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Learning from our past
Social work has a lengthy history of intervening in disaster situations – natural and human-made, especially in philanthropic work with faith-based organisations and individuals. This changed with institutional forms of solidarity enshrined in the welfare state following World War 2. These impulses were coupled with the formation of the United Nations and its affiliated bodies, formed to rebuild a war-devastated Europe. These now have a remit to respond to any humanitarian disaster anywhere. In this chapter, I describe these developments, and include how the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) also became involved in such initiatives, highlighting the creation of co-produced solutions in locality-specific culturally relevant ways through community partnerships that include the social sciences like social work working alongside the physical sciences. I also argue that disaster interventions should form part of mainstream social work curricula and that humanitarian aid workers should have a social work qualification.
Social work has a lengthy history of involvement in delivering humanitarian aid following disasters. Desai (2007) describes how social work academics at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences have been responding to disasters in India since 1947, and have developed sophisticated infrastructures for doing so. The simple act of helping someone in crisis is a form of social work. History is replete with such examples, but these are normally not claimed as social work interventions. This is because such helping is provided as charitable good neighbourliness or kindness displayed to strangers rather than that provided by specially trained professionals who are embedded in institutionalised helping relationships. Institutional forms of helping have sought to harness acts of goodwill, under both the aegis of religious institutions rooted in beliefs about philanthropic giving and/or through state-endorsed forms of giving formulated on notions of collective solidarity and rights-based entitlement to services such as the welfare state. Humanitarian aid workers have tended to consider themselves as continuing philanthropic traditions and not linked up with the profession, although many qualified practitioners work in and manage humanitarian bodies, and humanitarian workers do social work by another name. Currently, humanitarian aid workers are seeking to professionalise and create regulatory mechanisms independently of social work, thereby replicating the creation of an ethical code, sanctions and other regulatory mechanisms. It is essential that a dialogue ensues between these two groups of professionals to ensure that they do not go their separate ways if social work is not to be fragmented further.
Philanthropic giving is associated with institutions such as: Christian churches through charitable giving; Muslim mosques disbursing zakat; Sikh gudwaras observing vand chhako; Judaism has tzedakah; Hinduism promoting dana; Buddhists urging selfless giving; and so on. Professional social work which began in Europe over 100 years ago (Kendall 2000) has deep roots in philanthropic thought and charitable giving. Since then, professional social work has moved into institutionalised giving through publicly financed provisions including the welfare state which Dominelli (2004) termed ‘institutional solidarity’, voluntary agencies, and increasingly through philanthro-capitalists who give money to favoured projects in the Global South, e.g. mosquito nets to reduce malaria (Bishop and Green 2008).
Other charitable responses occur when disasters, whether natural or human-made, strike and usually entail governmental, professional and individual giving. Contemporary humanitarian aid provided in such situations is structured around institutions linked to the United Nations, government departments such as Emergency Planning, international civil society organisations such as the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent (IFRC), not-for-profit organisations and local non-governmental bodies (NGOs) that provide charitable giving and assistance. Additionally, social workers are involved in government bodies specially created to provide safety and services during both natural and human-made disasters. These include: aid distribution departments such as the British DfID (Department for International Development) that provides aid for countries in Africa and Asia; Canada’s CIDA (Canadian International Development Agency) that operates in many countries including those in Latin America; and Sweden’s SIDA (Swedish International Development Agency) that funds projects globally including in former Yugoslavian nations after the Balkan Wars of the 1990s; or disaster management agencies such as FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Agency) in the United States. Yet, while social workers can be involved at all levels and in all bodies that distribute caring services, their voice is seldom heard in the media covering disaster interventions. And, more worryingly for the profession, there is scant attention given to these activities in most mainstream social work curricula (Dominelli 2013a).
