Green Social Work E-Book

Lena Dominelli

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 472

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Social work is the profession that claims to intervene to enhance people's well-being. However, social workers have played a low-key role in environmental issues that increasingly impact on people's well-being, both locally and globally.

This compelling new contribution confronts this topic head-on, examining environmental issues from a social work perspective. Lena Dominelli draws attention to the important voice of practitioners working on the ground in the aftermath of environmental disasters, whether these are caused by climate change, industrial accidents or human conflict. The author explores the concept of ‘green social work' and its role in using environmental crises to address poverty and other forms of structural inequalities, to obtain more equitable allocations of limited natural resources and to tackle global socio-political forces that have a damaging impact upon the quality of life of poor and marginalized populations at local levels. The resolution of these matters is linked to community initiatives that social workers can engage in to ensure that the quality of life of poor people can be enhanced without costing the Earth.

This important book will appeal to those in the fields of social work, social policy, sociology and human geography. It powerfully reveals how environmental issues are an integral part of social work's remit if it is to retain its currency in the modern world and emphasize its relevance to the social issues that societies have to resolve in the twenty-first century.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

1 Introduction

Setting the Scene

The Structure of the Book

2 A Professional Crisis within Social and Environmental Calamities

Introduction

A Profession in Turmoil

The New Challenges Facing the Profession

Fiscal, Social and Environmental Crises

Urbanization and Slum Clearances

Conclusions

3 Reclaiming Industrialization and Urbanization for People

Introduction

Urbanization, a Defining Feature of Industrial Capitalism

Developing Alternatives to and within Centralized Urbanization

Conclusions

4 Industrial Pollution, Environmental Degradation and People’s Resilience

Introduction

Reconceptualizing Resilience

Industrial Pollution and Accidents

Chemical Pollutants and Radioactive Gas Escapes

Caring for the Carers in Disaster Situations

Guidelines for a Virtual Helpline Support Network in Disaster Situations: The Christchurch Example

Social Worker Involvement in Industrial Pollution and Environmental Degradation Issues

Conclusions

5 Climate Change, Renewable Energy and Solving Social Problems

Introduction

Climate Change

The Polluter–Victim Binary

Climate Change Endeavours Led by the United Nations

Environmental Justice

Social Work Action on Climate Change

Risk Reduction

Conclusions

6 Environmental Crises, Social Conflict and Mass Migrations

Introduction

The Impact of Environmental Crises on People’s Movements

Migration as a Response to Social, Economic and Environmental Crises

Environmental Degradation and Food Production

Conclusions

7 Environmental Degradation, Natural Disasters and Marginalization

Introduction

Exploring Marginalization and Social Exclusion

Sustainable Development

Coping with the Demands of a Growing World Population

‘Natural’ Disasters are Aggravated by Human Actions

Conclusions

8 Scarce Natural Resources and Inter-Country Conflict Resolution

Introduction

Scarce Resources and the Dynamics of Place and Space

Social Workers’ Involvement in Situations of Resource Scarcity

Conclusions

9 Interrogating Worldviews: From Unsustainable to Sustainable Ways of Reframing Peoples’ Relationships to Living Environments

Introduction

Indigenous Worldviews

Indigenous Peoples’ Struggles for Land and Self-Determination

A First Nations Environmental Assessment Framework

Conclusions

10 Conclusions: Green Social Work

Introduction

Developing Holistic, Sustainable Practices

Working for a Sustainable, Interdependent and Healthy Planet that Nurtures All Peoples and Their Environments

Building Capacity in Communities

Conclusions

Bibliography

Author index

Subject index

Copyright © Lena Dominelli 2012

The right of Lena Dominelli to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2012 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5400-3

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5401-0(pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6204-6(Single-user ebook)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Dedicated to my mother, Maria G Dominelli and to my great friend, Katherine A Kendall

Acknowledgements

There are so many people to thank when writing a book that encompasses so much territory. You are located all over the world, and too numerous to mention by name. But my gratitude for your inspiration, help and words of comfort is extensive. Without your encouragement and assistance this book would not have been written. Also, I am indebted to the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESRC) for providing the bedrock on which Green Social Work rests. Its funding of ‘Internationalizing Institutional and Professional Practices: Community Partnership Models of Change in Post-Tsunami Sri Lanka’, a project on the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, and the experiences of supporting disaster survivors through the Disaster Intervention on Climate Change Committees of the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) sparked my interest and research into a wide range of disasters, resilience and the indomitable human spirit.

I want to thank my family for the endless support they have offered when I am stressed out by the writing project, technology going wrong, and all the other awful things that happen in daily life that call upon our resilience and supportive networks. You were always there for me and helped me move on with the task to hand.

I also thank the publishers for their endless words of encouragement and willingness to see the project to its completion. And, although I express my gratitude to all my colleagues at the School of Applied Social Sciences and the Institute of Hazards, Risk and Resilience Research at Durham University for their support of this venture, I wish, however, to identify and especially thank several of them individually – Tom McLeish, Stuart Lane and Simon Hackett – for ensuring that I engaged wholeheartedly with the physical and natural scientists to show that the world can become a better place if the disciplinary divide in the sciences can be overcome and we work together.

Lena Dominelli

1

Introduction

Setting the Scene

Environmental crises and their impact on diverse populations across the globe have challenged social work practice at the beginning of the second decade of the twenty-first century not only by the frequency of their occurrence, but also by their complexity and the substantial damage caused to the Earth’s physical environment and well-being of the countless numbers of people, animals and plants living in it. Those linked to natural hazards such as the 2010 earthquakes that occurred in Haiti, Chile and Christchurch and the 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch and Japan, the latter of which also encompassed multiple hazards caused by a tsunami and radioactive leakages, have overwhelmed the helping services by the magnitude of the damage caused. They have also highlighted the linkages between human behaviours, economic imperatives and social policies and the extent of suffering experienced by victim-survivors. For example, corruption among the elites of Haiti, the inability to observe building regulations in Chile, and corporate secrecy in Japan meant that the damage was more extensive than it need have been and that emergency responses were hampered by the lack of information, infrastructures and resources vital for dealing with these catastrophes. Poor women, children and men bear the brunt of these failures. Victim-survivors’ experiences demand transformations in the conceptualization of and responses to disasters, as does caring for the environment. Social workers, as the professionals responsible for safeguarding human well-being must rise to the challenges posed by this state of affairs.

