Greening Social Work: Linking social and environmental justice in social work theory and

practice

by Lena Dominelli, Durham University

Social work has had an ecological perspective for many years (Brofenbrenner, 1979), but

despite its historical credentials in embedding the person-in-the environment, concerns

for the physical environment and how the use of this global resource impacts upon human

well-being are a fairly recent addition to the profession’s approaches to problem-solving

(Rogge, 2000; Dominelli, 2012). Green social work (Dominelli, 2012a) has been

significant in introducing new issues in debates about the environment. These have

included: the mainstreaming of environmental considerations so that the physical

environment becomes firmly embedded within ecological perspectives and professional

preoccupations , a widening of the theoretical and practice base to ensure that social and

environmental justice are considered integral to any environmental (in its widest sense)

involvement by social workers; highlighting the need to think of innovative approaches to

socio-economic development if meeting human needs is to not cost the earth; and making

disaster interventions core elements in the social work repertoire of knowledge, skills,

capacity building and in curriculum formulation.

In this chapter, I define green social work, contending that greening the profession is

central in meeting the challenges it faces in the 21st century, and that social justice and

environmental justice go hand-in-hand with ethical, socially just practice.

The remit of green social work

Green social work prioritises holistic practice, the interdependencies between people and

the physical environment, and the connections among peoples because these are essential

to linking social and environmental justice together. I invented the term green social

work (Dominelli, 2012a) to emphasise what distinguishes green social work from

environmental social work as depicted by Besthorn (2012); and Gray et al. (2012). These

differences cover green social work’s commitment to: holism; a structural analysis;

linking social and environmental justice; challenging neoliberal forms of social

development; and highlighting the interdependencies among peoples and between

peoples and their physical and social environments. I defined green social work (1) as:

‘a form of holistic professional social work practice that focuses on the:

interdependencies amongst people, the social organisation of relationships between

people and the flora and fauna in their natural habitats; and the interactions between

socio-economic and physical environmental crises and interpersonal behaviours

that undermine the well-being of human beings and planet earth. It proposes to

address these issues by arguing for a profound transformation in how people

conceptualise the social basis of their society, their relationships with each other,

living things and the inanimate world, to: tackle structural inequalities including

the unequal distribution of power and resources; poverty; various ‘isms’; promote

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global interdependencies; and utilise limited natural resources including land, air,

water and energy sources and minerals for the benefit of all rather than the

privileged few. The aim of green social work is to work for the reform of the

socio-political and economic forces that have a deleterious impact upon the quality

of life of poor and marginalised populations and secure the policy changes and

social transformations necessary for enhancing the well-being of people and the

planet today and in the future’(Dominelli, 2012: 25) .

Green social work continues the tradition that acknowledges the political nature of the

profession (Parry et al., 1979; Dominelli, 1997), including its tendency to support

difficult causes and advocate for marginalised and disenfranchised groups. An important

element within the lives of marginalised peoples is achieving a balance between

livelihoods, the centralisation of jobs in cities, and environmental degradation. In Green

Social Work, I have called the growth in megacities, often with slums as the living habitat

for poor peoples, hyper-urbanisation. Given the popularity of ever-larger cities globally,

this issue has to be addressed because the infrastructures in cities – water, sanitation,

power supplies, transportation, housing, schools, and health facilities are all being

stretched beyond their limits (Schumpeter, 1999). Hyper-urbanisation increases

population density as high-rise apartments become the norm for those lucky enough to be

able either to afford to rent these or to purchase them. Meanwhile, the physical

environment becomes more and more stressed to meet the needs of ever increasing

numbers of people.

The growth of slums world-wide attests to the failure of planners and developers to

deliver goods and services that meet people’s needs sustainably. The United Nations

Human Settlement Programme (UN-Habitat) Report in 2014 revealed that 863 million

people were living in slums in 2013 compared to 650 million in 1990. This indicates that

hyper-urbanisation is not meeting the needs of those people attracted to cities by the lure

of jobs which are often non-existent or poorly paid. The growth of ‘zero hours contracts’

and service sector employment that pays a pittance has meant that the numbers of

working poor people are growing very fast. And, they remain unable to purchase their

basic requirements despite working 70 hours a week in several posts (Ehenreich, 2002).

