Social Work and Sustainability in Asia

Facing the Challenges of Global Environmental Changes

Alice M. L. Chong, Iris Chi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781315514956
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The rapid trend of globalization has brought with it a variety of sustainability challenges, including global climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty, and social inequalities, which are problems with unclear boundaries, complicated interrelated components, undefined parameters, contradictory values, and no single solution. Social work has a long-standing tradition of emphasizing the interaction of people and their environment. For this reason, the field of social work is one of the best-placed academic disciplines for studying the impact of environmental change on social systems, and should play an important role in developing strategies for mitigating and adapting to these environmental challenges. However, traditional social work tends to lack sustaining work and neglect globally interconnected social problems.

Combining case studies and country reports from around Asia with a theoretical framework for understanding sustainability concerns, this book aims to show how social work can play a valuable role in mitigating and adapting to environmental challenges and social sustainability. For social work to develop a meaningful and viable profession that addresses contemporary sustainability issues, it requires changes and transformation in paradigm, theories, strategies, social policy and social services that will facilitate a sustainable future for all mankind.

Part I
Theory and concepts of social sustainability and social work

1 Social work and sustainable development

An overview^*

Iris Chi, Alice M. L. Chong, Ting Kin Ng, and Diego Busiol

Environmental change

Environmental change, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2013), is a “physical or material change to the economic, social, or physical environment” (para. 2). The environment, defined as the conditions in which any person lives or develops, can be altered by myriad phenomena; climate change and rapid urbanization, however, are two of the most fundamental causes of current changes to our natural environment. Pollution, drought, food and water insecurity, environmental degradation, poor urban sanitation and human health, increased occurrence of natural disasters, and economic and social inequality are all threats stemming from environmental change. These environmental changes have a profound effect on societies due to the close relationship between social and ecological systems, and can present significant challenges, affecting daily life and forcing societies and individuals to confront the reality of adapting to and mitigating the effects of environmental change.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2015) has predicted that nearly 70% of the world’s population will live in urban areas, and global temperatures will increase by 1–3°C by 2050. These projections will result in significant challenges for every area of the globe, especially the Asia-Pacific region, which is currently home to half of the world’s population and will continue to face significant economic, urban, and population growth. Increased industrialization, economic expansion, strained resources, sea level rises, and environmental degradation disproportionately affect socioeconomically disadvantaged individuals by limiting their access to vital resources, employment, and health, and ultimately reducing their quality of life.

Environmental changes have given rise to a range of sustainability issues. The field of social work is one of the best-poised academic fields for studying the impact of environmental change on social sustainability and can play an important role in developing strategies for mitigating and adapting to these environmental and sustainability challenges.

Definition of sustainability

The concept of sustainability refers to development that satisfies the immediate needs of the current generations without compromising the capacity of future generations to satisfy their needs (World Commission on Environment and Development, 1987). The term “sustainable” finds its etymology in sustain + able, indicating that some activity or lifestyle is bearable, can be supported; in fact, “sustain” initially derives from the Latin sub “up from below” + tenere “to hold” and later acquired the meaning “to continue, keep up” (e.g., an action).¹

Sustainability is not just about the protection of the natural environment; it also applies to political, economic, and social systems (Mary, 2008). Scholars have recently described sustainability as consisting of three distinct but overlapping components: (a) social sustainability, (b) economic sustainability, and (c) physical/environmental sustainability (Dillard, Dujon, & King, 2009). All three pillars of sustainability are related to or generated from environmental issues. For sustainability problems to be solved, all three pillars of sustainability must be addressed. Environmental sustainability requires that natural resources remain intact and that the source and sink functions of the environment are not degraded. Hence, renewable resources should not be extracted at a faster rate than they are renewed. The extraction of nonrenewable resources should be kept to a minimum. Furthermore, the capacity of ecosystems to absorb waste should not be exceeded (Gilbert, Stevenson, Girardet, & Stern, 2009). Economic sustainability requires that economic activities be financially feasible, self-renewing, and self-reliant (Bartelmus, 2008; Gilbert et al., 2009). The concepts of environmental and economic sustainability have been addressed in much greater depth than social sustainability and as a result are better defined and more consistently applied (McKenzie, 2004).

