Sessione 4 - Advancing the research on the interconnections between welfare and environmental sustainability from the perspectives of eco-social work and eco-social policies

Coordinatori/coordinatrici di sessione: Benedetta Cotta, Elisa Matutini, Francesca Campomori (Università Cà Foscari Venezia)

Description

With the European Green Deal, the European Union (EU) has committed to become the first carbon-neutral continent by 2050 (European Union 2019). The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 challenged the health care and welfare systems of the EU countries and deepened the inequalities between European citizens. To recover from the economic and social effects of the COVID-19 pandemic and keep on track the ambitious European climate goals, the European Parliament and the Council adopted the NextGenerationEU (NGEU) calling for intertwined social and environmental policies’ reforms within the framework of National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRP).
While European policies have encouraged an integrated perspective to address the current welfare and climate challenges, scholarly exchanges and cross-fertilization research on environmental and social concerns are still in the making. Until recently, studies on welfare and environmental policies have often been limited to each policy area with a general lack of contributions theorising an intersection between these policies (Koch et al. 2016; Hirvilammi and Koch 2020). Publishing under various terms such as “sustainable welfare”, “eco-social welfare” and “eco-welfare states”, an emerging body of literature has started to theoretically reflect on the link between these policies (Hirvilammi & Koch 2020). Studies have also empirically analysed public support for climate and welfare policies in Europe (Fritz & Koch 2019; Otto & Gugushvili 2020; Gugushvili & Otto 2021; Fritz et al. 2021), examined selected European policies from an eco-social perspective (Laurent 2020; Mandelli et al. 2021) and mapped the welfare and environmental performances of EU countries (Zimmermann & Graziano 2020). However, little is still known on the conditions and the mechanisms that enhance the formulation of eco-social policies at European level, as well as achievement of eco-social policy performances between and within EU member states that conduct to sustainable welfare states.
Social work has always been committed to promoting social justice and combating inequalities. It works with the victims of environmental crises and with communities that are faced with the climate crisis and must find solutions to this problem (Dominelli, 2012). There are many theoretical and methodological aspects of social work in relation to the ecological crisis that need to be further investigated: reflect on a scientific level, but also in working practices, regarding possible eco-social work models and methods (Närhi, Matthies, 2018); how can social work supports the frailest and the poorest to adopt ecologically sustainable attitudes? (Ramsay S., Boddy J., 2017) How can social work help populations and communities to build their own ecological strategies? What is the role of social worker in this sense at the individual, group and community levels? (Erickson, 2018; Zapf, 2010).
This panel aims to stimulate a rich discussion and advance research on the intersection between welfare, social work and environmental issues – with specific reference to the analysis of eco-social policies and ecosocial work. To this end, we welcome empirical papers which focus on pilot studies, experiments, specific case studies, comparative analyses at supranational, national and local levels and quantitative cross-country analyses and discuss their implications for the definition of eco-social policies and in relation to eco-social work, as well as theoretical and conceptual papers addressing the framings of such eco-social policy and social work interconnection.