Abstract

Climate change risks deepening social inequalities and poses new challenges for social policy. Drawing on climate justice, this article examines how climate impacts and policies are experienced by people living in poverty situations and by social workers, how their knowledge by experience and professional practice circulates in local climate policy-making, and how social workers understand their role in promoting climate justice. Based on qualitative interviews with people experiencing poverty, social workers, and local policy officials in three Flemish municipalities, the study shows that vulnerable groups experience climate injustice as a combination of disadvantages, misrecognition, and limited influence over policy agendas. While experiential knowledge is widely acknowledged as valuable, it remains weakly integrated in policy processes and is often channelled indirectly or introduced only after key decisions, reflecting persistent epistemic marginalisation. These patterns can be explained by the interaction of dominant policy framings, unequal power relations, and institutional arrangements that privilege technical expertise. Together, these dynamics highlight both the strategic importance and structural constraints of social work as a mediating actor and point to the need for institutional arrangements that enable earlier, more substantive, and more direct integration of experiential or practice-based knowledge.

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