Finding Common Ground? Environmental Justice across Difference

Background and Purpose Environmental justice (EJ) addresses the unequal distribution of environmental harms and resources and is increasingly recognized as central to social work's response to intertwined social and environmental inequalities. Despite growing calls to embed EJ in social work education and practice, existing scholarship has paid limited attention to how future practitioners understand it, particularly in socially divided contexts. In multicultural, conflict-affected societies, environmental issues may serve as a shared point of engagement; yet, how such engagement is interpreted across groups positioned differently within systems of inequality remains understudied. This study examines how final-year BSW students from diverse Jewish and Arab-Palestinian communities in Israel make sense of environmental justice as they transition into practice. The question that guided our research was: How do students make sense of EJ in a multicultural, conflict-affected context?

Methods: This qualitative study draws on data from a field-integrated course combining critical environmental justice (EJ) theory with community-based environmental projects, conducted in partnership with 21 organizations in the rural Jezreel Valley of northern Israel. Jewish and Arab-Palestinian students engaged with municipalities, governmental agencies, and NGOs. We examined 95 reflection papers produced by students across three course cohorts (2020–2023). The reflections, focused on students’ experiences with environmental justice in practice, were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis, with themes developed inductively through a critical social work lens.

Results: Findings reveal three interrelated dimensions of students' understanding of EJ in a multicultural, conflict-affected context. First, environment as a site of encounter across difference, where engagement with environmental issues facilitates interactions across social, ethnic, and political divides, prompting reflexivity regarding stereotypes, privilege, and positionality. Second, contested environmental narratives, where students interpret environmental issues through symbolic meanings, place-based attachments, and competing narratives, reveal how environmental concerns are embedded in identity and collective memory. Third, environmental justice and power relations, where students recognize environmental issues as shaped by unequal power differences, manifested in limited participation, silenced voices, and unequal influence in decision-making processes, particularly for marginalized and peripheral communities. Across these dimensions, an understanding of environmental justice emerged as a shared concern, as well as a space that highlighted difference and inequality.

Conclusions and Implications: This study advances environmental social work by examining the relational and interpretive processes that shape students’ engagement with EJ as they transition into practice. The findings suggest that EJ can serve as a form of "common ground" that enables engagement across differences while also reflecting and reproducing structural inequalities. This duality challenges the assumption that shared environmental concerns lead to shared understandings of justice. Social work education must explicitly address how environmental meanings, power relations, and positionality shape practice in diverse, conflict-affected contexts. For practitioners in divided societies, EJ work requires skill in navigating contested narratives and asymmetric power relations. Reflexive, place-based, and deliberative approaches can strengthen social workers' capacity to engage with environmental challenges as sites of both connection and contestation. Although this study is situated in a specific context, the findings may inform diverse and divided communities worldwide.