Social work,neoliberalism,and post-disaster intervention: The 1985,2010,and 2015 Chilean earthquakes

Abstract

The article analyzes the contexts and specificities of post-disaster social work intervention based on the testimonies of social workers who participated in the recovery and normalization processes after the earthquakes of 1985, 2010, and 2015 in Chile. The neoliberal context has influence in the social intervention. As neoliberalism deepens, there is more technology and better access to material resources, but at the same time, professional autonomy and community knowledge decrease. Research suggests there is a need for further critical discussion about how social work has been colonized by neoliberalism, even in seemingly neutral issues such as post-disaster intervention.

Keywords

Disaster neoliberalism normalization social intervention social work

Introduction

Social intervention is a transdisciplinary concept (Ortega, 2015), but it is used mainly by social workers (Moreno and Molina, 2018). Kaufmann (2014: 3) defines social intervention as ‘to characterize [a] specific, abstract form of intentional interaction with reality’. Soydan (2015) writes that intervention is at the core of social work, because the term refers to inducing changes or eliminating risk factors about social problems. This involves the theorical approach of this issue, besides the necessary efficiency about the problems that social intervention alludes to. Regarding this topic, Lub (2019) says that social work must reflect critically on the conceptual and political assumptions about intervention.

Social intervention’s meaning can be a restrictive or wide one. In more restrictive terms, intervention in social work is expressed on a smaller scale, focused on family or community issues (Fraser and Galisky, 2010). On the other hand, in its wider sense, social intervention refers to a more transversal social phenomenon. In this way, Carballeda (2002) points out that the processes of social intervention try to maintain social cohesion. In this sense, social intervention refers to discursive dispositives oriented to transform, adjust, or normalize the population (Saavedra, 2017).

For social work, normality can delimit the sense and purpose of intervention. There are legal, ethical, religious, and traditional approaches that define what is considered normal. Social intervention that produces normality is neither politically nor ethically neutral. For example, neoliberalism normalizes population behavior in relation to an ethos that locates the market as the center of social life. The neoliberal normalization processes in the population draw attention to critical social work, considering the consequences this political regime has caused to humanity.

The production of normality relates social intervention with neoliberalism. Payles (2011: 170) shows that neoliberalism emphasizes ‘trade liberalization, deregulation and the privatization of public service’. When the neoliberal regime works in a state of normality, the growing and naturalized mechanisms of intervention prevent disorder or social fracture. Some social work practices are very functional to this order (Wallace and Pease, 2011). This circumstance has not been critically observed by social work (Cheung, 2018), because it is about social political styles legitimated through processes which are simultaneously quotidian and global. Nevertheless, there are situations where quotidian normalization of neoliberalism does not work. This happens in disaster situations. Extreme phenomena related to climate change or seismic risk exposure have a significant potential risk.

Disasters and catastrophes are professional situations of great complexity for social work. In recent years, social work has developed interesting contributions in the field of disaster intervention and research (e.g. Alston et al., 2019; Dominelli, 2015). Certainly, the greater interest has to do with the progressive and serious consequences of climate change (e.g. Alston, 2015; Alston et al., 2018). Nevertheless, the effects of tsunamis and earthquakes are a matter of interest too, considering this kind of disaster has a low frequency in time but a large damage potential.

On the other side, disasters are a growing issue of concern in governmental agenda all over the world. This impacts institutions and services where social workers develop their careers. Extreme weather events, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, and the recent COVID-19 pandemic are situations hard to manage for affected communities. The frequency and intensity of disasters around the world have increased in the last decades. Climate change can explain the qualitative and quantitative rise of catastrophes. However, from a more critical approach, disasters are not natural events, they are socially and historically contextualized processes (Remes et al., 2016). Aspects such as governmentality, the relationship with nature, and productive matrix would be the conditional factors in the expansion of material damages and the impact on human lives.

In developing countries, this issue has been expressed with more intensity. Not only because governments do not have enough technical and financial resources for preventing and facing the effects of disaster, but also because in poor countries under neoliberal regimes, prevention and damage repairs are made according to market perspectives (Bay, 2019). In these countries, there are important normative and financial restrictions for government agencies’ actions based on neoliberal beliefs that suppose inefficiency in statal response (Norwood et al., 2019). Dealing with disaster consequences, social and community services suffer important restrictions in these political contexts. We think that social work should deal with this problem beyond the technical management of disasters considering that post-disaster neoliberal normalization has long-term political and cultural objectives.

