Environmental Intersectionality in eco-social work: clients’ challenges, green services, barriers, and recommendations

Environmental problems increasingly intersect with social inequalities, yet their implications for everyday social work practice remain underexplored. Addressing this gap, this study pursues two interrelated aims. First, drawing on environmental intersectionality, it examines how green issues function as a social category shaping clients’ common problems and how these challenges vary across intersecting social factors. Second, it explores social workers’ green practices, implementation barriers, and practice-based recommendations. Using a generic qualitative design, data were collected through four focus group discussions with 21 social workers in Türkiye and analysed through deductive thematic analysis. The analysis identified five interrelated themes. First, environmental deprivation, spatial exclusion, and poverty were identified as intersecting structural factors shaping clients’ social problems, such as crime, substance use problems, and family conflicts. Second, the findings indicate that these conditions produce differentiated and intersectional vulnerabilities across gender, age, and migration status, with specific manifestations among women, children, older adults, and migrants. Third, structural and institutional barriers, such as lack of legislation, were identified as key constraints limiting the implementation of green social work. Fourth, existing practices, including institutional services and nature-assisted interventions, demonstrate both the potential and the uneven integration of green approaches in the field. Finally, participants proposed policy and practice recommendations to strengthen and expand green social work, including advocacy, legal frameworks, training and awareness-raising initiatives.