Ecosocial Work in the Polycrisis Era: Vulnerability, Transformative Learning and Epistemic Change

Abstract

Western welfare systems prove structurally inadequate in the face of the polycrisis—the causal entanglement of ecological, economic, health, and democratic crises. This article develops a theoretical reconstructive framework that reframes social work in ecosocial terms around four interconnected axes: the polycrisis as an ontological and epistemic reconfiguration of reality that renders sectoral interventions ineffective; vulnerability reframed as an epistemic and political driver rather than a deficit to be managed; abduction and the buffer zone as method and architecture for transformative collective learning; and conflict as a productive catalyst, with boundary spanning as a connecting function that social work can exercise but does not monopolise. Ecological justice operates as a transversal criterion across all axes. Methodologically, the paper integrates and interrogates secondary evidence from the international literature, re-reading two documented cases that operate at different scales—one meso-local, one running from the embodied and domestic to the regional and supranational—and illustrate institutionalised and self-organised forms of conflict, respectively. The analysis converges into a recursive five-stage transformative cycle that articulates the doler–saber–querer–poder–hacer sequence across three levels of meta-designing—direct intervention, local governance, and regulatory arrangements—identifying enabling conditions and structural obstacles, including institutional permeability. The framework addresses the gap between well-established ecosocial work principles and the scarcity of operational devices capable of supporting collective learning in practice. Where much eco-social scholarship documents why experiential and situated knowledge remains weakly integrated in local welfare and climate governance, the contribution here is architectural: it specifies the devices and institutional conditions through which such integration could be organised and indicates Participatory Action Research as a coherent methodological frame for testing them. The discussion examines the framework’s limits, the tension between institutionalised and self-organised buffer zones, and the trade-off between depth, scale, and speed of transformation.

The authors' abstract, as published at the source. Social Sciences, 2026 · DOI ↗