Their lives are the epitome of super-exploitation in an uncaring neoliberal capitalist

system that keeps demanding more sacrifices from them, even as they make their way to

rapidly expanding food-banks that are edifices of shame, or monuments to the declining

welfare states of the West, as poor families seek to deal with the starvation and

immiseration in their midst. Would a more sustainable approach to providing well-paid,

decent jobs and sustainable livelihoods for the poorest inhabitants be better met by

developing opportunities in tune with the environment in the communities in which they

already exist? Schumpeter’s (1973, 1999) arguments for the ‘small is beautiful’ approach

to development would suggest that this could be so. And, it would curb the growth in

highly congested urban and hyper-urban areas which are not sustainable. Growing

urbanisation is touted as an achievement of humanity. For green social workers, it is time

to challenge this assumption and provide sustainable alternatives through a collaborative,

participative action research approach involving communities and residents.

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Placing a price on a natural good, namely land, as economists have done has simply

increased its utility value by subjecting it to market discipline, projecting it as a scarce

commodity that fetches premium prices and encouraging expansion onto green field sites

for construction purposes to ease profit-making by reducing costs. Appropriating land

for high density development has also increased pollution. Today’s cities account for 70

per cent of the greenhouse gases that drive climate change. Moving away from cities as

the main drivers of economic expansion could provide opportunities for community-led,

renewable forms of energy consumption and sustainable development that can drive local

economies in new and exciting directions. Social workers should lobby politicians to

change their priorities in this regard.

The issue of marginalisation and disenfranchisement is also important in addressing

environmental justice because most toxic materials are dumped in poor communities

where politicians are less concerned about electoral power than in other locations.

Bullard (2000), in highlighting this point coined the term ‘environmental racism’ to

encapsulate the correlation between toxic chemicals dumped in the environment and

residential areas of poor African Americans in the USA. Poverty, a structural issue for

social workers, is exposed through green perspectives as a factor to be incorporated fully

in considering the interventions of those committed to greening the profession. This is

because poverty exacerbates the impact of disasters, whether natural or (hu)man-made

(Pelling, 2003); and affects the levels of resilience that poor communities can achieve

without securing additional resources in knowledge, skills, finances and materials.

Gendered patriarchal relations

Marginality is also important in exploring the impact of social divisions on experiences

of social and environmental justice. For example, in relation to gender, and Alston and

Whittenbury (2012) and my own work (Dominelli, 2012b,c) indicate that women are

subject to discrimination when it comes to aid distribution. Yet, they are expected to

provide any care needed by their families including earning an income if the man cannot

do so, or is unavailable. They also experience increased levels of domestic and sexual

violence, even in the camps that are to provide them with refuge (Hirsch, 2012).

Moreover, women provide the informal care that covers the gap between formal

provisions and what is needed by victim-survivors (Dominelli, 2012b). I also identify

how poor men are forgotten in aid processes (Dominelli, 2014a). When men lose their

livelihoods, there are few, if any specific provisions for men either to become retrained or

to acquire new positions. Consequently, they hang about their communities, drinking

alcohol, fighting with each other and being violent against women and children. A Sri

Lankan villager interviewed for the Internationalising Institutional and Professional

Practices (IIPP), a research project that I headed into the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami in

Sri Lanka and funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) in the UK

claimed (2):

‘Our boys were very good, they helped others who came to clear the dirt, bury the

bodies, and clean the houses. Some of the young people had lost their boats and

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fishing things and they were sad. Some bad things also happened. Some of the

boys got to drink arrack and began to fight’.

Enabling men to continue with their provider role, especially in societies with traditional

patriarchal cultures is important in giving them a purpose that can save face and facilitate

their capacity to support their families. A desire to transform patriarchal relations

through aid provision was not a specific goal mentioned by any of the IIPP project

respondents, and so cannot be imposed on their agenda by outsiders. Although some

women managed to secure changes in their role within particular families, it was always

within the context of not starting out to transform patriarchal relations. Sometimes, roles

were altered as a by-product of securing family livelihoods as occurred when a group of

women working on their own income generation project eventually gained sufficient

confidence in their organisational skills to use funds gained through their work to arrange

their own visit to the Temple of the Tooth in Kandy - an iconic place for Buddhists.

