The Routledge Handbook of Green Social Work

Lena Dominelli

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351727464
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Green social work espouses a holistic approach to all peoples and other living things – plants and animals, and the physical ecosystem; emphasises the relational nature of all its constituent parts; and redefines the duty to care for and about others as one that includes the duty to care for and about planet earth.

By acknowledging the interdependency of all living things it allows for the inclusion of all systems and institutions in its remit, including both (hu)man-made and natural disasters arising from the (hu)made ones of poverty to chemical pollution of the earth's land, waters and soils and climate change, to the natural hazards like earthquakes and volcanoes which turn to disasters through human (in)action. Green social work's value system is also one that favours equality, social inclusion, the equitable distribution of resources, and a rights-based approach to meeting people's needs to live in an ethical and sustainable manner. Responding to these issues is one of the biggest challenges facing social workers in the twenty-first century which this Handbook is intended to address.

Through providing the theories, practices, policies, knowledge and skills required to act responsibly in responding to the diverse disasters that threaten to endanger all living things and planet earth itself, this green social work handbook will be required reading for all social work students, academics and professionals, as well as those working in the fields of community development and disaster management.

Part I

Green social work theory

Scene setting section

1

Green social work in theory and practice

A new environmental paradigm for the profession

Lena Dominelli

Introduction

Green social work (GSW) is a transdisciplinary, holistic approach to environmental crises that has challenged the social work profession to incorporate its principles, values and concern over environmental degradation, and the disasters associated with this into daily, routine, mainstream practice. Whether arising through air, water and soil pollution caused by industrial contaminants or ‘natural’ hazards, these have damaged people’s health and well-being, and exploited the environment for the gain of the few. Thus, environmental crises perpetrate environmental injustices that must be eradicated before their deleterious effects become irreversible. The green in green social work highlights the imperative of caring for the beautiful living planet human beings inhabit. The earth that sustains us has its bounty currently exploited by 1 per cent of the population for itself. Its destruction impacts heavily on the 99 per cent.

Poor people live and work in the degraded environments that feed the industrial system. Adults simultaneously struggle to obtain basic necessities including food, clothing, housing, healthcare, social services, and education for themselves and their children; and sustain their communities and geographical spaces. This calls for a rethinking of the economy – how it distributes goods and services; how it uses the earth’s physical resources; how it uses and treats human labour, animals and plants; how the products of human labour are distributed; and what economic alternatives can be developed to meet the need of each human being now to enjoy a decent standard of living, without destroying the earth for future generations. Neoliberalism, the current socio-economic system, is not fit for purpose within countries or globally. Neoliberalism is steeped in inegalitarianism. Thus, a new system has to be redistributive and regenerative. It has to ensure that every human being has his/her share of the earth’s goods and services, and that the earth’s capacity to regenerate itself is maintained. The global trends towards hyper-urbanisation and hyper-industrialisation, and creation of ugly urbanity for people to live in, must stop.

Why are these concerns a matter for all social workers? The answer is simple. Social workers are the professionals responsible for the health and well-being of those with whom they work. Their practice engages those whose lives are undermined by the lack of access to resources and opportunities in myriad settings. Thus, they have a professional and moral responsibility to examine why service users are in such situations and work with them for transformative change. Also, social work services should be universal. Within this framework, social workers should also work with the 1 per cent who own more than they can possibly use, and engage them in thinking about how they can contribute to the development of new, alternative economic systems that do not exploit people or the earth – its flora, fauna, minerals and physical environment.

Consequently, green social workers can ask awkward questions about the direction of humanity’s travel: Who benefits from the current socio-economic arrangements and governance systems? Who loses? How can the earth’s bounty be shared more equitably? How can the geographic spaces within which people’s sense of identity and belonging reside be enhanced and preserved? To contribute to answering these questions, green social work includes the incorporation of environmental justice within the profession’s social justice agenda, alongside that of critiquing neoliberal socio-economic forms of development and highlighting the duty to care for the earth in sustainable ways so that it can meet the needs of contemporary and future generations. Such commitment is embedded in acknowledging and addressing the interconnectedness and interdependencies that exist between living beings and inanimate things and maintaining a sustainable planet.