While social workers have provided humanitarian assistance and counselling services to those on the ground, their voice has scarcely been heard in the media. Additionally, it is absent from many of the decision-making structures formulating policy for preventing large-scale devastation in the future, and addressing needs during calamitous events and afterwards. Social workers’ lack of involvement is not unexpected. Their tasks involve supporting those requiring assistance. But they rarely have time to engage with the wider issues of practice, including the development of social policies that draw lessons from micro-level practice and affirmation of their expertise when other professionals extending their roles seek to appropriate it. The profession has a wide-ranging remit, but social workers have played a minor role in deliberations about the deleterious impact of environmental disasters on people’s well-being, in local communities and globally.

Except for community workers, those intervening in deprived localities with poor housing stock have seldom taken action to raise consciousness about the appalling physical surroundings in which service users or clients live. Social workers might advocate for a family needing a new home to protect children suffering from respiratory ailments caused by damp, mouldy housing, but, unless they are community workers, they would not engage in collective action to repair or replace decrepit properties in an entire estate. Their voice has been virtually absent from climate change discussions. Yet, they work in different communities in the aftermath of environmental disasters, whether these are caused by climate change, nature, or industrial accidents like the one that occurred in Bhopal, India, or conflicts between populations like those happening in the slums of Nairobi in Kenya. In the latter, refugees escaping the loss of grazing lands through droughts that had destroyed traditional lifestyles became embroiled in tense confrontations with existing slum dwellers.

This book contributes to filling the gap in the literature caused by the shortage of publications that specifically address environmental issues from a social work perspective, advocating for and strengthening the voice of social workers who support people during disasters at policy-making and practice levels, however and wherever these take place. There are a limited number of texts that address what has been termed environmental social work and ecological social work. I focus on what I call green social work because I want to produce a book that transcends the concerns of ecological social work, which is a systems-based approach to the mainstream social work preoccupation with the person in their environment, usually defined as their social environment (Van Wormer and Besthorn, 2011), e.g., Gill and Jack (2003). Such writings tend to ignore power relations based on geo-political social structures that have a deleterious impact upon the quality of life of poor and marginalized populations and the Earth’s flora and fauna. They also fail to endorse action that could secure the changes necessary for enhancing the well-being of both human beings and the planet, I argue that green social work focuses on how responses to environmental crises must both challenge and address poverty, structural inequalities, socio-economic disparities, industrialization processes, consumption patterns, diverse contexts, global interdependencies and limited natural resources.

Given the profession’s embeddedness in life-enhancing micro-practice in everyday routines, I argue that contemporary social work has a vested interest in attending to environmental issues as an integral part of its daily remit if it is to retain its currency in contemporary societies, emphasize its relevance to the social issues that peoples have to resolve in the twenty-first century and widen its scope if it is to prevent the haemorrhaging of its activities to related professions including health, geography, psychology and psychiatry. Additionally, practice has to engage with both local and global contexts to develop those that are locality-specific and culturally relevant and that engage with global interdependencies within and between countries. This goal configures the environment as a socially constructed meaningful discursive space that encompasses physical and material realities, socio-economic, political and cultural structures, and spiritual and emotional places that come together in one whole as the space in which individuals breathe their lives symbolically, in real and imaginary time.

I suggest that poverty is a constant, on-going disaster in its own right and not simply an additional factor to be considered in determining individual vulnerability to disasters. This sense of it is not adequately conceptualized in the existing literature. I connect this wider, structural notion of poverty to social justice claims that contemporary citizenship is denied to low-income people who cannot overcome poverty or participate in market-based solutions to social problems, including climate change. Nor can these groups afford to purchase new, renewable ‘green’ technologies that will enable individuals to procure energy-saving devices. In exploring these issues, I examine the interests of multinational corporations, material consumerism, the unequal distribution of resources, and population movements that are undermining attempts to conserve energy and reduce the exhaustion of natural resources, ranging from land to fuels, from minerals to air. And I link the resolution of these matters to community initiatives that social workers can engage in to ensure that the quality of life of poor people can be enhanced today and tomorrow without costing the Earth.

This strategy critiques the lack of resources associated with the cutbacks in public expenditures that are occurring throughout Western Europe, Canada and the USA as their rulers’ search for solutions in the community, which they create as a responsible discursive space that assumes unlimited goodwill and regenerative self-help activities to cover the gap between what people need throughout the life course and what they can secure without state support or employment in well-paid, life-affirming jobs. The state attempts to wash its hands of its caring responsibilities. Now described as burdens, these are epitomised in the ‘Big Society’ ideas promoted by David Cameron in the UK. I focus on this particular example because it is instructive in exposing the sophisticated structure of the fig-leaf it represents by drawing upon society’s potential to bring people together in self-help initiatives that might be useful in creating self-sufficient communities but hide the state’s role in creating poverty, its indifference to people’s personal suffering and its failure to control industrial barons and the financial sector and to create life-affirming and sustainable environments for people, plants and animals. The failure of states to govern for the entirety of their population, the planet’s flora and fauna, and the material worlds that fall within their boundaries, exposes elite governmentality and loss of good governance that extends beyond the ‘failed’ states identified a few years ago by George W. Bush as President of the USA, and reveals a democratic deficit of the highest order that leaves citizens feeling disenfranchised, alienated and isolated from their rulers.