Compared with economic and environmental sustainability, social sustainability is more difficult to quantify and hence has not been well defined in the literature. Social sustainability generally refers to the ability of a social system to indefinitely function at a defined level of social well-being (Sustainability, 2014). It occurs when formal and informal processes, systems, structures, and relationships facilitate the ability of present and future generations to maintain secure and healthy communities. A socially sustainable community is equitable, diverse, connected, and democratic, offering people a good quality of life (McKenzie, 2004), and is driven by an environmental agenda with a focus on environmental justice.

The importance of sustainability today

The relationship a society has with its physical environment is never simply neutral but always grounded on some (maybe implicit) antecedents. Our relationship with nature is not just “natural” but already mediated (or created) by the mainstream discourse. However, as we are born into such discourse, we are largely unaware of the underlying assumptions regulating our relationship to the environment. Nevertheless, the way we see (or neglect) the weight of the environment already reflects a particular philosophical and political vision of the world. Neglecting the importance of the context might be a consequence of the neoliberal discourse, which instead emphasizes the idea of a subject of free will: independent, autonomous, self-directing, irrespective of context (Liebenberg, Ungar, & Ikeda, 2015). However, the individual is not an autonomous and independent actor operating out of any context. Traditionally, one’s community coincided with one’s physical location, whereas nowadays, liberalism and globalization impose higher mobility on people, which, in turn, redefines one’s group or community beyond geographical coordinates. Thus, today, sustainability may mean finding solutions that align individual, community, societal, and global needs.

Sustainability in Asia

With its 4.2 billion people (United Nations, 2017), Asia-Pacific is the most populated geographical area on the planet; it is home to the largest urban population and hosts the highest number of megacities in the world. Asia-Pacific presents a great variety of cultures, languages, religions, and political systems; there is much more diversity within it than in Europe or America. For instance, in the same geographical area, we can find some of the world-leading economies and some of the most rapidly developing countries.

Growth models based on developed (Western) countries suggest that developing economies initially tend to be quite resource- and pollution-intensive, and show relatively little concern for environmental issues, and that only at a later stage do they develop a “green” consciousness, with greater concern for the protection of the environment, and make the effort to reduce their consumption of resources and production of pollution (Berkhout et al., 2010). However, at present, concern for environmental issues is not strong across the whole of Asia-Pacific, including in those more developed economies. For example, although Hong Kong’s economy is the freest in the world (Heritage Foundation, 2014), and despite the fact that the majority of Hong Kong people do not feel content with their quality of life, materialistic values (“having a job,” “having enough to eat,” “earning a high income”) and familial values (“having a comfortable home,” “spending time with your family”) still trump post-materialistic ones (“safe and clean environment”) (Sing, 2009). Then, as well as economic growth and the developments in technology, there are other important social, cultural, and political factors that may affect the concern for environmental issues. Nevertheless, recently, a different attitude seems to have emerged (Cheng, 2014; Han, 2015), particularly among the new generations. The 2014 Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong is one of the examples of civil disobedience, and it is possible that this attitude of becoming more responsible and attentive in civic and political issues will also be reflected in greater sensitivity toward environmental justice and social sustainability.

Consequences of environmental exploitation

The effects of so-called natural disasters can be multiple and long-lasting. The most visible effects are the death of people and animals, and the destruction of buildings and infrastructures. Earthquakes and tsunamis may be very impressive because they occur unexpectedly and can kill many people in an instant; their destructive power may activate archaic fears of helplessness against what is perceived as an inescapable fate. Events like this may open up the questions of the meaning of life or the presence of God, or may lead one to ask, “Why me?” They may be very traumatizing as, for example, they remind us that we are not in complete control of our lives. On the other hand, other phenomena can be much more destructive but are generally overlooked. For example, pollution is a silent killer that can cause an undefined number of acute and chronic diseases, and serious illnesses, and can definitely impact the mortality rate. Various types of air, water, and soil pollution can cause, among others, asthma, allergies, stroke, pulmonary diseases, cancer, infective diseases, pneumonia, respiratory diseases, heart disease, tuberculosis, diarrhea, and gastroenteritis (Laumbach & Kipen, 2012; Lu et al., 2015; Machdar, Van Der Steen, Raschid-Sally, & Lens, 2013). Recently, researchers from Harvard and Columbia Universities in the U.S. estimated that a smog outbreak resulting from a forest fire in Indonesia in 2015 may have caused over 100,000 premature deaths in Indonesia and several thousand more in neighboring Singapore and Malaysia. Yet the haze is an annual problem caused by fires set in forests and on carbon-rich peatland in Indonesia to quickly and cheaply clear land for palm oil and pulpwood plantations. Effects of pollution can be devastating because they may hit entire communities over a prolonged period of time as, in some cases, the effects of contamination may be evident only after several years and may affect more generations of people. Nevertheless, what is not immediately obvious and what is not clearly observable seem to receive less coverage from the media and seem to have less impact on public opinion when compared, for example, to the emergency that follows a typhoon or an earthquake.

