Holding governments to relational account: The case of youth exploitation prevention in Victoria, BC, Canada

Introduction: This article explores a Canadian case study to examine how governments’ hyper-managerialist practices are contributing to a youth exploitation crisis. Whilst the limited funding of youth programs is often viewed as an unavoidable reality within North American social work contexts, the author draws on decolonial and critical perspectives to consider how this funding precarity is a structural feature of managerialist approaches.
Approach: This article provides an overview of an innovative youth exploitation prevention program in a context where risks for youth are increasing, including surging and intersecting opioids, homelessness, and youth mental health epidemics. Despite being widely recognized as a unique, effective and cost-efficient community-based program that has met youth needs for over a decade, the program continues to be inadequately and inconsistently funded. A critical review of the literature illuminates that this precarity is not unique to this program nor city, but is a reality faced by similar programs across North America resulting from managerialist practices.
Conclusions: In this case, hyper-managerialist government funding mechanisms and processes have themselves become structural determinants of youth well being, exacerbating inequities through reducing access to life-saving programming for youth, including those most-at-risk. A new, collaborative, action-oriented research project is introduced that strives to advance transformative change through holding distinct levels of governments to relational account. A stark case about the threats managerialist approaches pose to social work values, practice and communities’ well being, this article is instructive for policy contexts where governments’ managerialist approaches may be delimiting funding of essential youth programming.