In a review of neoliberal impact on post-disaster intervention, Chile is a representative case. After the authoritarian government (1973–1990), the country has deepened its neoliberal politics, privatizing water supplies, education, and social security systems. Chile also has been well known for its long history of severe catastrophes, documented from the16th century until the present moment. Chilean territory is exposed to significant climate and geological threatens. As an example, can be mentioned huge earthquakes, higher that 8.5_Mw, some of which are related with big tsunamis that have affected the coastal zones of the country (e.g. 1730, 1960, and 2010).

Our research project addresses the way in which neoliberalism attempts to keep its course, both discursively and materially; in particular, when viewed from a social work intervention perspective. Our observation of post-disaster normalization proposes a specific line of argument that uses biopolitics as an interpretative framework (Bay, 2016).

For the purpose of this study, we considered three earthquakes that affected Chile during the neoliberal regime. The first event considered was the 1985 earthquake of 8.0_Mw that affected mainly the cities of San Antonio, Valparaíso, and Santiago, leaving 178 dead and nearly a million victims (Montes, 2020). The second was the 2010 earthquake that happened at a time when democracy had already been restored. This earthquake occurred in the early morning of 27 February, reaching an intensity of 8.8_Mw. The most heavily damaged areas were located in the country’s south-central regions (Maule and Biobío). According to the National Emergency Office (ONEMI-Chile, 2010), this disaster claimed the lives of 521 people, left 2 million victims and damaged 440,000 houses. Finally, on 16 September 2015, another earthquake hit northern Chile, with an intensity of 8.4_Mw. The most heavily damaged areas were the cities of Coquimbo and La Serena, in addition to a significant number of rural settlements. According to ONEMI-Chile (2015), 15 people died and a total of 7987 houses were damaged.

The objective of this article is to analyze the contexts and specificities of post-disaster social work intervention in neoliberal contexts. This is based on the testimonies of social workers who participated in the recovery and normalization processes after the earthquakes of 1985, 2010, and 2015 in Chile. It is necessary to note that in our country there are no technical protocols to define specific tasks for social workers in disaster situations and there are just some generic actions described in relation to their roles. Alcaíno and Matus-Salazar’s (2016) research after the 2010 earthquake identifies professional performance, basically around direct intervention with the affected people and the coordination of resources to solve basic needs.

In our investigation, the assumption is that social workers’ interventions would be adjusted to neoliberal principles to face post-disaster recovery. Therefore, social work was part of disaster recovery processes in 1985, 2010, and 2015 through social intervention mechanisms that follow neoliberal logics, and, for example, they do not consider the communities affected by the disasters. Our main question is whether social work intervention was mediated by a neoliberal order instauration process in Chile. Furthermore, we have two specific research questions, (1) how does the social work intervention in disaster contexts change as neoliberalism deepens in Chile? and (2) what key issues about social intervention arise from the narrative of social workers who were involved in disaster recovery processes in 1985, 2010, and 2015?

Methods

This article is a part of a research program developed between the years 2018 and 2020. Our research followed a qualitative design framed within a critical post-structural perspective. The inclusion criteria were social workers who worked in the zones damaged by the earthquakes of 1985 (Valparaíso region), 2010 (Biobío and Maule regions), and 2015 (Coquimbo region). The selected interviewees, in the moment of the disaster, were professionals working in local social services, emergency management offices, local planning, health and education units, among others. The sample comprised by 26 women and 11 men, while the predominant age groups were 40–49, 50–59, and over 60 years. Sampling was discontinued by means of the saturation principle. As an ethical safeguard, our research used informed letters of consent from participants.

The participants were selected through a snowball method or chain referral sampling. This was done via an initial known contact or someone who is close to the interviewer or via a convenience criterion. Through this initial contact, it was possible to find another professional. The sample grew lineally because each person recommended or contacted at least another person.

To produce qualitative data, 37 social workers of the aforementioned services took part in semi-structured interviews. From the total number, 8 were professionals working in the 1985 earthquake, 8 in the case of 2010, and 21 in the case of 2015. There was a guideline interview for social workers that included aspects such as their personal narrative of disaster and the moments after it, how the break with and recovery of normality were experienced, and what professional tasks were performed. In this way, the questions tried to discover how their experience in personal and professional life was before, during, and after the disaster.

