Introduction

Moving from the environments that provide a broad context in which social worker efforts to influence policies take place, this chapter focuses on the first of the three categories of factors that are affected by environments. These three factors – opportunity, facilitation and motivation – directly affect the level and the form of policy engagement by social workers in the different routes (see Figure 4.1). Here, we explore the specific institutions on the national and local levels in which policy is formulated, and the impact that these institutional settings and external events related to them have on the opportunities that social workers have to engage in policy.

We posit that efforts by social workers to affect social policy will inevitably be focused on the social policy formulation process itself and on the relevant institutions at the local, regional, national or international levels in which this takes place. The implication of this is that these policy efforts will only be possible if social workers have access to this process and to the policy institutions in which it transpires. Thus, while the emergence of new social problems, identified by the social workers themselves or by their service users, can lead to efforts by social workers to engage in policy efforts, these will only be possible if the social workers and/or their service users can have access as citizens and/or as professionals, either directly or indirectly, to the institutions in which policy is determined. Even within developed welfare states in which social workers are the implementers of services, the involvement of social workers in policy may be very limited due to a strict distinction between the policy role of elected officials or bureaucrats and the professional role of social workers or other professionals who implement services. To use the terminology we employ here: social workers’ policy involvement in the various policy routes is dependent on the opportunity that they actually have to affect the policy process (Gal and Weiss-Gal, 2020).

The goal of this chapter, then, is to shed light on the place of institutional opportunities in shaping levels and forms of policy engagement by social workers in the civic and professional policy routes.