Connectedness across human, animal, and environmental systems: a scoping review of One Health and One Welfare in social work

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Social work is increasingly engaged with challenges spanning human, animal, and environmental systems, yet explicit uptake of One Health and One Welfare within social work-relevant scholarship remains unexamined. This scoping review, guided by PRISMA-ScR, mapped how these frameworks are referenced, defined, and applied in literature relevant to social work education and practice. Searches across six academic databases, supplemented by targeted web searching, identified 220 records for screening, of which nineteen met the inclusion criteria. Four themes emerged: discourse on One Health/One Welfare has outpaced its operationalization in practice; the environmental/ecological dimension is often the weakest pillar relative to human-animal content; education is a common entry point, though curricular specificity, competencies, and assessment strategies are inconsistently defined; and while equity and justice framing is common, Indigenous knowledge is rarely substantively engaged. Together, these findings point to a gap between conceptual endorsement of these frameworks and concrete guidance for social work education and practice. Situating these findings alongside eco-social work and post-anthropocentric scholarship, the paper argues for a bidirectional relationship in which social work’s structural and equity-oriented tradition can strengthen One Health/One Welfare’s attention to social drivers of risk, while these frameworks offer social work tools for examining its own anthropocentric assumptions.