The interviews were conducted in Spanish and were audio-recorded with the permission of every interviewee. Each interview lasted between 40 and 60 minutes and were conducted by two social workers who are part of the research program. The interviews were transcribed by a different person, hired for that specific task. The aim was to obtain a reliable picture of the testimonies; although, for this article, the fragments included were translated and edited because of idiomatic expressions, all the quotations are extracts from interviewees’ testimonies. The bias control meant that the interviewer generally did not know or was not personally close to the interviewees. In the analysis process, there was a researcher who was not involved in the interviews.

Data processing was done through qualitative content analysis (Cáceres, 2003). This process implied (1) producing a pre-analysis with defined data processing categories from the outset, (2) defining the significant content units, (3) specifying the analysis rules and classification codes, to reduce incorrect interpretations and generate qualitative reliability, (4) establishing definitive categories, matching the codes to the research objectives. Rules related to exclusivity, completeness, and relevance were observed during the analysis. The analysis organized and classified the data through the Atlas.ti 8 software; this task was performed by a social worker who is part of the research team. The data were classified according to the definition of aprioristic categories included in the investigation objectives. Later, the research team redefined the analysis categories, linked the interviews’ codifications and fragments, and created emergent categories to order and reduce the information. Finally, the team conducted the data interpretation to answer the investigation questions.

The results of the qualitative content analysis grouped the emerging categories into the following aspects: (1) neoliberal contexts of social work disaster interventions and (2) disaster intervention themes or issues. For data presentation purposes, we identified the categories grouped for each aspect, differentiating by year of the disaster and representative citations to support it. Finally, the research was approved by the institutional Bioethics Committee responsible for the investigation, considering the informed consent letters and registration forms for each interviewee.

Results

We identified contexts and themes in the stories about social work intervention in disaster situations. Contexts are the circumstances surrounding the events under study, which support the interpretation of both factors: the decisions made and the actions performed during the interventions of the 1985, 2010, and 2015 disasters. These contexts are key to understanding disaster intervention. These categories emerged in the narrative discourses of the social workers who were interviewed. Four overarching themes were identified in terms of social work interventions performed after the above-mentioned earthquakes. They are as follows: the level of professional autonomy when disaster intervention was implemented, the technification of social intervention, the quality and availability of resources (technological and material), and finally, the extent of community knowledge available to social workers when carrying out post-disaster intervention.

Neoliberal contexts of social work intervention in the disasters of 1985, 2010, and 2015

It is important to provide a brief account of the events surrounding the earthquakes occurring during Chilean neoliberalism. In our view, the neoliberal system began upon the establishment of certain key principles contained in the Political Constitution of 1980, which enforced the privatization of water and social services, the minimization of the State, and the omnipresence of the market, among others. The interviewees’ testimonies talked about it:

Our main function was working with statal subsidies for families and that also was under the charge of the social department, the social stratification unit [help focalization unit] [. . .] there were a team of 10 social workers [. . .] and an other social worker specifically in charge of scholarships and another in charge of pensions for older or disabled people. (Interview 1, 1985 case)

Most professionals [social workers] from different municipal offices were part of teams and we were supposedly part of an emergency response group, but the truth is that wasn’t anything of that. (Interview 16, 2010 case)

At that moment I was working in municipal rural education schools . . . in the year 2015 we were a 4 professionals team working in an itinerant way in different schools. (Interview 32, 2015 case)

When the 1985 earthquake hit, the authoritarian government had completed 12 uninterrupted years of de facto rule. It was during this period that the neoliberal economic model was implemented by force, whereby the State adopted a subsidiary role and state-owned companies were privatized. Serious human rights violations occurred under Pinochet’s dictatorship. This was a very stressful time for the field of social work, whose professionals were dismissed from their jobs or became victims of political violence (Rubilar-Donoso, 2018).

