Nature-based therapy in Botswana and Scotland: Re-imagining social work for the climate crisis

Abstract

This article discusses nature-based therapeutic interventions for young people and their families in Scotland and Botswana, to explore how green social work practice might tackle deepening inequalities in the context of the climate crisis. Both countries struggle with long-standing inequalities, and both face similar threats as the climate crisis advances-complicated by the legacies of other shared crises, from pandemics to poverty. With similar modes of governance and a shared entanglement in the British colonial project, social work practice encounters similar challenges in addressing the intersecting crises both countries face. Co-written by two social workers and a social anthropologist with personal, professional and research experience in these countries, the article draws on autoethnography to make comparisons that enable imagining new possibilities for social work practice in a time of accumulating crisis.