Addressing environmental concerns allows social workers to adopt a number of diverse roles ranging from being coordinators of practical assistance to developing community and individual resilience in responding to disasters throughout the disaster cycle – prevention, preparedness, immediate relief, recovery, and reconstruction. And, it challenges social workers to understand the porous borders between ‘natural’ and (hu)man-made disasters and include environmental rights in their conceptual framework of social justice at the local, national, regional and international levels (Dominelli, 2012). There is no area of human life that is beyond the remit of green social workers. Their interventions are based on engaging victim–survivors of disasters to coproduce solutions to problems that are defined by those in the communities within which they are working. These should be inclusive and innovative. Green social work has initiated a paradigm shift in conceptualising environmental social work, away from leaving knowledge in the hands of environmental scientists into mutual sharing of scientific and lay expertise and embedding the coproduction of disaster action plans in mainstream social work values and empowering practice.

In this chapter, I describe the beginnings of green social work, its theoretical framework and value-base for practice, and its commitment to social change, including at the policy level, especially as it concerns the elimination of poverty and equitable distribution of resources from the local to the global. This aim is central to reducing vulnerabilities among the world’s poorest and most marginalised peoples before, during and after their differentiated experiences of disasters. I conclude with a call for social workers to include environmental concerns in their routine practice and social work curriculum for training and practice.

Developing the Green Social Work Framework

The absence of social workers’ voices during the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami when 250,000 people were killed in the 12 countries affected by its destructive waves spurned me to contemplate collective social work responses through the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) to change this state of affairs. A week after this disaster, IASSW established the Rebuilding People’s Lives After Disasters Network (RIPL) to do this (Dominelli, 2013). I became its first chair and later RIPL turned into IASSW’s Disaster Intervention, Climate Change and Sustainability Committee, which I currently head. Strengthening social work’s visibility in disaster interventions also led me to undertake research in this arena, and produced the ‘Internationalising Institutional and Professional Practice’ (IIPP) research project (Dominelli, 2015) funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC).

When I was appointed a co-director in the Institute of Hazards, Risk and Resilience (IHRR) at Durham University, I started to work with physical scientists including geologists, earth scientists, volcanologists and geographers to think about the science underpinning natural hazards such as earthquakes and volcanoes and the (hu)man-made ones including climate change, floods and poverty in projects that were funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (Wistow et al., 2015) and the Natural and Environmental Research Council (Dominelli et al., 2015). The ensuing research interactions made me realise how little social workers knew about how natural hazards became disasters, and highlighted the importance of thinking differently about the social dimensions of disasters, and in appreciating the intricate connections between the animate and inanimate elements of the ecosphere, and between the so-called ‘natural’ aspects of a disaster and its ‘social’ ones.

Social justice is an integral part of social work, and strongly embedded in its value of equality. The inclusion of struggles for environmental justice within an environmental framework is a critical and significant part of green social workers’ activities. It surfaces when redressing complex issues involving environmental degradation, vulnerability among marginalised populations, and disaster responses. Contributing to these involves green social workers in highlighting the:

• Human rights violations that go hand-in-glove within degraded environments.
• Socio-economic political systems that fail to hold multinational corporations accountable for destroying environmental resources and perpetuating structural inequalities.
• Inadequate governance structures that discourage local communities from acting as co-producers of solutions to the environmental problems they encounter.
• The global, inequitable distribution of the world’s physical resources and conflicts that ensue among those seeking to acquire a share of the earth’s ‘natural’ resources.
• Neglect of cultural diversity including the undermining of aboriginal, indigenous and/or nomadic lifestyles, knowledges and expertise.
• Lack of environmentally friendly, sustainable socio-economic developments.
• Absence of local environmentally friendly community relationships that acknowledge interdependencies between people and the environment.
• Inadequate care of natural resources and poor environment-enhancing regional and national policies.
• Lack of universal publicly funded provisions for health and social care services that promote the well-being of people and their capacity to prevent, mitigate and recover from disasters.
• Lack of care for the physical environment in its own right (i.e. as an end in itself).
• Disregard of the environmental damage caused by armed conflicts including the carbon dioxide discharged and ensuing environmental degradation.
• Lack of recognition of the interdependencies among peoples, and between people and the biosphere/ecosystem.
• Absence of resilient built infrastructures, resources and communities (Dominelli, 2012).

