Environmental workfare - the Australian experience

Abstract: Environmental workfare sits in the netherworld between employment or training and is both a precarious and low-paid occupation. Globally unique, Australia has produced a three-decade history of such programs at a national level. While government and service providers have provided some limited reporting on the outcomes of these programs, scholars have paid little attention to the experiences of the participants. Such programs also represent a social space in which the disciplining of youth occurs. The most recent incarnation, the ‘Green Army’, was consistently associated by the federal Conservative government with their ‘Direct Action’ response to climate change. While occupying young people for a short period, the programs fail to produce a coherent response to climate change. The compromises made, often before the work even begins, highlight the difficulties of a reformist approach to addressing climate change within a capitalist system. This thesis explores the experiences of participants, both young team members and their supervisors, in Australian national environmental workfare programs. It applies Bourdieu’s theory of practice to examine the habitus of the participants and considers other perspectives to examine their practices and struggles. By exploring the futures that they expect for both the world and for themselves and how they position themselves, it examines the capitals they accumulate and the fields they are contesting. The relations with other humans, species, and ecosystems exemplify the emergence of a ‘nature-culture’ associated with these programs. While attempting to implement their work, participants experience a variety of barriers. The subsequent disillusion of team members in the wake of their projects is discussed. The unique position of team supervisors is also explored: as individuals often qualified in environmental or related sciences, they found themselves in a role more akin to social work when supervising the teams of young workers. A series of focus groups and individual interviews were conducted at locations throughout New South Wales in 2018 in the final days of the Green Army program. Nineteen interviewees had been team members during various programs extending as far back as the mid-1990s. Some of these team members had progressed to other roles in the conservation sector. In total, thirty-four individuals participated in this research project. This included representation of team members and project supervisors from environmental workfare programs, plus some with managerial or project partnership experience. In response to concerns about the impending climate crisis, calls for emergency and authoritarian responses are emerging. The experiences of national environmental workfare programs in Australia provide some insight into the challenges facing future responses.