REIMAGINING CLIMATE JUSTICE THROUGH THE LENS OF GREEN SOCIAL WORK: AN INTEGRATED CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK

Climate justice scholarship has converged on a trivalent model of distributive, procedural and recognition justice, yet this model remains largely anthropocentric, vulnerable to technocratic and market-based capture, and silent on both the epistemic marginalisation of Indigenous and Global South knowledge and the structural drivers of the crisis. Green Social Work, grounded in eco-social theory, links environmental and social justice, but its implications for the conceptual architecture of climate justice have not been systematically mapped. This study examines how Green Social Work extends and transforms each dimension of the trivalent climate justice model and proposes an integrated conceptual framework. The study employs an integrative literature review of peer-reviewed scholarship published between January 2000 and March 2026 across climate justice theory, green and ecosocial social work, and critical perspectives on racial capitalism and degrowth, from which approximately 85 sources met the inclusion criteria, complemented by a reflexive thematic analysis of three abolitionist cases. The results show that Green Social Work reconfigures distributive justice into ecological justice, procedural justice into transdisciplinary co-production and recognition justice into epistemic justice, and adds a fourth, structural dimension that critiques racial capitalism, colonialism and growth ideology; the cross-case analysis identifies five themes, all present across the three cases, two of which recur irrespective of campaign outcome and across national, state and local scales. The findings of this study suggest that Green Social Work does not merely apply existing climate justice principles but reframes them into a four-dimensional model in which ecological integrity, co-produced knowledge, epistemic pluralism and structural transformation are mutually constitutive conditions of climate justice.