While these women acted out of traditional roles, they did not challenge their place or

role within the family through this activity.

Other victim-survivors are marginalised by the disempowering effects of aid which is

given inappropriately without consulting local people or involving them in making

decisions about the reconstruction of their community (Hancock, 1991; Hoogvelt 2007;

Dominelli, 2014). Such interventions disempower aid recipients and waste scarce

resources as well as providing services that are rejected because they are culturally

inappropriate or have to be ‘put up with’. This situation is depicted by one aid worker

who was interviewed for the IIPP study. Reflecting back on housing construction during

the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, the villager claims:

‘…in my area we have a two kitchens…one is for the vegetarian and other one is

non vegetarian. That is our cultural context. If you want to build a new house, we

need two kitchens, a small kitchen and the big kitchen. But [the donors] with…the

funds, the people [designing the] architecture, did not engage the people. They

planned on their own….[so] after the tsunami it was entirely an utter failure. Even

house construction done by the [name of organisation], for example if you visit

[place] house area…people are not at all happy. [And] there are water problems

again’.

Top-down approaches to aid distribution and delivery not only disempower local

residents by providing inappropriate services as indicated in the above vignette, but they

also made aid receipients dependent on aid ‘handouts’. As this aid worker states:

‘[The] community has potential [and] has resource[s] to develop on their own. The

problem is when people are not motivated and not empowered to do so….People

[rely] on dependency. It is the dependency [which is a problem]. Just delivering

welfare services without having a systematic way of assessing them and enabling

people to make their own choices and…[self-organise] is [unhelpful]’.

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This interviewee went on to describe the growth in ‘bottom-up’ approaches to aid

distribution as a result of lessons learnt during the 2004 Tsunami. These were applied in

the context of the Sri Lankan civil war by the government because bottom-up strategies

could facilitate engagement with local communities: ‘We should respect the local

cultural community to decide on their own needs’, a villager said in the IIPP study.

Egalitarian social relations, community engagement and the full involvement of local

residents and the organisations they develop is an integral part of green social work. It

leads to the coproduction of solutions to community-defined problems, thus enabling

them to devise culturally relevant and locality specific interventions that they own. These

also involve women.

Moreover, community members are usually the first to offer assistance in a disaster

because they are on the spot. Women, as members of communities charged with caring

for others, often respond quickly to meet perceived needs. Here is an example given by a

villager interviewed for the IIPP project:

‘a women’s organization [name of organisation] in [name of village]…are [all]

volunteers. They responded. They told me [interviewee] that they responded

immediately after tsunami. They pooled their own rice and everything and they

cooked a meal and delivered it [to community members] and they worked on [the

relief efforts]. Within half an hour of the tsunami, they [the women] started to

work with the community’.

Women are central to disaster interventions processes at every stage of the disaster cycle

from prevention, immediate relief, recovery, reconstruction and back to prevention.

Their contributions are central to community survival, but are rarely recognised as such

(Pittaway et al., 2007).

Professional social work meeting the challenges of the 21st century

The desire of Sri Lankan aid recipients in the IIPP project to have a proactive and

determining role in designing and delivering humanitarian services was a major challenge

for organisations delivering aid. Those that adopted disaster interventions that were

driven by top-down approaches planned externally (whether nationally within the country

or overseas), were less likely to succeed. Thus, encouraging bottom-up or grassroots

approaches provided appropriate counter-measures. Hierarchal relations are also a key

challenge for social workers to address in their responses to tragic events. Research such

as the IIPP’s clearly demonstrates that empowering, bottom-up approaches that release

local community energies and facilitate the coproduction of solutions involving scientific

expertise and local or indigenous knowledges embedded within the local cultural context

and decision-making structures are better equipped to enhance resilience that is lasting

and enables victim-survivors to move from one phase of the disaster rebuilding process to

the next. Thus, social workers can assist community mobilization processes during the

immediate relief, recovery and post-disaster reconstruction phases. They can also

encourage mutual self-help that draws on external resources to bolster local endeavours

instead of the reverse, i.e., allowing external organisations to appropriate local resources.

