SOWK 425 Week 2 Theory and Concept Paper Example

Theory and Concept Paper: Green Social Work, Environmental Justice and the Profession's Place in a Warming World

Introduction

Social work has long described its focus as the person in the environment, yet for most of its history the environment meant family, community and institutions, not air, water and land. Green social work challenges that omission. It holds that environmental degradation, climate change and disasters are social justice problems because their harms fall unevenly, landing hardest on people who are already poor or excluded. Healy and Link (2012) describe a profession increasingly shaped by global forces, and few forces are more global than a changing climate. This paper defines green social work, traces its theoretical roots, applies it to international practice and evaluates its limits.

Defining Green Social Work

Dominelli (2012) defines green social work as an approach that treats people and the planet together, binding environmental justice to social justice, calling practitioners to address the ways industrial and consumer-driven development degrade the physical environment and deepen inequality. Her account asks social workers to work with communities on disaster preparation and recovery, to advocate for a fairer distribution of environmental resources and burdens and to question models of growth that treat the earth as an inexhaustible supply. Ramsay and Boddy (2017) later conducted a concept analysis of environmental social work across the literature. They found the term used in varied and sometimes vague ways and identified common attributes, including recognition that human well-being depends on the natural environment and a commitment to sustainability and environmental justice in practice.

Theoretical Roots

Green social work extends ecological and systems theories that already shape social work education. Those theories taught practitioners to see people within nested systems, but they generally stopped at the social world. Green social work widens the frame to include the physical and natural environment as a system on which all the others rest. It also draws on structural and critical traditions, since it asks who benefits from environmental exploitation and who pays for it. In this sense the concept is less a new theory than a correction, applying the profession's commitment to justice to a domain it had overlooked.

Application to Global Practice

The case for green social work is strongest at the global level. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2022) concluded that roughly 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts highly vulnerable to climate change, with vulnerability concentrated where poverty, weak governance and limited access to services coincide. Those are the same populations social workers serve. When Typhoon Haiyan struck the central Philippines in November 2013 and killed more than six thousand people, the poorest coastal families, living in light housing near the shore, suffered the heaviest losses and the slowest recovery. A green social work response in such a setting would include psychosocial support after the storm, but it would also involve communities in rebuilding plans, advocate for housing that can withstand future storms and press for fair access to relief.

Dominelli (2021) applied the same lens to the COVID-19 pandemic, arguing that the crisis exposed links between human treatment of the natural world, public health and structural inequality and that green social work offers a framework for responses grounded in community solidarity and sustainability. Her argument shows the concept's reach beyond weather disasters to any crisis where environmental and social harms intertwine.

Critiques and Limits

Green social work faces fair criticism. Its scope is broad, and Ramsay and Boddy (2017) note the conceptual looseness that can make environmental social work hard to teach or measure. Practitioners in under-resourced agencies may reasonably ask how they can add climate advocacy to already overwhelming caseloads. Some critics also see a risk that Western scholars will frame environmental priorities for communities in the Global South without listening to local knowledge. These concerns suggest that green social work is most useful when it is concrete, tied to specific practice tasks such as disaster planning, and shaped by the communities affected.

A Christian Perspective

Genesis 2:15 records that God placed the first man in the garden to tend it and to guard it (English Standard Version Bible, 2001/2016). Stewardship of creation and care for the poor are not competing Christian concerns, because environmental harm so often falls on the poor first. Green social work gives Christian social workers a professional language for a responsibility Scripture already assigns.

Conclusion

Green social work asks the profession to take its own person-in-environment principle literally. Its definition remains broad, but its central claim is persuasive: environmental harm is unevenly distributed, and social workers who serve vulnerable people across nations cannot ignore it. Applied to disaster recovery, climate adaptation and advocacy, the concept offers global social work a framework for one of the defining problems of this century.

References

Dominelli, L. (2012). Green social work: From environmental crises to environmental justice. Polity Press.

Dominelli, L. (2021). A green social work perspective on social work during the time of COVID-19. International Journal of Social Welfare, 30(1), 7-16. https://doi.org/10.1111/ijsw.12469

English Standard Version Bible. (2016). Crossway. (Original work published 2001)

Healy, L. M., & Link, R. J. (Eds.). (2012). Handbook of international social work: Human rights, development, and the global profession. Oxford University Press.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (2022). Climate change 2022: Impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press. https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg2/

Ramsay, S., & Boddy, J. (2017). Environmental social work: A concept analysis. British Journal of Social Work, 47(1), 68-86. https://doi.org/10.1093/bjsw/bcw078