Sustainability in everyday Social Work practice: From ecological awareness to operational change.
Emanuela Fato
The ecological crisis challenges social work not only to address environmental issues through specialised projects, but to reconsider how everyday professional practices are organised, sustained and legitimised within welfare services. While eco-social work has increasingly highlighted the interdependence between social and environmental justice, sustainability is still often treated as an additional thematic area rather than as a guiding principle for ordinary practice. This article proposes a theoretical–methodological reflection on sustainability in everyday social work practice, understood as an operational competence that shapes daily decision-making, professional relationships and organisational processes. From an eco-social and relational perspective, sustainability is reframed as the capacity to hold together care, limits and responsibility over time, avoiding both the moralisation of individual workers and the delegation of ecological concerns to specialised interventions. The paper identifies key dimensions through which sustainability takes shape in daily practice: the use of sustainability as a decision-making lens, the revaluation of margins and «waste» as generative resources and the diffusion of practices through relational processes rather than formal replication. It argues that working sustainably is not primarily a technical issue, but an ethical and political orientation that affects how social workers inhabit complexity, manage scarcity and preserve the quality of professional and community ecosystems.
Keywords
Sustainability, Social work practice, Everyday decision-making, Organisational change, Professional wellbeing.
