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Integral Human Development

Social Intervention and Impact: Reflections

With the growing demand for effective social investment, transparency, and accountability, the need to measure social impact has become more critical than ever. The requirement for accountability, transparency, and legitimacy by funders, coupled with organizations’ interest in understanding the effects of their interventions on society, drives this focus on measurement (Kah & Akenroye, 2020).

This premise assumes that the activities organizations undertake with individuals, groups, and communities influence how these people live, work, and organize to address their needs. Furthermore, it posits that such changes can be measured (IAIA, 1995).

In the realm of social intervention, the emphasis on evidence and metrics poses challenges to the capacity of social intervention professionals to innovate within organizational settings. Specifically, in the field of Social Work, such practices may reduce the social worker’s role to that of a mere executor of policies or programs, emphasizing procedural and technocratic tasks. However, Hughes and Wearing (2017) argue that social workers can adopt broader approaches to designing and evaluating action, facilitating participation and accountability.

Drawing on the frameworks of new social assistance and service delivery programs funded by governments in the UK and Australia, the authors establish a connection between social innovation and participatory evaluation. From this perspective, participatory evaluation emerges as an approach that:
(i) materializes the principle of self-determination in Social Work, empowering service users/clients/beneficiaries to act as co-evaluators;
(ii) enables organizations to develop responses to the needs and concerns of clients, introducing new issues to the organizational Social Work agenda; and
(iii) elevates the professional profile of social workers (Hughes & Wearing, 2017).

Using this theoretical framework as a reference, along with the ethical and deontological dimensions of the profession, the postdoctoral research experience at the Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development provides an opportunity to engage with professionals across various fields, particularly the evaluation and planning team.

In this international context of action, the research seeks alternative pathways for project evaluation aligned with the values of Integral Human Development (IHD), where human rights occupy a central position. More specifically, the aim is to integrate the evaluation criteria proposed by the OECD-DAC (2019) — relevance, efficiency, effectiveness, sustainability, and impact — with the dimensions of IHD. To define these dimensions, the research intends to involve project evaluation experts, both academic and non-academic, social intervention professionals, and thinkers advocating for a “different economy” that envisions development beyond economic parameters.


OpenEdition sugere que esta publicação seja citada da seguinte forma:
antonelajesus (21 de Janeiro de 2025). Social Intervention and Impact: Reflections. Desenvolvimento Humano Integral. Recuperado em 9 de Fevereiro de 2025 de https://doi.org/10.58079/134ez


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