Common Goal and Common Cause: An Ethical Challenge for Collaborations in Environmental Social Work

Background and Purpose:  The objective of this ethnographic study was to understand processes of collaboration across geographic scales of macro-level social work (DeFillipis, Fisher, & Shragge 2010), with a focus on environmental organizers in Kerala, India.  Intervention on environmental issues often requires collaboration between community-level practitioners and practitioners working at a larger geographic scale (Claudio, 2007; Gray & Coates, 2012).  Given the extent that community-level interventions feature in proposed responses to global environmental changes (Adger, 2010; Tobin 1999), such collaborations will likely be crucial for the emerging field of environmental social work.  The state of Kerala, India is an apt site for studying such collaborations because of its strong indigenous organizing tradition and the environmental concerns arising from its recent rapid development.

Methods:  This presentation reports findings from twenty-five months of ethnographic research among two groups of environmental justice organizers who collaborated on a campaign to shut down a gelatin factory in a village in central Kerala.  The first group were local organizers residing in the village. 24 informal interviews and 51 semi-structured interviews were conducted concurrently with 700 hours of participant observation.  The second group was a network of “solidarity organizers” engaged in environmental campaigns throughout Kerala.  37 informal interviews and 60 semi-structured interviews were conducted concurrently with 900 hours of participant observation.   During observation, audio and video recordings were made of campaign-related meetings and events.  Two researchers (the primary investigator and a trained local assistant) were present during participant observation, and fieldnotes were compared daily to reduce bias.  In-situ coding employed MAXQDA qualitative analysis software to identify emergent themes, which were iteratively refined based on further analysis of fieldnotes, recordings, and interviews.

Results:  Though the two groups of organizers shared the campaign goal of shutting down the gelatin factory, they ultimately found it impossible to collaborate.  Differences in views about participant roles, leadership styles, and organizing tactics all led to this failure.  This study finds that all of these differences were traceable to a more fundamental disjuncture between different ways of framing the campaign goal as a matter for shared ethical commitment, or “common cause.” For local organizers, commitment to shutting down the factory arose directly from the shared hardships and hazards of proximity to the factory.  For solidarity organizers, by contrast, shutting down the factory was one part of a broader commitment to global social and environmental change.  Thus, although they shared a clear common goal, each group came to doubt the others’ commitment to both the cause and the collaboration, and eventually they parted ways.     

Implications:  This study shows that a shared goal may not be enough to sustain a collaboration between macro-level practitioners working at different geographic scales.  A conceptual distinction between “common goal” (i.e., a shared desired outcome) and “common cause” (i.e., a focus for alignment of ethical commitments) is developed as one tool for describing this problem.  This distinction is important to collaborations in macro practice generally, but particularly to collaborations across geographic scales of intervention, such as many in environmental social work.