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The twenty-first century has provided both opportunities and challenges for the

profession across its entire remit. The opportunities are linked to cheap airplane travel

that collapse notions of place and space and make it easier for people to move around the

globe, whether as workers (White, 2007), students (Vickers and Dominelli, 2014) or as

service users who move from the Global South to the Global North and decide to stay

because they can get better facilities in the West for family members like disabled

children (Tinarwo, 2014). The use of internet, information technologies including smart

phones and Skype now allow social workers to talk across borders, share curricula in real

time, and learn about new forms of practice in countries other than their own. Challenges

also cover the internationalisation of social problems ranging from poverty to

humanitarian aid.

Humanitarian aid is both an opportunity to provide much needed resources to those in

need whether this occurs as a result of (hu)man-made armed conflict as in Syria or in

response to natural disasters such as earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, volcanic

eruptions, floods, heat waves, and cold snaps, or industrial disasters caused by chemical

spills. Climate change is exacerbating these types of disasters, and leading to an increase

in their frequency and intensity (Oven et al., 2012). Social workers have been latecomers

to climate change debates, but are inevitably drawn into providing the services that

victim-survivors require (Dominelli, 2011). Examples of these include providing water,

food, clothing, medicines, temporary housing and family reunification services

immediately after a disaster strikes.

Training in humanitarian aid and disaster interventions is also limited, although it should

become part of the mainstream curriculum and specific degrees awarded in the subject.

An important aspect of this curriculum is that it should include training in the physical

and social sciences because these contain information that would be of use to

practitioners (Dominelli, 2013). For example, I have used landslide maps to assist

practitioners placing people in evacuation camps after earthquakes in both Haiti and

China - in Lushan and Yunnan, and the Uttarkhand floods in India/Nepal to identify

places that people should stay away from because they are unsafe potential landslide

sites. Passing on specialist satellite maps are one way in which scientific knowledge can

be transferred to social workers to strengthen their understandings about what evacuation

sites are safer than others. It is also a task in which a social worker can translate complex

scientific knowledge for use in everyday humanitarian action on the ground.

Seismological maps that expose known faults (stresses in the earth’s crust that can

produce earthquakes) would also enable practitioners to make better decisions about

advice given to local people about which locations are safer for construction because they

could detect whether or not a proposed building is sitting on fault lines that stress the

earth’s crust and cause movements that could lead to building damage or collapse.

This approach of drawing knowledge from different disciplines has been variously called

transdisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or multidisciplinary. I have tried to distinguish

between them as follows:

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• Multidisciplinarity – 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 – 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 – 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: knowledges (expert, locale and indigenous), development of new

approaches; considerations about how an issue might be resolved through

coproduced solutions that draw upon all expertises; and provide for changes in

current policies and practices.

These definitions draw on insights considered by Callon (1999) and Lane et al (2011)

whereby the coproduction of knowledge focuses on the various models utilised in science

and technology to develop a different way of ‘doing science’ in community settings.

These entailed four approaches that were described as the ‘involvement of lay people’;

‘public education’, ‘public debate’ and the ‘coproduction of knowledge’.

In the UK, research funding councils are promoting trans/interdisciplinary research

projects. Although a social worker and sociologist, I have been involved in several of

these that included both the physical and social sciences. For example, the EPSRC

(Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council) along with the ESRC (Economic

and Social Research Council) funded a project called BIOPICCC (Built Infrastructures

and Health and Social Care Provisions for Older People in Conditions of Climate

Change) where I was a co-investigator along with others including health experts and

engineers; the NERC (Natural Environmental Research Council) and ESRC funded the

Earthquake without Frontiers (EwF) project in which I am involved alongside

seismologists, landslide experts, geologists, veterinarians, geographers, and historians

among others to develop community based understandings of hazards, risks and

responses to disasters. Another NERC and ESRC funded project is called Strengthening

Resilience in Volcanic Areas (STREVA). This one covers volcanic activity, which until

the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull volcanic eruption in Iceland disrupted air traffic across Europe,

was considered incidental to Northern European interests. Now, learning from these

trans/interdisciplinary kinds of projects is essential if new scientific knowledge is to build

on what local communities already know and develop new information and solutions to

the intractable social and humanitarian problems that the world faces. While these

illustrations are drawn from the UK experience, in an interdependent and highly

integrated world, it is likely that Swedish research councils are adopting similar

strategies. An interesting exercise for you would be to discover what initiatives are being

taken in this regard in your country.