Moreover, I examine the formation of energy-sufficient communities that utilize self-help to access the new renewable technologies and reduce reliance on fossil fuels. In implementing such initiatives, community social workers can draw lessons from the skills of mobilization that middle-class communities display in creating more humane urban environments for transferral where relevant in mobilizing working-class endeavours. Such skills can be acquired without condoning deficit models of poor communities or suggesting that they eschew their own identities and adopt middle-class lifestyles as often occurs in mainstream social work (Callahan et al., 2000). Additionally, I argue that social services must become an inclusive, universal service, not a residual and stigmatized one. High-quality social services for all, readily available and accessible at the point of need, are a human right and integral to realizing social justice claims to resources. In this book, I utilize case studies to integrate theory and practice around these concerns and indicate the importance of thinking holistically about these issues.

Locating a new discursive space

Social work educators have written under the rubric of ecological or environmental social work. Their works include Van Wormer and Besthorn’s (2011) Human Behaviour and the Social Environment; John Coates’ (2003) Ecology and Social Work; and Gill and Jack’s Children and Families in Context. These primarily reflect a systems approach to the social environment and an individual’s place within it. They are less concerned with structural analyses of the social and economic developments that have destroyed both physical and human socio-cultural environments. They are not embedded in the social and physical elements of life for the purposes of changing existing socio-economic relations. There is a Global Alliance for Deep Ecological Social Work that includes authors such as Besthorn and Coates which has sought to enhance social workers’ interest in the physical environment. Its impact has been limited, but it has organized several conferences to discuss these issues. Michael Ungar’s (2002) article on environmental rights for marginalized groups and the formation of sustainable communities brings a deeper dimension into these debates by highlighting the importance of human rights. Although he addresses social work issues, his work lacks the sweep of this particular book. Nor does Ungar utilize case studies that could encourage practitioners to work outside their usual boxes in bringing about a more sustainable, and socially and environmentally just, world.

My arguments also go beyond relevant works like Cahill and Fitzpatrick’s (2002) edited book, Environmental Issues and Social Welfare which is not about social work practice as such. None of the authors in their edited collection is engaged in mainstream social work; nor do they cover practice. Another one, Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy, written by Brown and Garver (2009), helpfully critiques capitalist economic development particularly that of neoliberal economics, for destroying human well-being. But it has little to say about practice issues, including those of organizing residents to resist neoliberalism’s destructive tenets and argue for more collective and interdependent approaches to the economy, as social workers do when supporting people in rebuilding their lives through alternative economic community models, many of which draw upon micro-finance and credit union initiatives that pool resources collectively. Kati Närhi (2004) considers structural inequalities in what she terms the ‘eco-social approach in social work’, but concentrates on a narrow range of ecological issues and a small area in Finland. The objectives in Nancy Mary’s (2008) book are closer to mine, but these do not cover practice in a sustainable world, nor a critique of industrialization and consumerism as these influence practice interventions, and so has gaps that I consider. McKinnon (2008) highlights the relevance of the value base of social work in addressing ecological issues, while having a limited engagement with environmental matters. Given its scope and range, Green Social Work aims to break new ground.

This book engages with environmental and social justice issues in the contexts of eradicating structural inequalities by critiquing an industrialization model that caters for the needs of the few, in order to enhance humanity’s and the planet’s well-being. It is also embedded in a collective duty to care for, and be cared by, others. Being green in social work encapsulates a holistic approach that addresses both personal behaviour and the structural facets of social organization and marginality to argue for mutuality and solidarity in solving social problems that are rooted in an unequal distribution of: the Earth’s resources; its technological innovations; and social provisions that can be employed to enhance human well-being. These have to be spread equitably across the globe while at the same time acknowledging interdependencies between peoples and other living things, and showing respect for the Earth’s limited physical resources, its flora and fauna. The challenge for green social workers is that of working to enhance the quality of life for marginalized peoples today while also preserving the Earth’s largesse for future generations. Embedding this in looking after the well-being of all individuals, animals and plants is crucial in developing alternatives to existing unequal social relations. Enhancing planetary well-being requires a diminution of consumerist lifestyles as typified by Western societies and burgeoning middle classes in emerging economies like India, China and Brazil; the development of new economic paradigms that take account of the needs of all stakeholders, not just those who want to make a profit from their investments; greater planning for projected growth in human populations; and the protection of a diverse biosphere and physical landscape.

Green Social Work also seeks to create a specific subject of study in an area that has been largely neglected in social work by focusing on the interaction between equality, securing the well-being of people, animals and plants, and protecting their physical environments including the built environment that covers housing stock, power grids, transportation and communications infrastructures and the natural environment, including land, air, water, mineral resources and primary products within the context of environmental rights and social justice. The social and environmental justice dimensions of this topic bring marginalization, structural inequalities, human rights and active citizenship into the heart of the green social work agenda and call for the creation of new models of intervention within a framework of preserving Planet Earth. To achieve this, rethinking neoliberal capitalist relationships between peoples and their environments becomes unavoidable.