The social workers interviewed for the 1985 case recalled witnessing situations of greater extreme poverty back then, unparalleled in the manifestations of poverty we see today. As one of 1985 interviewees said, ‘. . . it’s just that families were extremely poor . . . we don’t really see today’ (Interview 2, 1985 case). Professionals also agreed that the post-disaster process helped them to develop a thorough understanding of the communities and families targeted by their work. The group of interviewee in the 1985 case mentioned they had greater professional autonomy to carry out their work. Compared to the scenario experienced in 2010, they pointed out that their former autonomy was in stark contrast with the bureaucratic restrictions they find today. One of the interviewees commented, ‘we were living in a dictatorship, [we were] right in the middle of it . . . I must be fair and acknowledge that the professionals allowed us to carry on with our work’ (Interview 1, 1985 case).

In 2010, Chile was on the verge of a change in government. The country’s economic situation was stable, but there were significant signs of social inequality. Michelle Bachelet was sworn in as the President in March 2006, and her government program placed special emphasis on social protection, which garnered high levels of approval among the population. In spite of this, the January 2010 presidential elections were won by Sebastián Piñera, the candidate of the right-wing political coalition, which had very close ties to groups that supported the ideology of the military dictatorship. Interview records show that the disaster was unexpected, despite the country’s ample history of exposure to seismic hazards. The interviews revealed that activities and tasks were organized and allocated while the contingency was taking place. Professionals recalled that President Piñera took office on 11 March of the same year; interviewees did not remember this fondly, even when they were in the midst of a highly complex emergency. One of the interviewees described it in this way, ‘. . . the first earthquake was [electoral triumph] Sebastian Piñera, it was followed by this other [real] earthquake that . . . it was awful, terrible . . .’ (Interview 14, 2010 case). It was a matter of concern, as they were aware of the new government’s neoliberal inclinations. In fact, interviewees stated that the agenda of the incoming government was marked by post-disaster reconstruction, which also intersected with interests such as entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic growth.

After the 2010 earthquake, the interviewees reported the creation of formal intersectoral divisions and committees to deal with disasters, as was noted in one interview ‘. . . there was a social worker and in some cases a person from the technical area [engineering] . . .’ (Interview 7, 2010 case). These bodies became responsible for addressing disaster management and risk governance in local governments. This resulted in a change in the way interventions were carried out, while interviewees began to mention the concept of specialization. This implied appointing people responsible for these issues, either full time or for at least some hours of their working day. However, this emerging specialization did not necessarily incorporate social work when allocating new tasks. This is worth noting, because of the way normality is recovered with a lower professional presence of social work.

In 2015, Michelle Bachelet once again became the President, after the triumph of the center-left coalition in the previous year’s elections. Her new government began making progress to establish free education and increase taxation on private companies, both efforts that were systematically blocked by sectors favoring the neoliberal mind-set in previous decades. Bachelet’s second presidency was severely challenged by political scandals affecting her closest personal circle, allowing conservative sectors to erode her government’s legitimacy. The year 2015 was marked by an extended drought that had mainly affected the country’s north and central regions. This situation impacted water access and traditional agriculture; it was a disaster scenario that demanded the attention of the government, both locally and on a countrywide scale, for example, ‘There were floods [in 2015], it was complicated . . . in terms of the climate, natural disasters’ (Interview 26, 2015 case).

In the interviews conducted with the group of professionals that intervened in the wake of the 2015 earthquake, we observed that planning to address disaster situations and manage risk had been more consolidated in municipalities and public institutions. Due to the experience of the 2010 earthquake, municipalities had managed to produce better defined lines of action involving various local actors in disaster prevention, such as schools. In the 2015 earthquake, most of the intervention for this emergency remained in the hands of local and national public agencies. One of the 2015 interviewees explains it in this way: ‘I entered some data . . . on a platform belonging to the Ministry, and they would [use this to] filter out the provision of certain benefits, such as the personal property and rental bonuses’ (Interview 18, 2015 case). However, interviewees reported the increasing involvement of private actors (e.g. non-governmental organizations [NGOs] and volunteers). The latter had already been observed in the post-disaster recovery process of the 2010 earthquake. In this regard, the neoliberal principle of subsidiarity enshrined in Chile’s constitution is key to interpreting the meaning of these narratives. It is also worth noting that the interviews revealed the existence of subcontracted social workers, whose working conditions at the time were nothing short of precarious, despite their active role in the post-disaster management of social services.

