Midgley’s Social Development Model – knowledge from the Global South to the North

James Midgley was a social work academic, originally from South Africa, who studied at the University of Cape Town and the London School of Economics before holding senior academic posts in the United States, including Dean at Louisiana State University and later the Harry and Riva Specht Professor of Public Social Services at the University of California, Berkeley. He defined social development as a process of planned social change designed to promote the well-being of the population as a whole in conjunction with a dynamic process of economic development (Midgley, 1995). His model rejects the separation of social welfare from economic growth, insisting instead that social and economic policy be deliberately integrated, and that intervention strategies work simultaneously across the macro, meso and micro levels, drawing local communities, governments and international organisations into a single strategy rather than treating them as separate tiers of practice.

Midgley was clear that social development did not originate in the North and travel outward as a Western export. He traced its origins to the developing world, noting that although social development emerged there, it is now more widely known in Western countries where social development interventions are also being implemented (Midgley, 1995). This ordering matters. It positions the Global South, and Africa specifically, not as a recipient of a ready made Northern welfare model, but as the source of the very framework that the North later adopted and adapted. Social development, on this reading, stands as the South’s contribution to social work as a discipline, correcting the more common assumption that professional social work theory flows only from North to South.

This is the same reordering of credit and origin that this course insists on for harambee, though the two ideas arrived at academia by different routes. Where Midgley’s framework was formulated directly within academic social welfare scholarship, the harambee model of social development began in orature, carried across generations through proverbs, praise poetry, and communal call and response performance, before being drawn into formal academic study and structured into a model.This is the theoretical backbone that connects harambee, as a value and a practice, to formal social development work, both African and global. Harambee gives us the collective will and the societal starting point. The ASD Model gives us the structural target, the macro level, and Midgley’s model gives us the wider, cross-national language for describing what that structural, integrated work looks like.

Now, you should be able to state Kaseke’s critique of the modernisation approach, explain the historic macro level gap in African social work, define Midgley’s model of social development, explain why the harambee model treats society as its starting point while Midgley’s model has none, and compare the two models’ views of systems and of economic growth.