The rationale for green social work

Social work as a profession has engaged in environmental issues and continues to do so, albeit in a limited rather than comprehensive manner. The intermediate treatment programmes extremely popular in the 1980s in the UK, which involved outdoor activities for diverting young offenders from prison, exemplify this. They encouraged personal growth in young people, and taught them skills in relating to other people and the physical environment. These endeavours declined in popularity when the tabloid press attacked them for being ‘jollies’ at the taxpayers’ expense and the state responded by refusing to fund alternatives to prison like these. For example, in England, Mark Hook, who had a string of offences to his name, was dubbed ‘Safari Boy’ by the media after going on an 88-day character-building trip to Africa at the cost of £7,000. Soon after his return, he was imprisoned for nine months by a Gloucestershire County Court for burgling a house, stealing several items and driving a car without insurance after absconding from the Bryn Melyn Centre in North Wales (Waterhouse, 1994). The media hysteria around ‘Safari Boy’ provided a crucial ‘tipping point’ in the discourses about intermediate treatment because young offenders like him committed further crimes after completing such programmes. Their reoffending undermined the programme’s claim to change individual behaviour by building character and facilitating personal growth. By focusing on the young person’s failures, the media and state conveniently ignored state failure in changing the lack of opportunities and conditions of deprivation prevailing in the communities to which young offenders were returned. Personal and structural changes have to occur together to support successful interventions in people’s lives. This is a more constructive lesson to be drawn from this affair.

Green social work, as I define it, has holistic understandings about the various environments and their impact upon people’s behaviour. Although utilized for therapeutic purposes, the environment is a socially constructed entity in and of itself, not a means to an end and should be respected as such, even when people use it to meet their own goals. I suggest that the failure in probation officers’ involvement with ‘Safari Boy’ was in expecting a short outdoor experience in unknown territory to achieve their objectives of controlling and disciplining a young man rather than inculcating a sense of valuing himself and the environments that he already knew on a day-to-day basis, and understanding how these blocked his ability to realize his full potential and what needed to be changed in these, as well as in his behaviour, to secure enduring changes that would facilitate his becoming an active, valued member of society. Had they done so, this might have produced the self-confidence and trust in himself, others and the environment needed for real behavioural change to occur. People need a sense of place and stake in society to respect and value the environment and others. Otherwise, alienation and a distancing of themselves from others will illicit further offending behaviour or social disorder. This lesson has relevance for what should happen to those sentenced for their participation in the 2011 summer riots in England or imprisoned for opposing the cuts in Greece.

I define ‘green’ social work as that part of practice that intervenes to protect the environment and enhance people’s well-being by integrating the interdependencies between people and their socio-cultural, economic and physical environments, and among peoples within an egalitarian framework that addresses prevailing structural inequalities and unequal distribution of power and resources. Paying attention to these requires social workers to address the politics of identity and redistribution and not to treat the environment as a means to be exploited for people’s ends. By being concerned with the politics of identity and the politics of redistribution, this book goes beyond the issues raised by the ‘deep ecological approach’ to social work, which focuses largely on the interaction between people and social and physical environments while viewing the latter as objects on which human beings act. I suggest that this continues to privilege people as separate objects and does not integrate all environments – physical, social, economic, political and cultural – within which people are embedded into a holistic social work practice that engages with and aims to change existing inegalitarian social relationships, power relations and resource distribution systems. In this sense, the social and physical environments are inter-related and interact with and impact upon each other. As I consider these elements, I examine the roles that social workers have played and can play in the key environmental issues of our time – environmental degradation; industrial pollution; over-consumption by the few; climate change; migrations caused by natural disasters; and conflicts that will increasingly accompany peoples’ competition for scarce natural resources like water, land and clean air. This includes exploring social workers’ capacity to act as: advocates; mobilizers and organizers of people, communities and resources; lobbyists who can influence policy-makers; and therapeutic workers who can respond to individual distress. I then consider how social work practice can be transformed by encompassing a holistic ‘green’ agenda rooted in the interdependency of all peoples and their socio-cultural, economic and physical environments. I conduct my arguments as indicated in the chapter outlines below.

The Structure of the Book

In chapter 2, I consider how poverty, a key social disaster, is accompanied by the lack of environmental rights, with poor people living in the most degraded social and physical environments and disproportionately subjected to industrial pollution and natural disasters. Poor people lack the financial wherewithal to strengthen their capacity to cope with environmental crises or to purchase expensive fuel, high-quality food and decent housing. The current global fiscal crisis is decreasing public welfare provisions, particularly those upon which poor people rely as demand for them is rising. Undermining a nation’s capacity to repay debts by letting the markets decide whether a sovereign state can be considered credit-worthy enough to do so, whilst compelling its peoples to endure ever tighter austerity measures, can result in public funds lining the pockets of hedge fund holders, as is anticipated to occur over Greek bonds, an example of predatory capitalism that is likely to incur taxpayers’ wrath when they contrast speculators’ enormous profits with their own penury (Landon, 2011). In other Western countries, the ‘age of austerity’ prevails, but imperils Western economies because they cannot produce the growth that is needed to promote prosperity and take people into paid employment. President Barack Obama is struggling to address entrenched unemployment in the USA as the economy slides into deeper recession. In the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron proposes grandiose ideas like the ‘Big Society’ to get people through hard times. This scheme exacerbates poor people’s plight by combining savage public expenditure cuts and reduced publicly funded welfare resources with pathologizing people, blaming them for their predicament, and emphasizing their lack of skills, initiative and will-power to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Contextualized, holistically embedded, innovative strengths-based solutions will be necessary for people to respond effectively to such onslaughts. Social workers can assist them in finding new paths forward. I examine such initiatives in chapter 2 in light of social workers’ roles within both social and physical environments.

I also consider the crisis in the profession itself as it endeavours to prevent the haemorrhaging of its borders to other professions, particularly psychology, psychiatry, human geography and criminology. At the same time, social workers have opportunities to expand into new arenas by addressing environmental issues and practising green social work within a redistributive framework that operates locally and globally. Social workers have the skills to deal with new challenges, as they have done when community workers have mobilized communities to protect them from the predations of the market. These are instanced by resistance to the ghetto cleansing that occurs when poor people in the West resist being removed from their homes to make way for a major road, or poor people living in urban slums in Mumbai, India, refuse to cede their homes to prestige developments for wealthy people. Social workers help poor people mobilize as groups to challenge such developments. Some of these struggles have been won, others have been lost. An important point, however, is that social workers continue to support poor people who seek to defend their communities and interests, even when powerful decision-makers and resource-holders defy their requests for better-quality living conditions.