Contamination and exploitation of the environment normally bring an immediate economic benefit to a few individuals/organizations but are detrimental to all others, particularly in the long term. The costs of exploiting the environment are economic, social, and psychological. Lands that are contaminated are completely devalued as not only are they a threat to health, and not only do they ruin any potential for cultivating, farming, or even building, but they also require large amounts of money for decontamination and cleanup. This will impoverish both individuals and families, who see their belongings being depreciated, as well as communities, societies, or the nation that will have to remediate the damage to the environment. In some cases, it may be required to provide new accommodation for people who have lost everything because of an earthquake, a landslide, or a flooding. Besides the economic costs, this may lead to geographic reallocation of people, separation of families and communities, social isolation, and marginalization. Further, it can bring a sense of personal insecurity and distrust toward institutions and toward Mother Nature. These events affect the micro-, mezzo-, and macro-systems (Bronfenbrenner, 1979) as well as the relations among the three.

“Environment in the person” and “person in the environment”

The aforementioned examples indicate that we should operate a paradigm change and start to consider the influence of the person in the environment, not just the effects of the environment on the person. This means not only that the environment affects one’s development and life but also that a person makes use of the environment, and his or her actions have an impact on both the environment and the lives of other people, and future generations.

Social work usually upholds the construct “person in the environment.” The term “environment” is normally understood by social workers as the social, psychological, and cultural context or setting in which one lives. In fact, the physical habitat and the geographical area in which we live do affect our lives; however, these variables are rarely accounted for by social workers (for a review see Alston, 2015), as if they were beyond the social workers’ sphere of interest and/or intervention. This is somewhat surprising because it has been known for a long time that the physical environment also affects how people behave and interact, although, in most cases, this knowledge was used to serve private interests or political goals. For example, psychology in the workplace was (at least initially) understood as a tool for increasing productivity and maximizing profits through manipulation of the environment, such as lighting, space design (e.g., large open space design with desks facing supervisors, as in Taylorism, versus cubicles), noise control, and improvement of air quality. Totalitarian regimes have often created new models of cities so as to shape new societies and individuals (e.g., the creation of the “new man” in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany; see, for example, Fritzsche & Hellbeck, 2009). These examples represent ways of controlling physical variables to affect psychosocial variables; however, these goals are likely opposite to social work values. Social work is, in fact, person- and community-centered; its goal should be the health and well-being of people and the community. Social work has for a long time neglected the importance of the physical and geographical environment for the person, and now, it is time to fill this gap.

Relationship between physical and social environment

Often, the quality of the psychosocial and physical environments is correlated. However, this is not always necessarily the case; for example, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea are wealthy places where the high population density is not associated with the poverty (as it is in slums, for example) and social problems (e.g., social exclusion, marginalization) experienced in Western and/or developing countries. Indeed, previous research studies show that the relationship between living density/psychological symptoms and social problems is most likely mediated by income tenure and socioeconomic status (SES) (Busiol, 2016). Nevertheless, very high urban density may directly and/or indirectly affect one’s physical and psychological development, and one’s system of social relations and place in the community and society. Thus, it is not possible to describe a one-way causality relationship between the physical and social environment as both can be considered independent variables. Both features (physical and social) of the environment are important as they present different challenges and opportunities to individuals and communities. All these variables may have direct and/or indirect effects on the mental health of individuals as well as on the relations among c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of photographs
• Notes on contributors
• Preface
• PART I Theory and concepts of social sustainability and social work
• PART II Case Studies in Asia
• PART III Leadership and Future Development
• Index