The point of departure for this volume is that social work is a profession that embodies the values of social justice and human rights, and embraces social change as a means to achieve these values (Hare, 2004). As such, changing social welfare policies is an important, indeed crucial, aim of social work interventions because those policies can facilitate the furthering of these values by changing the environment in which service users live (Cummins at al, 2011). Policy practice is the form of social work practice that focuses on affecting social welfare policies (Jansson, 2008).

Our explicit goal in this book has been to explore the nature of policy practice in social work in eight countries with diverse social work legacies and patterns and different welfare regimes. In order to do this, four principal questions have dominated the country chapters that constitute the bulk of this study. The first relates to the importance of policy practice in the social work discourse. In other words, the volume has sought to explore the place of policy practice in Codes of Ethics, formal documents of social work organisations and the professional literature in the countries examined. The second question endeavours to examine social work education, the degree to which it prepares social work graduates to engage in policy practice and the manner in which it does so. The third question seeks to understand better the actual engagement of social workers in policy practice, in terms of the extent of this engagement and the forms that this takes in different countries. A fourth and final question focuses on the factors that contribute to involvement by social work professionals in policy practice in the various national settings. This concluding chapter attempts to bring together the responses offered to these questions by the country experts that authored each of the chapters of the book. By doing so, we seek to offer some more general responses to these issues on the basis of an examination of the similarities and the differences that emerge in the different country cases.

Thinking about how policy practice is defined

‘Policy practice’ is the term employed here to describe the policy-related activities of social workers.