During the last few decades, the concepts of participation and belonging has frequently beenused within the social welfare field in general, and within the field of disability researchspecifically. Additionally, in Scandinavia the concept of participation has become increasinglyused in social work and social pedagogy programmes at universities. However, there's ratherlittle known about how participation can be understood and related to social pedagogy, sincethe concept has a broad range of meanings, e.g. a sense of belonging. This paper aims to identifyand discuss understandings of participation and belonging with relevance for social work andsocial pedagogy. Empirical illustrations have been gathered with ethnographical methods andanalysed in accordance with an interpretive tradition. It is argued that the concept ofparticipation can be attributed to different meanings in different ideological, theoretical, andinstitutional practice contexts (e.g. schools that offer special needs programmes, the transitionto working life, online social networking). Consequently, it's a challenge to provide adequatedefinitions of the concept. The inference drawn is that the aspect of belonging as it relates tosocial participation can be attributed to its particular importance for social pedagogy. Animplication for professional practice is the need to pay attention to alternative identificationsthat are not based on notions of a stable, constant sense of belonging to a categorical group.