Abstract for presentation at Global Social Work 2004

This paper will start by identifying the relationship between the three sectors: public, private and ‘third’ (community’), as the location for the negotiation of social policies. This perspective is familiar within the policy confines of the nation state, but also needs to be applied at the global level, as, with globalisation, global social policy becomes an area of interest.
The interests of the three sectors will be examined across five dimensions of globalisation: economic, cultural, social, environmental and political. With economic and cultural globalisation the main support for globalisation comes from the private sector, and the main opposition from the community sector; however this is reversed with social, environmental and political globalisation, which are in general supported by the community sector and opposed by the private sector. Interestingly, the public sector, or the state, is relatively neutral and ambivalent in these debates, as the state is caught in a contradiction between representing the needs of the community and responding to the imperatives of global markets. It has become marginalised, while the private and community sectors engage with the debate.
This analysis suggests that social workers seeking to influence the course of globalisation need to concentrate their efforts in the community sector, rather than within the traditional social work context of the welfare state and ‘public policy’. Some ways in which this might be achieved, formally, informally and institutionally, will be briefly explored.