The central theme of chapter 3 is industrialization and urbanization, in the context of a critique of its current forms. Industrialization has centralized activities in urban environments while built-infrastructures have opened up opportunities for business to make profits and encourage peoples’ mobility in search of jobs and improved standards of living. This approach has led to hyper-urbanization and enormous damaging consequences for peoples’ well-being and the physical environment. Although poor people bear the direct costs of living in degraded physical environments, they seldom have a say in how development initiatives are executed and what impact these will have on them and their communities. This has been evidenced historically during the Enclosures that left rural people landless in the Scottish and English countryside and subjected countless inhabitants to destitution in the big cities of Victorian England, e.g., London. It is currently evident in shanty-towns in megacities of the Global South. The outcome in both scenarios has been the same: a drop in the quality of life for once self-sufficient rural peoples in the short term, and a dependency on their ability to sell their labour in the long term. The lack of sustainable, healthy environments and well-paid employment opportunities in rural areas must be addressed to limit the pressures and problems of hyper-urbanization.

Social relations also became more hierarchical and differentiated, within the home where men began to dominate, and in the workplace where employers called the tune that those fortunate enough to have paid work were expected to obey. Under this form of social organization, it has been difficult to hold those with wealth accountable for their behaviour and the decisions they make, despite their negative impact on other peoples’ livelihoods and existence. Lack of accountability among the owners and managers of contemporary multinational corporations remains a problem that social workers can highlight. Issues have to be identified and named before they can be addressed. Practitioners can help communities organize to hold such firms accountable for the consequences of their decisions on the lives of usually voiceless people.

In chapter 3, I use case studies to consider how social workers can operate at the local level to develop more sustainable and life enhancing forms of urban living and demand accountability for actions taken by all stakeholders involved in local areas. I explore how local schemes can have an impact at national and international levels and provide insights for improving situations through collective action. I draw on examples from both the Global North and the Global South to examine these issues. These include: the formation of micro-credit ventures; locally accountable financial institutions such as credit unions; creation of local area networks such as local exchange schemes, to avoid monetary transactions while providing people with access to services outside the market-place; and formation of social enterprises. I adopt a critical reflective stance towards such initiatives, because social workers have much to learn about intervening in these activities holistically.

Industrialization continues as a key topic for chapter 4. This time I focus on how pollution, as a by-product of industrialization, has had deleterious outcomes for people’s health, e.g., increasing respiratory ailments and a range of disabilities that can be traced back to the lack of controls on the pollutants that industrial processes discharge into the atmosphere. The banning of lead as an ingredient in petrol-driven cars in the West illustrates how changes in daily routines can alter everyday behaviours, like driving, to improve significantly the health of people living near major roads. Serious accidents have resulted from human control over scientific products going awry. The nuclear explosion in reactor 4 in Chernobyl in 1986 exemplifies such a problem. It entailed wide-ranging and long-term consequences that continue to be addressed. Other examples have been the leakage of dioxins or radioactive materials in many spots throughout the world, including the discharge of dioxins into the atmosphere in Seveso, Italy, in 1976, and the more recent nuclear explosion following an earthquake and subsequent tsunami in Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in 2011. Such accidents have gravely undermined people’s well-being, defined as their right to enjoy the products of the Earth and develop their skills and talents to the fullest extent as articulated under Articles 22 to 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

I examine the huge industrial accidents at Three Mile Island in the USA, Chernobyl in the Ukraine, and Bhopal in India from a social work perspective in chapter 4. Poor health and higher morbidity arising from increased rates of cancer, higher levels of congenital disabilities, loss of livelihoods, social isolation and stigma are concerns that social workers have addressed. I also highlight the importance of utilizing existing social resources and legal instruments to hold perpetrators accountable for their actions, while exploring social workers’ roles in developing local resilience in response to industrial disasters like these.

Climate change is the major theme of chapter 5. Climate change is the by-product of industrialization models promoted by Western entrepreneurs exploiting natural resources to produce goods that make a profit, while discharging greenhouse gases and other pollutants into the atmosphere and water because this was the cheapest method of waste disposal. These activities subsequently caused air temperatures to rise to levels that threaten all forms of life on Earth. Climate change portrays recent environmental crises that embody global interdependencies whereby what one country does can have severe and damaging impacts upon other nations and their environments. The benefits that the West has gained arose through industrialization processes that have increased greenhouse gas emissions to the detriment of people living less industrialized lifestyles, such as poor people living in rural areas of the Global South. These outcomes are especially worrying in small island nations that are in danger of sinking into the ocean, e.g., the Maldives, Tuvalu. Although unintended, these consequences have resulted in claims for the ‘polluters to pay’ for cleaning up the environment and developing renewable green energy sources that will limit temperature increases to less than 2 °C in perpetuity.

Regardless of where they live, people without incomes or on low ones cannot access the expensive technologies that would enable them to protect, maintain or enhance their quality of life without state intervention and support. I argue for states to play an important role in this because: (a) the nation-state, as the embodiment of the collective will of the people and guarantor of their rights to be cared by, and care for, others, has to be held accountable for its failure to deliver these for all its residents; (b) the market as currently constituted cannot fulfil this function for all; and (c) charitable giving is insufficient for the enormity of the tasks to be addressed. Moreover, the state has to engage corporations as philanthropic players in solving these problems. Politicians can express their choices by subsidizing private firms and individuals; building public infrastructures that will sustain renewable energy sources; and public education campaigns to initiate behavioural change at the individual level. Current strategies of ‘business as usual’ do not challenge the industrial model that is responsible for creating these problems in the first place. Nor do they begin to hold accountable the industrial entrepreneurs who ignore the consequences of their decisions for those least likely to have the resources to tackle them. These messages have been repeated on many occasions at the meetings on climate change hosted by the United Nations. So, states must rethink their priorities and responses. The interdependencies between countries, peoples and the environment suggest that solutions to climate change dilemmas have to be more inclusive and integrate those who are excluded from the market-place of expensive technologies in finding solutions to controlling energy consumption, and the problems raised by an unequal distribution of power and resources globally. Social workers can both highlight such problems and engage with local people in responding to them.