In this chapter, I highlight the roles that social workers have played in disaster interventions, including their capacity to work in multidisciplinary teams to enhance the humanitarian services provided. And I consider the relevance of lessons from past disasters that are useful in addressing 21st century conditions including those linked to climate change, which, along with poverty, are proving extremely difficult to eradicate. These two problems expose virtually intractable contemporary challenges for social workers to address. Moreover, they are inextricably linked. Poor people have fewer resources available to reduce or mitigate the impact of either climate change or other types of disasters, and so when these occur, these groups suffer most. Populations in the global South, indigenous peoples, women, children, and black people in the global North are the most adversely affected groups while they have contributed least to creating such problems in the first instance. I draw on empirical research from several projects, one based on the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, another on climate change and older people in the UK, and others based on disaster interventions linked to earthquakes and floods1 and activities conducted under the aegis of the Disaster Intervention and Climate Change Committee of the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) which I have headed since its inception in 2010. All of these examples indicate that climate change creates new vulnerabilities, has a deleterious impact on people’s existing vulnerabilities and reduces their capacity to demonstrate resilience during a disaster and afterwards in the post-disaster reconstruction and prevention processes. Moreover, this work reveals how social workers’ transferable skills and values enable them to mobilise people in locality-specific and culturally relevant approaches to mitigate the risks that they will face to livelihoods and wellbeing and demand more accountable and socially and environmentally just solutions that will benefit everyone.
Professional social work began in Europe, with important developments occurring in the UK and the Netherlands towards the end of the 19th century. In the UK, the Settlement Movement and the Charity Organisation Societies (COS) worked on issues of poverty, unemployment and housing among white British working-class people and immigrant groups in East London. The COS focused on casework interventions that focused on individual responsibility and change, while the Settlement Movement sought to address the same problems through community-based collective action and brought in university students including those from Oxford University to foster self-help initiatives. Jane Addams, when she visited community workers in the British Settlement Movement, was so impressed by Toynbee Hall and its initiatives in East London that she imported its model of working into the US and set up Hull House in Chicago. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, the University of Amsterdam beat the UK in establishing the first university-based course for training social workers by a couple of years. Social work education at tertiary level entered the American academy a few years later (Kendall 2000; Dominelli 1997).
Professional social work’s involvement in disaster situations came later. It formally commenced after World War 2 to help rebuild a war-devastated Europe and involved American funding through the Marshall Plan. This included Fulbright Scholarships which allowed selected academics to go to the US to train in social work at doctoral level. Such exchanges promoted the Americanisation of European social work, and impacted heavily upon locality-specific and culturally relevant forms of social work practices2 in Europe. Many of these were lost as many returning academics and those accessing American literature utilised this external knowledge in the educational programs in their countries of origins. There was a certain cachet of sophistication and modernity associated with American social work over local brands. For some countries, the imperialistic mandate was more obvious. Ioakimidis (2010), for example, describes how Greek social work was destroyed through the deliberate policy of Americanising the local curriculum. Similar concerns have been raised by others, including Yip (2005) and the rise of the movement promoting indigenous social work (Hart 2010).
The United Nations (UN) and its associated agencies were crucial in both spreading professional social work across the globe and developing its disaster intervention dimensions. Under its aegis, disaster intervention, or humanitarian aid as it has become known, has grown into a big business involving millions of professional relief workers and volunteers (Pilger 2005). At the same time, governments who have promised substantial sums of aid either do not deliver the full amount, or donate it as tied aid which does not always provide the goods and services that local people either need or want.
The UN opened the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Geneva in 1950 to take over relief functions previously performed by its Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) in a Europe devastated by war. Expert-led models provided the dominant paradigms for practice, even though the Office of the High Commission on Human Rights (UNHCHR) had underpinned its operations with a commitment to human rights. The UNHCHR was replaced by the Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in 2006 to accommodate objections raised by several countries including the US. A number of other changes occurred in the UN’s disaster work infrastructures in the intervening years. They are too detailed for coverage here, but today the main body for delivering humanitarian aid is the Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) which is led by a UN Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs. OCHA replaced the UN’s Department of Humanitarian Affairs in 1998 and Valerie Amos has been in charge of OCHA since 2010. OCHA’s work is undertaken through the Executive Committee for Humanitarian Affairs, an Emergency Relief Coordinator (Amos), and the Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC). Social workers have helped IASC develop the guidelines for psycho-social interventions amongst others, and IASSW (International Association of Schools of Social Work) members helped to translate these into a number of different languages. Other UN agencies with an interest in humanitarian aid are the UNDP, UNFPA, UNHABITAT, UNHCR, UNICEF; the WHO and World Bank; and international non-governmental bodies including the International Committee of the Red Cross and Red Crescent, Oxfam, Save the Children, Christian Aid, World Vision, USAID, and local civil society organisations.
