methods, values and processes would necessarily involve etymologists and language experts and broader consultation with Nepali linguistics, culturalists and social scientists. Authentic and rigorous re-translation is an essential decolonising step towards locally generated knowledge.
Recognition
Gray and Amadasun (2024) argued that recognition depended largely on social work’s ‘relevance and usefulness’ (p. 6). In Nepali society, its relevance and usefulness depend on the extent to which social work transforms the lives of marginalised and oppressed peoples living in vulnerable conditions and mainly rural locations. Unless local people see the tangible effects of social work interventions, they are unlikely to perceive the need for social workers or their services. Social work’s avowed aim is to improve the quality of life for people subjugated due to gender, geography, language and social affiliation (such as to so-called lower castes and ethnicities in Nepal). Therefore, to gain recognition, social workers would need to achieve solidarity with the struggles of indigenous Nepali for emancipation. Despite Nepal’s development experiment that began in the early 1950s, continuous efforts by government, international and national NGOs and civil society agencies, have failed to shift Nepal’s status as one of the world’s most underdeveloped countries. This makes involvement in development initiatives, poverty alleviation and empowerment and capacity building of people imperative, if social work is to have any significance in Nepali society.
Relevance
Relevance refers to social work’s ability to derive its legitimacy from socially sanctioned norms and values, being responsive to local needs and playing significant roles in implementing welfare policies (Gray and Amadasun, 2024). To achieve social legitimacy, social work needs to engage with social development perspectives, initiatives and practices, as well as with social and political processes that produce and maintain injustice and act as barriers to people’s quality of life and wellbeing. Nepali social work can achieve legitimacy only by justifying its relevance and usefulness in Nepali society. To do this, Nepali social work would have to revisit its colonial roots and draw on recently emerging scholarship on decolonisation that provides a framework for home-grown Nepali social work relevant to local contexts and issues (Ghimire et al., 2024; Yadav, 2019). This would mean need re-defining its identity, vision and goals to align with local Nepali values, norms and developmental needs.
Rights and social justice
The principles of human rights and social justice undergird social work and its mission to address systematic and structural suppression, oppression, injustice, inequality and exploitation (Healy, 2008; Ife et al., 2022; Staub-Bernasconi, 2016). They impel the social work profession to embrace emancipatory goals and values and political action and advocacy to liberate people from social injustices and rights violations (Dhakal and Burgess, 2021). Intersectionality theory highlights the role of intersecting factors, such as social, economic and political conditions; social constructs of race, gender, class, caste, culture and ethnicity, including language; and geography, in contributing to various forms of injustice in society (Bishwakarma, 2019; Devkota and Bagale, 2015; Ghimire et al., 2024; Gupta et al., 2021; Lawoti, 2012; Yadav, 2019). To assess and respond to systematic sociostructural violence, Nepali social work needs to frame its pedagogies, praxis and research agenda to accord with rights-based, anti-oppressive approaches that embrace social activism and action. Among others, social work education must equip Nepali social work graduates with knowledge and skills of empowerment, conscientisation and constitutional rights and legal provisions so they might stand alongside vulnerable and voiceless people, including human right defenders, notably the National Human Rights Commission.
Relational connections
Since its existence in the mid-18th century, Nepal has progressed through various political systems – the Shah (1768–1846), Rana (1846–1951), brief transition (1951–1962), panchayat (1962–1990), short-lived democracy (1990–2001), despotic monarch (2001–2006), and republic (2006 onwards). Through all these periods, the Nepali state and its rulers and leaders committed themselves rhetorically to institutionalised rights and justice, as well as inclusion of all in the state apparatus (Bishwakarma, 2019; Gurung, 2019; Yadav, 2019). Professions like social work can play an important role in making institutionalised rights, justice and inclusion real in the state’s structures and policies. To do this, Nepali social workers would have to establish strong and effective relational connections with actors and agencies promoting these values. Only through relational connections with NGOs and civil society agencies, and the media, can they embed emancipatory values in government, political party discourse and policies addressing socioeconomic, ethnocultural and social developmental issues in Nepal. While focused on internal relationships, they need to be cognisant of the Nepali state’s extreme dependence on external donor agencies and their fundamental influence on Nepali social and economic policies. Therefore, relational connection with key actors and agencies is essential to Nepali social work’s public, social and political visibility and its quest for recognition.
