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This paper discusses the knowledge transmission from the English Integrated Children’s System to Swedish BBIC, ‘Children’s Needs in Focus’, in the light of comparative approaches towards child welfare, contemporary advocacy for cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural approaches, and the emphasis on knowledge-based social work. The focus is on the conceptual framework of risk assessments in the context of the Swedish child protection system. The purpose is to critically assess children’s epistemic position in these complex processes of knowledge distribution. 

Discourse analysis is used as a framework for analysis of evaluations, reports and research linked to BBIC and ICS. With the concept epistemic culture, I look more closely at knowledge production and what is included in the realm of ‘evidence’ and research, as well as what is considered to be knowledge-based social work. Such an approach allows for analyses of epistemic cultures that are not necessarily confined to space and instead are widespread and distributed in line with other logics. 

Preliminary findings indicate how a knowledge transfer serve as a knowledge-legitimizing practice which in many ways exemplifies a homogenization of two geopolitically distinct contexts. From this point of view, BBIC and ICS are tightly interlinked and may be seen as parts of one and the same epistemic culture, similar epistemologies and ontologies of childhood, as well as its epistemic subjects and objects of knowledge. What becomes comparative not only links the two systems’ assumptions of the universal but comparison in itself becomes a legitimizing practice. 

This paper suggests the importance of going beyond conventional comparative welfare approaches and pay more critical attention to epistemic cultures, a fields’ scientific communities, and disciplinary boundaries when trying to understand contemporary social work.