The OCHA-driven infrastructure was created to improve coordination of aid, and integrate inter-agency, multi-sectoral interventions and multi-professional involvement to deliver services more effectively to recipients. While progress has been achieved, the Haiti earthquake of 2010 and the ongoing Syrian civil war have highlighted extensive difficulties in achieving these objectives in complex situations, especially those further complicated by armed conflict and the loss of governance structures. Although lessons have been learnt from these experiences, they indicate the intractable nature of humanitarian aid that gets trapped in the interstices of political power plays in which national sovereignty trumps state duties to care for their citizens and ensure that they can access food, clothing, shelter, medicine, education, health and social services as endorsed by Articles 22 to 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) which all UN member states have ratified. Observing the implementation of the provisions of the UDHR is a task that social workers can promote (George 2003).
The UN defines a disaster as ‘widespread extensive damage that is beyond the coping capacity of any community and thereby requires external intervention’ (Perez and Thompson 1994). This potentially covers both natural and human-made disasters like earthquakes, tsunamis, flooding, drought and chemical spills respectively. Dominelli (2009) has extended this definition to include poverty as the largest ‘human-made’ disaster and argues that there is an interaction between these which blurs the boundaries between these two broad types. Additionally, the impact of disasters is exacerbated by poverty, leaving women, children and older people as the most vulnerable groups (Bizzari 2012). Additionally, Dominelli (2012a) builds on Bullard (2000) to suggest that urbanisation and industrialisation based on capitalist social relations jeopardise sustainable solutions to the fundamental causes of many avoidable disasters and highlight the role of sexist, classist and racist power relations in structurally undermining the resilience of exploited and vulnerable populations following a disaster. Social workers, with their concerns about social justice and human rights, are well-placed to advocate for environmentally sound, equitable and socially responsible disaster interventions and cover these in mainstream social work curricula (Dominelli 2013c).
The number of instances in which social workers have worked as humanitarian aid workers is legion and beyond the scope of this short article, so I focus on examples of recent disasters that IASSW has utilised to raise awareness of various issues encountered in providing humanitarian aid. These have drawn upon research and IASSW members’ commitment to developing disaster interventions as important arenas for the development of theory and practice. I choose instances that produced developmental milestones in IASSW’s recent contributions to the field.
I begin with an initiative emanating from Durham University (Dominelli in the UK) and Metropole University College (Strauss in Denmark) endeavouring to secure support from the IFSW (International Federation of Social Workers) and ICSW (International Council for Social Welfare) to provide a conference on social workers’ role in climate change interventions as a side event in the COP (Conference of the Parties) 16 Summit in Copenhagen in December 2009. For this event, given my research on the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, I spearheaded the development of a policy document on social work’s role in disasters and another on climate change which were discussed and unanimously ratified at this conference and subsequently approved by the IASSW Board of Directors at its Copenhagen meeting in January 2010. The Copenhagen event raised the profile of climate change and disaster interventions in all three sister organisations (IASSW, ICSW and IFSW). This was followed up by an article challenging practitioners and educators to take this work forward as an integral part of the social work profession (Dominelli 2011). Additionally, the then President of IASSW (Yuen) had the vision to request that I seek IASSW’s accreditation to the UNFCCC. Consequently, IASSW has been accredited at UNFCCC and, as head of the Disaster Intervention and Climate Change Committee, I have ensured social work representation at the Cancun (2010), Durban (2011), Doha (2012) and Warsaw (2013) meetings of the UNFCCC. Exhibitions, side-events and media interviews have enabled policy-makers and NGOs to appreciate the role of social work in climate change debates.
