Critical Social Work centralises the analyses of ‘power’ within social work research, and focusses on whether and how social work practices (re)produce power and vulnerabilities and legitimises controlling interventions. However, this research field overlooks the role and influence of supra-national or ‘global’ actors and the complexity of power relations shaping social welfare relations at the  ‘local’ level, certainly when these localities differ from the Western welfare state design. This research project aims to analyse and theorise the interaction between power, scale and social work practices. In concrete, it focusses on how gendered, geopolitical or pedagogical imaginaries of actors on different scales of power influence social policies, its implementation and therefore the lives of people who are targeted by them. This is done through ethnographies of different glocal social work fields.