A good case study in ‘doing science differently is offered by Lane et al (2011) which you

can access online. In this article, engineers, among other experts, became involved in

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community mobilisations aimed at developing flood defences, doing community

engagement work that any social worker would be familiar with (Lane et al., 2011).

Working in a trans/interdisciplinary way to coproduce solutions with local communities

is in itself a challenge to scientific experts who are unused to doing such work (Lane,

2011), but it is one that social workers can help them to deal with. Social work, as an

interdisciplinary subject in its own right (Dominelli, 1997) draws on many different

disciplines and is accustomed to working across professional boundaries, and is well-

placed to do so when conversing with other disciplines whether it is to help practitioners

do better disaster interventions, or assist other disciplines to acquire the mobilisation

skills that they already possess as social workers.

Socially just practice

From a green social work perspective, socially just practice encompasses environmental

and social justice as integral parts of the work done in preventing disasters, preparing for

them and responding to them. Social injustice is the lack of opportunity and resources to

participate fully in the social life of a community or society which thereby blocks the

development of an individual’s talents. Environmental justice is concerned with ensuring

that the physical environment is respected and cared for so that people’s needs might be

met without costing the earth. Environmental care retains the earth’s capacity to sustain

human life across the planet rather than being exploited as a resource to provide profits

for the wealthy few as is currently occurring in neoliberal forms of social development.

Globalisation aimed at making profits has resulted in environmental injustice whereby

poor communities become the sites for toxic waste dumps that have a deleterious impact

upon their health while wealthy people live in healthy environments with green trees,

grass and flowers adorning their homes.

To tackle these concerns, knowledge about housing, income generation and health issues

is essential. Given that today’s crucial social context is that of global neoliberal capitalist

development, social workers can deepen their understanding of what this entails by

reading articles on globalisation, socio-economic development and macro-level decision-

making in international corporations as their activities carry implications for local

communities. These include not only their decisions about investments or their

withdrawal to other locations, but also production, reproduction and consumption

capacities in a community, and local capabilities in caring for or reclaiming the use of the

physical environment. For example, in the UK, cuts in the welfare state have opened the

door for private multinational companies to provide services for children, older people

and prisoners. These usually promote non-unionised workplaces, pay lower wages than

their public sector counterparts and provide less job security (Ehenreich, 2002;

McLuskey, 2014). Thus, they add to the exploitation of workers to cut costs and

maximise profits. Services can also become subject to the vagaries of the market, e.g.,

this occurred when Southern Cross closed down its homes for older people because it was

not making profits on these (Triggle, 2011; Dominelli, 2014). Their sudden closure

meant that thousands of older people were made homeless and social workers had the

onerous task of finding alternative homes for them in a sector that had decimated the

number of places available to them.

Comment [MK1]: A reference would be

helpful here

Comment [DL2]: McLuskey, L. (2014)

Pay Up for Public Services. London: UNITE, the Union.

Also, the Enhenreich (2002) already given

Comment [MK3]: A reference would be

helpful here

Comment [DL4]: Triggle, N. (2011)

‘Southern Cross Set to Snut Down and Stop

Running Homes’, BBC News, 11 July,

Available on

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-

14102750 Accessed 20 October 2014.

Dominelli, L. (2014) ‘The Age of Austerity in Welfare Services: Impact Upon Social Work and Marginalised People’ in Participation, Marginalisation and Welfare Services: Concepts, Politics and Practices Across European Countries, Aila-Leena Matthies and Lars Uggerhoj (eds.). Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 79-94.

9

Thus, socially just practice covers socio-economic issues in a holistic way. Social

workers, therefore cover a range of concerns. These include the ability to: earn a decent

living wage through the sale of one’s labour; clear debris after disasters; establish new

forms of social production, reproduction and consumption that provide for the needs of

all residents on an equitable basis; protect the physical environment from rapacious

exploitation that benefits the few; secure healthy environments in which individuals and

groups can flourish and grow; receive care and give it without becoming bankrupt in the

process; use education to raise consciousness about reducing demands on the physical

environment; and ensure sustainability that protects the interests of future generations of

people, flora and fauna alongside an equitable distribution of the earth’s bounty.