Addressing these issues requires social workers to engage with the knowledge and expertise held by other disciplines and community residents. Accordingly, green social workers have sought to develop transdisciplinarity to highlight the links between the physical and social sciences in ‘doing science differently’ (Lane et al., 2011) with local communities. In Dominelli (2016), I differentiate between multidisciplinarity, interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity as follows:

• Multidisciplinarity consists of a group of disciplines working together, but with little or no attempt to develop a coherent team ethos of working together, learning from each other or developing new approaches as a result of their interactions.
• Interdisciplinarity comprises of a number of disciplines working together as one team in a specific project with specific aims that all those involved are aiming to fulfil, with a limited focus on how their work can be facilitated through some common approach or theoretical framework.
• Transdisciplinarity involves a number of disciplines working together on a specific project using a common holistic theoretical and practice framework. Specific endeavours are made to develop joint understandings about a problem that draws on the: local, indigenous, and expert knowledges; development of new approaches; considerations about how an issue might be resolved through coproduced solutions that engage with all forms of expertise; and that provides for changes in current policies and practices.

Physical scientists had highlighted the dangers of human activities on the environment some time earlier (e.g. Rachel Carson’s [1962] Silent Spring). She spelt out the dangers that chemicals in everyday artefacts such as pesticides in farming and cleaning fluids in the household were causing by polluting the soil and water. Some people’s behaviour changed as a result of reading it. President J. F. Kennedy initiated a scientific committee to investigate pesticides. I read the book as a teenager shortly after publication, and it engaged my interest in the topic. At that point, I was more intrigued by chemistry’s capacity to solve the problem, rather than understanding that changing people’s socio-economic behaviour was possibly a much better solution.

On one level, social work’s concern with the environment is not new. It is a thread deeply embedded in its professional foundations. Social work began with a focus on the person-in-the-environment with the Settlement Movement in Victorian London’s East End (Younghusband, 1978). However, its emphasis on the physical environment, especially built infrastructures such as housing, was lost with the ecological school of thought that followed Brofenbrenner (1979) who emphasised social systems as the environment within which people were located. By the 1990s, a number of American social work academics (Rogge, 1994, 2000; Besthorn, 2012; Besthorn and Meyer, 2010) and Canadian scholars (Coates, 2005; Ungar, 2002) had again raised the physical environment as an issue for social workers to take seriously. In the UK, I (Dominelli, 2002) had tried to include the physical environment in holistic, anti-oppressive approaches to social work, depicting it the anti-oppressive social work chart I devised. But, at that point, the holistic, transdisciplinary approach to the theory and practice of green social work had yet to be developed. Moreover, these strands have begun to come closer together as more authors collaborate on environmental theory development (Coates and Gray, 2012; Coates et al., 2013; Drolet et al., 2015; Alston and McKinnon, 2016).

While the social work academy saw a general narrowing of the profession’s wider remit, individual practitioners, particularly those embedded in community action, had responded to environmental concerns by supporting poor communities ravaged by different polluting agents released by chemical and nuclear explosions (e.g. Bhopal, India in 1984 and Chernobyl in the Ukraine in 1986, respectively). In 2010, with the support of Angie Yuen, then-president of IASSW, I initiated and completed the process whereby IASSW joined the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). This venture was a response to increased academic interest in social work’s roles in the environment (Dominelli, 2011). To promote green social work in the UK, I returned to community social work traditions to engage a local community in Durham in renewable energy as a way of exiting fuel poverty and unemployment through transdisciplinary green social work approaches (Dominelli, 2012).

Green social workers also support people who are inured physically and psychosocially during disasters and provide practical help such as water, food, medicine, clothing, shelter and family reunification. They also assist in repairing damaged environments and facilitate longer-term transformative initiatives that develop environmentally just, sustainable, life-enhancing forms of being and doing throughout the disaster cycle. Doing this in the reconstruction phase when preventative measures are being considered is especially important because most external actors and civil society organisations leave a site within six months of a disaster. Also, for those whose mental health is undermined by disasters, social workers provide psychosocial support (IASC, 2007). Indeed, this dimension is the area of social work intervention most often embedded in public consciousness. Although when the appropriate time to engage psychosocial workers and how this service should be provided is contested (Sim and Dominelli, 2016), the IASC (Inter-Agency Standing Committee) has developed guideli...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Preface
• Foreword: Green social work: a new direction for social work
• Introduction: why green social work?
• Part I Green social work theory
• Part II Natural disasters
• Part III Green agricultural practices
• Part IV Food (in)security
• Part V (Hu)man-made disasters
• Part VI Extreme weather events
• Part VII Disaster-driven migration
• Part VIII Health disasters
• Part IX Industrial and urban issues
• Part X Practicing green social work
• Part XI Education
• Conclusions: towards a green society and mainstreaming green social work in social work education and practice
• Name Index
• Subject index