Poor people’s capacity to transcend financial limitations in energy reduction strategies might be an outcome of the proposed ‘feed-in’ tariffs in the UK. In this scheme, residents who create electricity for domestic use through renewable energy sources and ‘feed’ the units surplus to their needs into the national grid are paid a fee set by government for these extra units – hence the term ‘feed-in tariffs’. Whether their introduction will benefit poor peoples and their communities as utility companies form partnerships with them remains to be seen. However, there are small demonstration projects tackling issues like fuel poverty and unemployment through the development of micro-renewable energy technologies which will be considered in this book. By engaging in such initiatives, poor people can address fuel poverty, reduce fossil fuel energy consumption and develop self-sustaining energy communities while enhancing employment opportunities and raising their standard of living. I consider such endeavours in this chapter because community social workers have been involved in these in both the Global North and the Global South, e.g., Gilesgate in the UK, Misa Rumi in Argentina. I use such examples to argue that social workers can play an active role in climate change policy debates initiated under the Kyoto Protocols and expand the domains in which they are proactive.

Environmental degradation has damaged physical environments to produce desertification, flooding and other environmental crises. In chapter 6, I consider the consequences of climate change and industrial processes that encroach into traditional farmlands and forests. These have exacerbated the loss of traditional habitats and lifestyles, particularly nomadic ones in the Global South and other countries that have indigenous people who favour traditional ways of life that link people and land holistically. Environmental degradation has led to conflicts between groups of people who have migrated in response to deteriorating conditions in their surroundings. The ensuing migrations, in certain parts of the world subjected to either desertification or extensive and prolonged flooding, have intensified land stress in both rural areas and built environments in cities, as populations compete for scarce social and physical resources and spaces. Competition between people and scarce resources on the land can also endanger people and their surroundings in refugee camps created to house those fleeing environmental crises. Building resilience in such communities to address pre-disaster and post-disaster situations is an important part of reducing vulnerability to climate change. In this chapter, I consider how social workers act as mediators in conflict situations, and as development workers to help rebuild lives and communities in more sustainable ways. An interesting example of social workers’ interventions occurred in the Mathare Valley in Kenya where practitioners worked with residents to bring harmony to a volatile situation involving newcomers and more established dwellers when nomadic peoples migrated to the slums of Nairobi to escape drought.

Other problems explored in chapter 6 include those of tribal peoples living along the borders of Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia who were prevented from moving across borders by boundaries formed during the European colonization of Africa. For example, Dadaab camp in Kenya was created for 90,000 Somalian refugees following the collapse of the Said Barre dictatorship. The 2008–9 drought more than doubled the numbers descending upon this camp from these three countries, thereby causing further environmental degradation. Official attempts to limit the growth of these settlements included one whereby the Kenyan government declared that, if its nationals sought support at the camp, they would lose their citizenship rights. This form of exclusion failed to stop the Masaii peoples from going there. This issue raises concerns about the Kenyan state’s failure to uphold its citizens’ rights under the UDHR. Furthermore, social workers as relief workers staff refugee camps for any displaced population and would deem it unethical to uphold any stipulation that excludes any particular nationality from receiving assistance if they arrived at Dadaab. The plight of the Masaii also raises the thorny issue of the arbitrariness of the frontiers that colonial powers imposed on local people in Africa. And it poses the question of why people as citizens, should lose their rights to ask for help from their national governments simply because they cross into lands that they had traditionally used as herds-people. Moreover, food provided to refugee camps through the World Food Programme is usually insufficient, but aid workers are dependent on government and the public for the resources they need to do this job. Food shortages occurred elsewhere during this drought, e.g., in the camp at Ayub in Ethiopia. In considering these matters, I explore other roles that social workers can play in these circumstances, e.g., questioning the loss of citizenship rights to state assistance.

Environmental degradation brought about by industrialization, urbanization and the demands of growing numbers of people on Planet Earth have brought about failures in the built environment and infrastructures that sustain peoples, to the detriment of their livelihoods and well-being when ‘natural’ disasters strike. I address these in chapter 7, by exploring the complex connections between population movements, marginalization and social exclusion and demands on environmental resources. These competing requirements can be addressed with sensitive planning and sufficient community engagement. To achieve this goal, humanitarian aid workers cannot work according to a ‘one size fits all’ plan. Instead, they have to contextualize their work, engage effectively in locality-specific and culturally relevant practices with a range of different agencies, academic disciplines and government bodies that support poor people.

The impact of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans is a recent example of the havoc that can occur when relief and government responses are unable to meet the needs of poor and marginalized peoples, in this case, of African Americans. The Japanese government’s early responses to Japan’s multiple hazards in 2011 were also declared inadequate by victim-survivors, especially for older people. Both examples indicate the paucity of responses even though these involved two of the richest countries in the world. In Katrina, that people of African American origins, older people, and low-income families with children were disproportionately adversely affected during relief efforts after the levees broke, demonstrated how those most marginalized by society suffer most during relief efforts, as well as through the disaster itself. The floods in Pakistan during the summer of 2010, and the Haitian earthquake in the same year, were followed by cholera outbreaks and gastrointestinal disease. These two situations illustrate the lack of urgency in rebuilding infrastructures, including sanitation and water supplies when a disaster destroys these. And they expose the failure of global responses to meet the needs of poor people.