However, IASSW’s recent involvement in disaster interventions had commenced earlier – in response to the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami through the RIPL Network (Reconstructing Peoples’ Lives after Disasters) which was agreed by the board at the first meeting chaired by President Abye Tasse to provide both direct aid and capacity-building initiatives in affected communities. This endeavour is described in detail in Dominelli (2013b). Although this began with various universities in the UK, Canada and Slovenia intervening in Sri Lanka and working with local universities (Colombo, Sabaragamuwa, Rahuna) and the National Institute for Social Development (NISD) (the educational body responsible for delivering social work education in that country) only Ljubljana and Durham universities remain involved, primarily through staff and student exchanges that continue to the present. These revolve primarily around assisting long-term reconstruction initiatives and capacity building aimed at improving social work education in Sri Lanka. This work has been conducted primarily through voluntary initiatives funded largely through university staff and student goodwill. However, CIDA funded non-social-work staff at Queen’s University to assist NISD in replacing its diploma program in social work with an undergraduate degree in 2006. It helped initiate MA-level studies at NISD as well. The issue of bringing social work education into the university remains a live one, and although there is support for NISD joining Colombo University at staff level, the money needed to do this has not been forthcoming from the Sri Lankan Government which is responsible for NISD through the Ministry of Social Welfare as well as holding the purse-strings for the University Grants Committee (UGC) which then distributes funds amongst all Sri Lankan universities.
IASSW’s role in disaster interventions was given a huge boost through President Yuen’s support for social work development in the People’s Republic of China, particularly following the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake which destroyed large numbers of lives and livelihoods across huge swathes of Sichuan Province. These interventions are strongly embedded amongst staff based at Hong Kong Polytechnic University and described at length in Sim et al. (2013). Along with other IASSW colleagues, I have made modest contributions to training events focusing on disaster interventions aimed at capacity building and curriculum development in China. Other crucial developments here have involved community development initiatives (Ku et al. 2009), psychosocial work (Sim 2011), and interdisciplinary work that crosses the physical and social sciences to build resilience before, during and after disasters (Dominelli 2012a, 2012b). Additionally, Yuen’s energy resulted in the creation of other joint initiatives including the formation of the Institute of Disaster Management and Reconstruction (IDMR) with Sichuan University in Chengdu which was launched in early 2013. These diverse threads are being woven together and are highly influential in the future development of green or disaster-based interventions in social work in China. Additionally, the Sichuan experience, along with the Sri Lankan one which were presented at an ESRC Festival of Social Science Event in Durham in late 2012, inspired local residents who listened to these presentations in a disadvantaged part of that city and saw the picture exhibition based on Sim’s work in Yingxiu to consider using photography to enhance their own resilience and tell their stories in surviving poverty locally. This provides an excellent illustration of how Asian experiences can influence developments in the West. Social workers can undertake more work that encourages flows of information and lessons from abroad to the West, in what I term reciprocated knowledges (Dominelli 2004).
