Children and global social policy: Exploring the impact of international governmental organisations

Axford N. Children and global social policy: exploring the impact of international governmental organisations International governmental organisations (IGOs) seek to influence child welfare policy and practice in individual sovereign states. But do they succeed and, if so, in what way? This article outlines the nature of selected IGOs' work, explores the nature of their impact and seeks to explain the pattern that emerges. It also notes areas for further research.     

Global civil society or ‘networked globality’: beyond the territorialist and societalist paradigm

The concept of global civil society (GCS) is central to treatments of globalization and to depictions of a contested globality. This article offers a novel critique of the concept and its value for a critical social science of globalization. It argues that received notions of GCS are rooted in territorialist and societalist paradigms of the social and should not be used to subvent an account of globalization located in the dynamics of trans and even post-societal and post-national connections and the kind of world they intimate. GCS and variants such as cosmopolitanism are examined to evaluate whether they can provide a way of bridging the gap between territorialist and societalist assumptions about the organization of the social and the increasingly post-societal and post-territorial nature of the world. The aim is to avoid the inviting, but ultimately misleading sleight of hand through which GCS is revealed as the boundary-less equivalent of civil society, but with all the normative and aesthetic baggage of the latter still attached. The article ends with a critical discussion of the claim that globalization processes of connection are producing a networked globality in which reflexive agency is not lost. To recognize this requires a radical take on networks and their ontologies and being skeptical about much of the received sociology of globalization.     

Research Review: Risk and protection in the context of services for children in need

The paper summarizes the evidence and provides definitions of risk, protective factors, resilience, coping strategies and need in the context of children in need. Definitions are offered for children in need and children's services. The way in which individual interpretation can alter objective assessment of risk is explored. A method for recording evidence relevant to clinical practice on behalf of children in need is offered. Implications for policy and practice are discussed.     

Children's services in the UK 1997–2003: problems,developments and challenges for the future

This article reviews developments in children's services since 1997 and considers their effect on children in need by examining government statistics, recent additions to the evidence‐base, and data from two studies conducted by the authors. It shows that there has been extensive service development, mainly beyond the Department of Health, and considerable effort to improve assessment and administrative data. The limits to what can be demonstrably achieved by children's services, particularly in a short period, are acknowledged, and it is argued that the approach of providing predominantly low level interventions to large groups may need re‐thinking if significant and lasting changes to children's development are to be secured. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Exploring the Potential of Shadow Controls in the Evaluation of Children’s Services

This article describes and presents a framework for an under‐used evaluation technique in the context of an evaluation of a programme for disaffected young people. Shadow controls—the use of expert judgement to estimate the success of a programme—are often dismissed in research design as an unreliable form of comparison, but can be useful in situations where there is limited scope for a control group or to enhance the causal inference attributable to non‐experimental evaluations. The exercise described uses a practice tool as a structure for making predictions about the situations of the young people on the programme, assuming they do not receive an intervention. These predictions (shadow controls) are then compared to outcome data for the young people at the end of the programme. The results of the exercise provide some important messages about the programme’s effectiveness and the potential for strengthening non‐experimental evaluation methods. The article also discusses how the method can usefully inform evaluations of social programmes and encourage agency and user collaboration.     

Measuring children's needs: how are we doing?

Children's services in England and Wales are legally required to determine the nature and extent of children's needs in their areas as a precursor to providing needs-led services. However, few needs assessments are ever published. This article analyses 83 such reports conducted between 1999 and 2007 in two local authorities in England (one urban, one rural), focusing on their quality and usefulness. It makes recommendations for improving practice in this important area, both in terms of the type of needs assessment required and how best to produce and use them.     

Developing congruent children's services to improve child well-being

This paper explores whether different concepts of child well-being call for different 'service styles' and, if so, whether these styles can dovetail together to form a congruent pattern of children's services. The first part draws on the distinguishing features of five approaches to conceptualizing well-being – need, rights, poverty, quality of life and social exclusion – and their empirical manifestations ('conditions') to identify different emphases or 'styles' in service provision. The second, more discursive part of the paper explores potential contradictions between these service styles, for example, between needs-led and rights-based approaches or between policies to tackle poverty and combat social exclusion. The third part examines whether and how such contradictions can be minimized to achieve greater congruence and discusses the need to consider the orientation of children's services in respect of interpretations of child well-being.