In chapter 7, I also examine social workers’ involvements in calamitous ‘natural’ disasters, practitioners’ critiques of disaster interventions and their suggestions for providing more appropriate ones in the future. I argue that ‘natural’ disasters have a substantial (hu)man contribution that exacerbates their deleterious impact. I also suggest that reactions to such events can be more preventative in their focus if they build resilience among peoples and communities for dealing with such events and rebuilding their lives afterwards. The involvement of communities as full players in these plans is vital to enhancing resilience at all levels, and is an element of practice that social workers can advocate for and promote. I also endeavour to examine how interdisciplinary teams of experts can work closely with local people to prepare better for such events in future. For example, in Haiti, landslide experts can work with relief workers to ensure that refugee camps are located in safe spaces.

In chapter 8, I argue that the Earth’s natural resources, such as land, water, energy supplies and minerals, are being exhausted by the demands of Western models of industrialization. These are clearly unsustainable for the few who benefit from them now, let alone the growing numbers of the world’s population, which the United Nations predicts will exceed 9 billion by 2050. I consider these concerns and those caused by growing population numbers in the context of scarcity in this chapter. Whilst I do not endorse Malthusian gloom over this issue, unless ways of raising people out of poverty, promoting sustainable development and healthy lifestyles are found, the future could be very bleak for generations to come and the Earth’s flora and fauna. And it could intensify conflicts over scarce resources, particularly land and water, in future.

On an optimistic note, some countries have sought to achieve non-violent means of resolving conflict over natural resources. A current example is the talks between Egypt and Ethiopia over the management of the Nile to meet the water needs of growing populations and desire to improve their standards of living in both countries. Their cooperation is in contrast to the violence that erupted in 2008 over the control of the waters flowing in the Isfara river at the border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In chapter 8, I also examine how social workers can support inter-country initiatives aimed at resolving potential conflicts over scarce resources to achieve win-win situations for all, including Planet Earth. I add to this a consideration of policy initiatives locally, nationally, regionally and internationally.

Chapter 9 explores modernity or Western ways of thinking about the world, based upon industrialization processes that have focused on hierarchical and binary dyads that prioritize monied people and their interests. Until its critique by post-modernists, modernity as a worldview was deemed superior to others. It gloried in being the product of rational thought processes rooted in empirical evidence that its adherents called ‘scientific’, while disparaging others as inferior to it. The disparagement of alternative ways of viewing the world was practised with particular vehemence against indigenous or pre-industrial ways of being and living on Planet Earth. The West has benefited from such depictions of reality by raising its people out of the forms of deprivation typical in nineteenth-century Europe. But it failed to eradicate poverty within its own borders, and intensified poverty elsewhere by destroying traditional lifestyles and promoting economic underdevelopment in the interests of commanding the Earth’s natural resources for its own projects. Questions are now being raised about the dangerous potential of such colonizing ventures and their capacity to be perpetuated in neo-colonial guises through education that advances Western models of thought. Concern is also being expressed about rising superpowers like China that acquire land and other resources without paying attention to local aspirations or safeguarding the human rights of local peoples and their environments.

Alternative worldviews have existed before and continue to be available. Significant among these have been spiritual approaches to life evident among indigenous peoples in the West and elsewhere. They have struggled to keep alive their cultures, languages and traditions despite the onslaughts legitimated through colonization. Indigenous peoples in Asia, Latin America and Africa have sustained their traditional lifestyles against the odds. Like their counterparts in the West, they demand the restoration of rights over their resources and more sustainable lifestyles. These are often defined as indigenous movements, which have had a significant impact upon social work itself (Gray et al., 2008). Key among indigenous approaches to daily living are the integrated relationships that they envisage among themselves as people, and between them and their social and physical environments. Their conceptualizations of themselves as keepers of the Earth’s flora, fauna and natural resources for future generations are embedded in a spiritual connection between people, other forms of life, and inanimate objects. This is referred to as a spiritual orientation to living things and their physical environments (Green and Thomas, 2007).

In chapter 9, I consider how indigenous beliefs, particularly those of First Nations in Canada and Maori in Aotearoa/New Zealand tend to be collective, aimed at causing least disruption to natural environments and leading sustainable lifestyles based in local communities. Indigenous peoples underpin their activities with more holistic and collective approaches to life, and link the individual to their specific community. They also enable the continuation of heritage languages and traditional identities. Drawing on these assets, indigenous peoples have critiqued dominant approaches to welfare and the criminal justice system to develop alternative models of dealing with those experiencing hardship and/or social problems (Grande, 2004), e.g., Maori approaches to young offenders. Practised through family group conferences, it involves the entire extended family in rehabilitating and supporting the young persons concerned to reorient their lives.

Insights derived from indigenous knowledge and approaches to life can provide lessons that could help social workers practising in densely populated urban areas, by assisting people in reconnecting with the physical world and renewing their ties with other peoples, including those in rural areas seeking to industrialize in sustainable ways that do not cause the mass migration of young people to urban centres in large cities to earn livelihoods that are difficult to come by and cause further destitution and environmental degradation.

I conclude this book in chapter 10 by considering how the contributions of previous chapters can develop a holistic model of social work practice that promotes interdependence and solidarity among the world’s peoples, its flora, fauna and natural resources. This approach, promoted in and through community-based practices that hold governments and multinational companies accountable for their decisions, is crucial in developing the sustainable lifestyles that will protect the well-being of all peoples and preserve and/or enhance the environment for current and future generations. I call this model Green Social Work. It involves social workers working closely with people in their communities through everyday life practices to: respect all living things alongside their socio-cultural and physical environments; embed economic activities, including those aimed at alleviating poverty, in the ‘social’; and promote social justice and environmental justice. This will require social workers to engage in action at the local, national, regional and international levels and to use the organizations that they have formed to advocate for changes that favour the equal distribution of power and social resources, and protection of the Earth’s physical bounty, including its flora and fauna.