The contemporary neoliberal world has yet to recover from one of the worst fiscal crisis

since the 1930s. The failure of states to control multinationals and guarantee residents

the opportunity to earn a living wage is compounded by its own actions. State-induced

poverty is rising through public expenditure cuts that have initiated policy changes

deleterious to human well-being. These cuts have: reduced benefit levels from those

eligible for them; withdrawn eligibility from groups requiring services by redefining

eligibility criteria as occurred when those under the age of 25 become denied housing

benefit; excluded more people from accessing services and consigned them to the

category of ‘undeserving’ claimants; and introduced service user charges and private

provisions in a market-place from which millions are excluded through the lack of

wherewithal to purchase goods and services. (Wintour, 2013; Dominelli, 2014)

The attempt to encourage personalisation and modernisation as has occurred in the UK

does not eliminate these bleak prospects for service users. Personalisation was part of the

attempt to ‘modernise’ public services by giving service users greater choice and control

over the services they used. Thus, service users were given personal budgets whereby

they could purchase whatever services they felt would meet their needs. These budgets

are capped and the service user becomes responsible for paying the salary, national

insurance contributions and taxes of any person they ‘employ’ to provide them with a

service. Managing to do all of this is both an intellectual and a financial challenge. But

while service users are seeing savage public expenditure cuts and having to ‘do more

with less’, we have a socio-economic order wherein 1,645 individual billionaires live in

unparalleled luxury while 3 billion live on less than $US2-00 per day. Worse than that,

the numbers of billionaires grew from 793 in 2005 to 1,210 by 2010 and 1,645 by2013,

and had amassed between them a value of $US6.7 trillion (Kroll and Fass, 2011; Dolan

and Kroll, 2014). Surprisingly, this huge growth in the numbers of the wealthy elite has

occurred during a recession!

However, the landscape among this super-rich group is changing as China, India and

Russia have challenged American dominance of the billionaires’ list. After being second

for 4 consecutive years, Bill Gates has once again resumed the title of the richest man in

the world. Gender inequality is also evident among this elite as only 152 among the total

number of billionaires were women, and the richest woman, Liliane Bettencourt had less

than half the amount held by Bill Gates. Women are, however, over-represented among

Comment [MK5]: A reference would be helpful here

Comment [DL6]: Wintour, P. (2013) ‘Conservatives to withdraw key benefits

from unemployed under-25s’, The

Guardian, 2 Oct. Available on http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/

oct/02/conservatives-housing-benefit-

jobseekers-allowance-unemployed-under-25s Accessed on 20 October 2014.

10

the world’s poor because they make up approximately 70 per cent of those ranks.

Moreover, inequality is growing both between countries and within countries. At the

same time, while one billion people over-consume food, one billion people starve with

hunger and another one billion are malnourished while food prices rise. One billion

people live in houses lacking clean drinking water, 2.6 billion are without sanitation and

1.6 billion people have no electricity. Additionally, 15 million people die annually

because drugs for curable diseases are unaffordable and/or inaccessible to them

(Newsweek, 4-11 June 2012: 49). These gross inequalities form the basis of the green

social work critique of the socio-economic status quo and capitalist market-based models

of development.

On the health front, Chatham-Stephens et al, (2013) analysed 373 toxic waste sites in

India, Indonesia and the Philippines and identified that around 8.6 million people were

exposed to dangerous levels of lead, asbestos, hexavalent chromium and other hazardous

materials. Women and children were among the most vulnerable groups. Although the

products that yield such waste are typically not consumed in the communities that suffer

the consequences, human health and reproduction in such locations are particularly badly

hit. The precarious health status of local residents is exacerbated by under-nutrition and

susceptibility to infectious diseases already prevalent in such localities. These unequal

outcomes in health provide ammunition for social workers to argue that concentrating

scientific energy on cleaning up toxic wastes and finding ways of meeting human needs

that are more sustainable and renewable are matters of urgency. So, is utilising

indigenous knowledges of how planet earth should be treated. In Canada, First Nations

knowledge teaches people to act as custodians of the earth rather than as consumers, and

prioritises using only the resources absolutely necessary to meet today’s needs so that

those of tomorrow might also be met.