The issues of disaster intervention under neoliberalism

The testimonies of social workers show the incidence of neoliberal contexts in post-disaster professional practice. These signal a growing de-professionalization and a loss of social work acknowledgment in post-disaster intervention. The discursive markers are more emphatic in the professional testimonies from the year 2015:

We, as Social Department and personally, had to face the disaster in a complete ignorance of what had to be done. (Interview 26, 2015 case)

I think one of the things that must be learnt when a social worker is called to work [intervene] in an emergency is not just to calm people down or tell them ‘In a couple of months you will receive some help’, it is to perform a social intervention with all its characteristics . . . also there is not a systematization about those processes. Nobody has written ‘in 2015 this was done, this is the work that has to be done, this is what must be repeated for the next catastrophe’, there isn’t a systematization about the [post-catastrophe] intervention process. (Interview 31, 2015 case)

In the three-decade trajectory of disasters under the Chilean neoliberal regime, what are the relevant elements mentioned in social workers’ narratives? Our analysis detected four significant overarching issues that emerged throughout the interviews. The first issue is professional autonomy. This refers to how much freedom social workers have to organize their work, apply their disciplinary knowledge, and make decisions in their professional field. The interviews revealed that autonomy decreased as the neoliberal context of the interventions became further entrenched. According to the interviews, social workers in 1985 had more autonomy to intervene than they did in the 2015 disaster; this is how one interviewee explains it: ‘. . . we were in charge of the whole system, we created the instrument, we evaluated it, we looked for the shelters, we got the things, we sent the information to the mayor’s office [regional government]’ (Interview 6, 1985 case). It is particularly important to highlight that social workers from the 1985 case reported that they provided a benchmark in the management of local emergencies. This was because they were asked about key information pertaining to the affected populations and were involved in the decision-making process.

We understand technification as the application of technical rationale and means to post-disaster social intervention. Traditionally, the word ‘technification’ has been related with positivist and technological approaches of social work (Castañeda, 2014). Specifically, technification refers to the incremental use of technical, rational, and scientific knowledge in professional practices (Silva, 2018). In contrast to decreasing autonomy, the interviews revealed that technification increased during the most recent disasters. This is evidenced by the greater availability of instruments and technological support for data collection and processing, which in 1985 were still scarce ‘. . . a list of the heads of household’s names on the computer, the only computer we had’ (Interview 1, 1985 case). In 2010, interviewees reported the existence of statistical data collection and communication software, while in 2015, they reported a greater use of the Geographical Information System (GIS): ‘ . . . we would [make a record] for each person, [describing] what had happened to them . . . a personal file and Carabineros [police] [recorded the information in] these mechanical typewriters’ (Interview 10, 2010 case). The interviews associated the technification of disaster intervention to more bureaucracy and administrative management, which deepened as neoliberal governmentality became further entrenched.

When interviewees talk about resources for disaster intervention, they are primarily concerned with the availability of materials to cope with the emergency. Interviewed social workers saw materials as both equipment and supplies, as we can see in the case of 2015: ‘We began organizing them . . . some of us acted . . . others entered [data] . . . in my case . . . I had the keys to the social department’s warehouse [so I went there] whenever we needed [something], I don’t know, [like] mats, food . . .’ (Interview 21, 2015 case). A descriptive reading of these data shows that over time, more materials became available to deal with the emergency. According to our analysis, however, this greater material availability is only superficial, because the capacities of the Chilean State have shrunk since 1980 due to the implementation of neoliberal policies; despite the solid growth in the last 30 years, which is also mentioned in some interviews.

While the interviews suggest a greater technification and availability of material resources for disaster intervention, the relationship with the community aspect poses a significant problem for social work. In the 1985 case, interviewees reported that they were familiar with the characteristics of the communities in which they performed their post-disaster work: ‘I knew perfectly well which families I had to check on, who was in the most distress, or which sectors I needed to at least check into’ (Interview 1, 1985 case). In 2010, there were differences between age groups, where younger interviewees were less knowledgeable of the communities served: ‘After doing my rounds on bedridden [victims], we started finding out the location of those affected, where these people were’ (Interview 14, 2010 case). In 2015, the interviews reflected even less knowledge of the communities served by the interviewees, for example, ‘[We’d] go to the site, perform on-site checks of people’s situations so we could start using the record sheets’ (Interview 23, 2015 case). Although this finding can be questioned based on the sampling type and the adopted qualitative strategy, it is certainly an interesting trend to examine. From a critical analysis perspective about social intervention, community has become an information source, but not a relevant actor in the social recovery processes.