2

A Professional Crisis within Social and Environmental Calamities

Introduction

Social work in the early twenty-first century is facing past challenges and new ones. Persistent ones like failing to tackle poverty, juvenile and adult offending behaviours and preventing child abuse have occurred throughout the profession’s existence. Others are relatively recent in its repertoire, for example, climate change and disaster interventions. At the same time, social work is undergoing considerable change as a professional discipline. Its status among high-ranking professions like medicine and law remains in doubt in both the academy and the field, despite a century of endeavours aimed at raising its research base and profile, nationally and internationally. Although a historical concern, this uncertainty has dented the profession’s confidence as its energies are consumed by proving its credentials and demonstrating that it has its own specific knowledge base, and particular theories and methods of practice. Although its varied professional patterns are recognized throughout the world, social work practitioners are more valued in some countries than others. In Europe, British politicians are particularly unappreciative of the contributions that social workers make in society generally, while those in Nordic countries admire them more (Oxtoby, 2009).

In Western countries, lack of professional credibility surfaces at three key points – when social workers interacting with medical and other professionals feel devalued; when social work’s porous borders are haemorrhaging as other professions appropriate activities that were once under its exclusive remit; and when only social workers are castigated by the media when practice goes seriously wrong. In some circumstances, the three coincide to the detriment of social work. Social workers’ failure to meet expectations in their spheres of activity undermines their position, especially in child protection arenas. Resource shortages contribute much to this state of affairs, but concerns about inter-professional working including the absence of adequate channels of communication between various parties (Laming, 2009) and lack of clarity about the roles of social work in society, are also culpable. All is not doom and gloom because social work has spread globally and those holding the title of ‘social worker’ can now be found in ninety countries. Social workers in the Global South are more likely to engage in social and community development activities which carry more authority and weight within public consciousness than do the individualized approaches to social problems common in many Western countries.

While the profession is in crisis over its identity and professional status, so are the social and physical environments in which it is embedded. The financial crisis of 2008 has had enormous implications for social work: many countries have cut back on social services provisions and reduced contributions to publicly funded welfare benefits. Because ‘Main Street has had to bail out Wall Street’, many poor people, and especially those who are more reliant on benefits than paid work such as women caring for children, people with disabilities, and older people – have been particularly disadvantaged. Public expenditure cuts have caused considerable social protest and unrest, especially in countries like Greece and France. Additionally, the new managerialism, including public-sector management initiatives promoted under neoliberalism, have: undermined relational social work (Folghereiter, 2003); reduced practitioners’ professional autonomy; and subjected practitioners to managerialist control and a bureaucratization more concerned with protecting agencies from allegations of (mis)using resources than safeguarding the welfare of individuals and communities in need (Dominelli, 2010a; Munro, 2011). Increasing demand for social workers to contribute their expertise in a range of new issues, including disaster interventions and addressing climate change scenarios, is stretching their limited professional resources and capacity to respond to these on a global scale (Dominelli, 2011).

In this chapter, I examine the crises facing the profession and the contexts in which it operates to consider social workers’ roles in supporting people through hard times. I explore practitioners’ involvement in innovative responses to social problems. Among these, I highlight social workers’ engagement in community-based economic initiatives that prioritize the social sphere and physical environment. At the same time, I consider the crises in the social work profession itself as it endeavours to prevent the loss of expertise to other professions, particularly psychology, psychiatry, human geography and criminology. Social work has opportunities to expand into new arenas by becoming engaged in environmental issues and practising green social work within a redistributive framework. The capacity of social work to rise to new occasions is evident in the way in which community workers have energized and organized communities to reject the predations of the market, as has occurred when poor people in the West have been threatened with removal from their homes to make way for a major road; or people on low incomes living in slums like those in Mumbai, India, have been cleared to build prestige housing developments. In such cases, social workers have joined poor people and mobilized action to resist the loss of homes and livelihoods.

A Profession in Turmoil

Professional social work, as distinct from social work as informal caring, was a European invention, created primarily by middle-class women in nineteenth-century Europe (Walton, 1975; Kendall, 2000). In Victorian England, they built on earlier philanthropic traditions fostered by religious institutions, family support networks and volunteers, and aimed to initiate change in individual behaviour alongside improving the administration of charitable support. These endeavours exposed the need for a scientific basis and rationale for such incursions into private family life, and helped establish the realm of ‘the social’, whereby the private realm became subjected to public surveillance (Lorenz, 1994). This approach became formalized with the establishment of the Charity Organization Society (COS) in the UK in 1868. Shortly afterwards, its favoured model of intervention, the casework approach, became the mode for intervening in the lives of poor individuals and families as the newly fledged profession sought to establish its place among other professions. The contradictions between ‘care’ and ‘control’ (Parry, Rustin and Satyamurti, 1979) that these initiatives highlight have sat uneasily in social work since its inception and are particularly evident in practice involving counsellors, clinical social workers, probation officers and community workers, as they simultaneously respond to society’s demands for well-behaved, law-abiding citizens and challenge its inequalities, structural disadvantages and indifference to the physical environment, while operating within the interstices of a capitalist economic framework that privileges privatization initiatives (Parry, 1989).

The validity of the casework tenets espoused by the COS were questioned by those in the nineteenth-century Settlement Movement that grew out of universities like Oxford which sent students to live and work in disadvantaged communities in the East End of London (Gilchrist and Jeffs, 2001). Its adherents promoted what became known as community development initiatives that focused on structural inequalities, like poverty, unemployment and lack of educational opportunities. Alongside their radical critiques, they sought to educate and mobilize local communities in finding their own solutions to problems, a tradition that Jane Addams spread in Chicago through Hull House and that continues today as empowering and anti-oppressive practice.