The 2010 earthquakes in Haiti and Chile also provided opportunities for IASSW to contribute to disaster interventions both in providing practical help, increasing awareness of the issues involved in developing community preparedness and promoting capacity-building initiatives. IASSW members from universities in the Caribbean, Canada and the UK sought to provide practical help and support for victim-survivors in Haiti. Colleagues from the Caribbean highlighted inappropriate interventions in Haiti, including the limited distribution of aid amongst those affected; the treatment of children by some agencies; fragmented service provision; and the implications of inadequate health care for the future health of victim-survivors. Funding from Durham University facilitated the engagement of Haitian-origined staff in the University of Montreal to strengthen their links and interventions with affected social work educators in Port-au-Prince and contribute to seminars aimed at building capacity in social work in the Haitian capital city which was virtually totally destroyed – its infrastructure, public institutions, governance structures – and resulting in huge casualties. It also provided the first instance in which physical scientists and social scientists at Durham University were able to highlight landslide hazards for social scientists and for the IASSW member to pass this information on to practitioners on the ground
In Chile, IASSW members from the UK, Hong Kong and different parts of Latin America provided seminar training aimed at building capacity for disaster intervention. During the course of their visit to the country, Chileans’ own contributions to capacity building and curriculum development, housing construction and preparedness initiatives were shared amongst those present, and highlighted the importance of local initiatives led by the indomitable Malvina Ponce de Leon in strengthening the knowledge held by social work practitioners and educators in the country. The many lessons the overseas visitors took away with them covered the importance of sound housing construction in reducing the number of fatalities during earthquakes; networks of support at local and international levels; and the constant updating of curriculum materials to ensure the inclusion of the latest research data and the mainstreaming of disaster interventions in what is taught to social work students
The lessons learnt through these disaster interventions culminated in the creation of the Christchurch Virtual Helpline and the development of a virtual means of support for hard-pressed practitioners responding to endless aftershocks (11,000 in one year) and stressed victim-survivors of the ‘double-whammy’ inflicted by the 2010 and 2011 earthquakes in Christchurch, New Zealand. Using the insights of IASSW initiatives, those collected through data arising from the research projects identified below (in note 1) and the Disaster Intervention and Climate Change Committee, I sought to gather the energies of many IASSW members who wanted to respond to a request that IASSW assist practitioners and victim-survivors in Christchurch (Dominelli 2012a). Without any additional resources to help reach this objective, I used technologies offered by the internet and mobile phone to lead the development of ethical guidelines and bring together a group of social work educators and practitioners who were willing to support people in Christchurch who could contact them by telephone, email and Skype in dealing with the traumas that arose from these two earthquake events. The ethical procedures and Christchurch Virtual Helpline model were offered to IASSW members responding to the Fukoshima multiple-hazard disaster in Japan (Akimoto) later in 2011.
The 2013 Lushan earthquake in China led to the further integration of knowledge held by physical and national scientists, utilising the expertise held in the Earthquake without Frontiers (EwF) Project funded by the Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) in the UK which involved a multi-stakeholder consortium in studying the Alpine-Himalayan Continental Plate (i.e. Earthquake Belt), with particular emphasis on Kazakhstan, Nepal, Bihar (India) and the Ordos Plateau (near Xi’an) in China. This consortium, based on British universities – Cambridge, Durham, Hull, Leeds, Northumbria and Oxford – expanded to include Hong Kong Polytechnic University and the Institute of Disaster Management at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in India. Responding to the needs of the victim-survivors in Lushan involved a different form of virtual, voluntary support and was led by Durham University’s social sciences head for the in-country EwF project in China. This disaster struck a few weeks before the head of the IASSW Disaster Intervention and Climate Change Committee and the current IASSW President (Nadkarni) were to go to Chengdu to celebrate the launch of the IDMR.
As the social sciences lead for EwF’s work in China, I had met physical science colleagues at the Chinese Earthquake Administration (CEA) and practitioners linked to Red Cross China earlier. Consequently, I was able to find out what was happening on the ground through the internet-based information technologies, particularly email and Skype. As I had already distributed the Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Intervention Toolkit, Manual and Handbook, based on the ESRC 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami Project at an OCHA meeting in Copenhagen in March 2013, it was available for me to offer for utilisation in this incident. Colleagues in the CEA and Hong Kong Polytechnic University volunteered to translate parts of it for use by practitioners responding to the needs of the Lushan earthquake victim-survivors, a number of whom had been adversely affected by both the 2008 Wenchuan and 2013 Lushan earthquakes. Additionally, I was able to call upon the landslide hazard expertise at Durham University and passed their maps identifying these hazards to practitioners on the ground in Lushan. These maps identified the areas where camps should not be sited because the risk of landslides would be too high. Thus, physical and social scientists showed that, by working together, knowledge could be shared and used to inform decision-making and practice in complex, dangerous situations.