All is not total doom and gloom, however. The United Nations (UN) has initiated a

programme under the UN Global Compact, UN Environment Programme and UNFCCC

(Framework Convention on Climate Change) that began to work with commercial

companies on a voluntary basis to reduce carbon emissions and work with local

communities to improve their commitment to sustainable development. Whether this

voluntary initiative will bear fruit remains to be seen. But, there is money to be made by

investing in renewable energy and products, e.g., solar cookers to replace wood or dung

burning ones in many industrialising countries, so green technologies may well become

subverted by market discipline in future.

Population dynamics are an important part of the sustainability equation as well. The

earth does not have the resources needed to sustain 10 billion or more people (the UN’s

projected population later this century) at North American levels of consumption, so

reductions in consumption for those who over-consume are in order. Sustainable socio-

economic development, education, sustainable livelihoods, birth control, the development

of health, social welfare and social care policies to protect an ageing population all have a

role to play in ensuring that there is an equitable use of the earth’s resources for now and

in the future. Population growth will also impact upon migratory movements of people,

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especially if they have to leave stressed or environmentally degraded environments

because climate change has not been brought under control.

Socially just practice, therefore, is a complicated matter for green social workers to

deliver upon. However, working in collaborative, egalitarian partnerships with local

residents and organisations would enable them to achieve this goal through coproduced

knowledge formation and innovation for sustainable development.

Conclusions

Green social workers have a critical role to play in the realisation of social and

environmental justice. Below, I summarise the roles that social workers can play in

securing social and environmental justice through the work they do in promoting

resilience before, during and after disasters according to equitable and ethically sound

principles (Dominelli, 2012a). These are as follows:

Doing no harm to people, the planet’s flora, fauna or physical environmental;

Consciousness-raising whereby practitioners discuss possible scenarios about

reducing greenhouse gases through the development of alternative models of

sustainable socio-economic development and acting as cultural interpreters who

facilitate discussions across disciplines, organisations and societies, all of which are

embedded within different cultural entities;

Lobbying for preventative measures taken at local level, for example house

construction, to take account of local conditions, traditions and resources; and at

national and international levels by advocating for policy changes that facilitate

access to green technologies, equitable sharing of resources regardless of country

boundaries and tackling (hu)man-induced climate change;

Mobilising communities to reduce carbon emissions and to care for the physical

environment as an integral part of the work undertaken in communities;

Coproducing solutions by engaging communities of scientific experts and local

residents to share their respective knowledges and find new solutions to identified

problems together;

Dialoguing with physical scientists, other professionals and policymakers, and

using the media to change policies at local, national and international levels; and

Developing curricula that cover climate change, sustainable development and

disaster interventions that build individual and community resiliences.

People have a responsibility to act as custodians of the earth, to ensure that it develops

and evolves rather than being subjected to exploitative extraction of its resources. By

acknowledging that people and the ecosystem are interlinked, people are enabled to

collaborate in ecological partnerships that enable both to flourish. In this way, people

will live in harmony with nature and have their needs met. Otherwise, people will

compound the planet’s fragility and make their own existence even more precarious.

Green social work is a challenge to us all. Can social workers rise to this? My answer is

an unequivocal, ‘Yes, we can. Yes, we must’.

12

Notes:

1. The development of green social work began in the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami

through the Rebuilding Peoples’ Lives Network (RIPL) originated by the

International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) in January 2005 to

support victim-survivors of that disaster. I was chosen as its Chair and have been

linked to its activities in different disasters since. From 2010, its work became

incorporated into IASSW’s Committee Structures, and I am Chair of its

Sustainability, Disaster Interventions and Climate Change Committee. I have also

played a key role in devising IASSW’s policies on disasters and climate change.

This work was enhanced by my growing interest in social work’s role during

times of disaster and research and practice linked to this in various countries

including China, Chile, India, Japan, and New Zealand.

2. This ethnographic study ran from 2009-2012 and covered 12 villages. Various

papers have emerged from it. Here, I wish to acknowledge the work of the Co-

Investigator (Joy Palmer-Cooper), the local researchers in Sri Lanka including

Kanthi Pereira and Sunil Shantha, and UK Research Associates (Mark Powell,

Tom Vickers and Beth Casey) for their contributions to the work of the project.

Quotes from the 368 in-depth interviews will be utilised in this paper, and

attributed to the category of person making them to protect their identities.

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