Representation
Social workers’ representation on key decision-making agency and departmental boards and committees is essential to strengthening professional status. This requires that social workers are astute political actors, able to negotiate and lobby for their positional and professional interests. Nepali social workers should strive for representation on key decision-making bodies, such as the Ministry of Women, Children and Social Welfare; Social Welfare Council; National Planning Commission; National Human Rights Council; and Non-government Organisation Federation of Nepal, as well as seek representations at the provincial and local governance levels.
Research and theory
Professions have long been associated with research-based specialist knowledge and expertise (Flexner, 2001; Schön, 1983). A central feature of a profession’s identity, identified in early writings on professionalism, is its claims to a discrete scientific knowledge base (Flexner, 2001; Greenwood, 1957). Social work does not have this, given it draws knowledge from diverse disciplinary sources. The diversity of social work knowledge and roles leads to a lack of clarity on the profession’s distinct identity, purpose, methods and value in society (Daly et al., 2024; Moon, 2017). Nowadays, social workers associate a strong professional identity with having a discrete knowledge base that incorporates local norms, customs and needs (Gray et al., 2013; Nilsen et al., 2023). Thus, practice accounts and case studies dominate its literature. In the absence of research-based knowledge, social work has often resorted to pseudo-scientific theories and concepts to assert itself as knowledgeable (Gray et al., 2009). As Abbott (1988) observed, formal knowledge was important to defend a profession’s position in the context of ongoing power struggles among professions. In the absence of formal knowledge, social workers value informal, experiential knowledge, developed from practice, believing their job requires a practical rather than technical rationality (Daly et al., 2024; Schön, 1983). The evidence-based practice movement in professions allied to social work, and increasingly in social work, has reinforced the role of research is social work’s legitimisation, as it tests, formalises and enhances the effectiveness of frameworks, approaches and interventions social workers use in their practice. In so doing, it responds to political trends towards evidence-based policy (Gray et al., 2009). Nepali social work’s research base is developing gradually as Nepali social workers pursue opportunities for PhD study, graduate, and, for some, develop teaching experience at overseas universities. These Nepali educators and scholars are influencing developments internally towards a culture of research, shown by the establishment of the first PhD programme in social work in Nepal in 2015. Strengthening this programme in the future, and subsequently inspiring those who are enrolled in this programme to research home-grown theories of social work, will greatly contribute to a local empirical knowledge base and the professionalisation of social work in Nepal.
Registration and regulations
The afore-mentioned strategies are a pre-requisite for professional registration and regulation that, in Nepal, goes hand in hand with improving social work education. Unregulated education programmes produce graduates with variable, and sometimes dubious, qualifications that leave them lacking in professional integrity and accountability and ill prepared for the complexities of practice (Dangal et al., 2021; Yadav, 2019). As Dangal et al. (2021) noted, ‘graduates mostly from the social science discipline are considered as social workers but there are also students from other disciplines such as natural sciences and management who work as social workers in Nepal’ (p. 150). For Nepali social workers, legitimisation depends crucially on government recognition and sanction and leads to public financing for the social work sector. Lobbying political parties and their representatives, especially those in politics and government, about the importance of social work and need for registration and regulation to ensure effective, competent and ethical practice is essential. To do this, social work needs a national professional association with widespread support as its mouthpiece and key lobbying body. Although individual social workers have won elections to represent local-level governments and have joined national-level political parties, only collective, coordinated action will accentuate the thrust for registration and regulation and the supportive policy that would legitimise the social work profession in Nepal. Without recognition, a system of government registration and regulation for social workers in Nepal cannot follow.
Conclusion
This article highlighted the context of social work’s professional identity in Nepal. In doing so, it also explained the role social processes play in shaping social work’s professional identity. Drawing on Gray and Amadasun’s (2024) analytic framework, it discussed ways in which Nepali social workers might further their professionalisation efforts through a strategic process of social legitimisation. It reported on efforts of Nepali social workers towards this end and highlighted issues hampering them. The path ahead for Nepali social workers is a challenging one that will require systematic organisation and purposeful action in collaboration with key actors and agencies influencing social policy. They might also have to engage in purposeful research activities to explore other strategies to legitimise their profession and achieve the social sanction and legitimation professionalisation requires. Legitimisation of social work through abovementioned strategies will not only equip Nepali social workers with professional identity but also will help to them better respond to Nepali social issues in the future. It is hoped that the knowledge produced herein will prove beneficial to social workers in similar contexts facing challenges in their attempts to gain professional recognition and legitimacy. The social legitimisation of social work, as discussed in this article, might be helpful to them as they engage in their own quest for a professional social work identity.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