This model of interdisciplinarity utilisation of physical sciences and social sciences knowledge through collaborative endeavours was used subsequently to inform practitioners and academics involved in supporting those affected by the Uttarkhand floods during the summer of 2013. IASSW members including Nikku, Dominelli and President Nadkarni worked together to support local people and apply for funds to conduct research to improve preventative responses to future floods. The Tata Institute and Nepal School of Social Work sent staff and students to assist the local universities. Durham did not because lack of local knowledge and funds meant doing so was inappropriate and could jeopardise local initiatives and also place additional pressure on scarce resources including those linked to helping people reach safety. The stress they place on hard-pressed resources is something volunteers should think about before they go into a disaster situation (Dominelli 2012a). Once again, the landslide expertise at Durham University was harnessed to provide much needed information about this particular hazard and then given to academic staff, students and practitioners on the ground in Uttarkhand. Funds to further develop this work in this area are being sought. Academics at the Hemwati Nandan Bahuguna Garhwal University and their students are key players in these initiatives to ensure that all interventions are locality-specific and culturally relevant.
Although these interdisciplinary, multi-stakeholder approaches to disasters are discussed to some extent in Dominelli (2012a, b), these instances highlight the importance of further development in this newly emerging area of professional practice – green social work. Green social work has sought to develop theory and practice to a different level than either ecological social work or disaster social work which has either largely ignored the physical environment as in ecological social work (see Gill & Jack 2007) or environmental social work which ignores a holistic approach rooted in a structural critique of current models of socioeconomic development including hyper-urbanisation, structural poverty and political marginalisation according to diverse social divisions and neoliberal social relations (van Wormer et al. 2011; Sim et al. 2013). Although IASSW activities have drawn upon and disseminated the green social work model in response to requests for help, as a flexible, locality-specific culturally relevant one, it is essential that the lessons learnt from the examples considered above are made known more widely and developed further to ensure that social work’s roles and responsibilities in disaster interventions and climate change are better debated, understood, theorised and practiced. Crucial to this is partnership working within an egalitarian, social justice and human rights–based framework that is led by local people. I now turn my attention to considering some of the opportunities and challenges entailed in conducting such work.
The combination of direct action and research illustrated through the above discussion reveals that with leadership, commitment and energy, social work can innovate and foster practice in new directions and promote the production of shared knowledge and learning. IASSW can play a crucial role in growing this emerging aspect of the profession – green social work – by:
Challenges that need addressing include:
The identified opportunities are useful in developing social work’s potential to contribute to debates about and interventions in disaster interventions. The Global Agenda developed by IASSW, IFSW and ICSW has one of its four pillars based on sustainable development. This can facilitate the compilation of good practice and relevant theories that are being used to promote social workers’ practical engagement with the issues raised above across the world, but also to strengthen the profession’s voice within the UN and other international bodies (Truell and Jones 2012).
The above challenges will require extensive action at the local and national levels to ensure that political commitment to supporting disaster victim-survivors is given priority and resources, and people are given dignity in having their needs met as they determine them. It is also about enabling local populations who might provide funds and resources to do so. This might involve social workers providing information about how earlier funds were used and which groups were covered by their distribution. And it is about convincing national governments and politicians to uphold their promises of aid, but also to remove any conditions that restrict their use to advantage the donor-country, not the receiving one.
Social workers have transferrable skills in interviewing people, mobilising resources, raising consciousness about social problems that affect the wellbeing and livelihoods of people, flora, fauna and the physical environment and facilitating the development of solutions and actions that bring communities together in institutional expression of solidarity, individual initiatives promoting goodwill, and enhancing understandings of the interdependent connectivities that mean that finding solutions to the problems initiated by climate change will benefit every living being on planet earth.
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1 The projects are the: Internationalising Institutional and Professional Practices: Community Participation models in the 2004 tsunami in Sri Lanka, funded by the British Economic and Social Sciences Research Council; Built Infrastructures, Older People and Health and Social Care under Conditions of Climate Change (BIOPICCC) funded by the British Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC); Earthquakes without Frontiers (EwF) project funded by the British Natural Environmental Research Council (NERC) and the ESRC; activities facilitated by the International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW) Disaster Interventions and Climate Change Committees, including attendance at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Conference of the Parties (COP) meetings.
2 I invented the term ‘locality-specific culturally relevant’ forms of social work to avoid using the term ‘indigenous’ because this term carries so much colonial baggage that I wished to avoid (Dominelli 2000).