Discussion

Chile is widely recognized as a model for the implementation of neoliberalism (Clark and Clark, 2016), both in terms of its profound cultural transformation and the characteristics of the establishment process (Klein, 2014). It is therefore relevant to identify the political, socioeconomic, and institutional neoliberal contexts of the intervention in the above-mentioned disasters. In this sense, it is necessary to conduct in-depth research about the post-disaster social intervention in neoliberal contexts. It should be noted that the analysis of the contexts of social intervention is an ongoing concern for social work research within the international academic community (Horner, 2018; Mitendorf and Van Ewijk, 2019). Our research focuses on a selection of political and socioeconomic contexts that coincide with the above, for example, in Chisala (2006) and Barrera-Algarín et al. (2015). We do not consider the psychological and personal contexts (e.g. Aiello and Tesi, 2017), since neoliberalism operates as an external and coercive macro-social framework, whose regulatory purpose encompasses every expression of human life.

The trajectory of social intervention shows that since the 1980s, neoliberalism has sedimented in the discourses and practices of social work. This can be seen in the way gradually community is getting less importance in the social workers’ testimonies about the 1985 to 2015 emergencies. Social work has been unable to escape the onward march of neoliberalism in the modern world and its effects (Cheung, 2018). Questions about the normalization of the neoliberal order are more relevant than the search for social transformations. Under this rationale, post-disaster social intervention is also mediated by neoliberalism. The consolidation of neoliberalism removes social work from the political debate and the struggle for emancipation (Schubert and Gray, 2015), which can be projected into the field of post-disaster recovery. This also relates to similar issues, such as the minimization of the State and the privatization of social services, which has an impact on the weakening labor and academic conditions of professions such as social work (Hudson, 2016). Moreover, this entails the overlooking of gender issues in post-disaster interventions (Dominelli, 2020).

The interviews show the neoliberal influence in the social workers’ interventions in the 1985, 2010, and 2015 earthquakes. Some of the influences include producing statistical data, and the use of military forces to simultaneously help and discipline the population (Hyslop, 2018). This has to do with, for example, creating shelters, building emergency housing, restricting mobility and assembly rights, among others. These findings are in line with studies of disaster under transdisciplinary perspectives (e.g. Grove, 2011).

The study’s results evidence certain tensions in post-disaster social intervention. From a longitudinal perspective spanning three decades, we can observe a greater level of technological sophistication and improved access to material resources to cope with the disasters occurring in Chile. Nevertheless, from 1985 to the earthquake of 2015, there is evidence of less professional autonomy and diminished understanding of the communities by professionals. Karvinen-Niinikoski et al. (2017) opine that social work is concerned with the issue of professional autonomy against a neoliberal background and its animosity toward the welfare state. This also relates to a reduced understanding of the community in the most recent earthquakes. Marlowe (2015) points out that in the wake of a disaster it is important to share information and provide support to community members. However, Jorquera (2019) points out that the community itself sets up camps, provides food for the community, and cleans up the land affected by a disaster. This finding is noteworthy because social work deems the community to be important in post-disaster recovery (Payles, 2017).

Regarding historical contexts, the interviews show how the contexts of deepening neoliberalism impact in the interviewees’ practices. For post-disaster social work in neoliberal contexts, the issues of recovery and normalization are crossed with the paths of the interviewees. In this sense, professional performance is delimited by public policies and norms defined by governmental structures that decide what is recovery: what, how, and when. As Fahrudin (2012) points, there is a high professional involvement of social work in disaster management, which in an unavoidable way links it with the recovery politics defined by government. However, in the interviews, there is no consistent account about the long-term recovery policies in direct service social workers’ with the disaster’s affected population. In addition, the interviews show the social workers actions in post-disaster normalization; starting from the procedure and techniques implementation in the affected communities. The normalization context is neoliberalism, and the professional performance of social work is coherent with that socio-political structure, particularly in the events of 2010 and 2015.

In short, for social work, dealing to disaster situations within a neoliberal context is a very complex issue. In relation to the intervention issues in post-disaster interventions, the interviewees express the dichotomy between gains (e.g. technification) and losses (e.g. professional autonomy). The interviews revealed an underlying discourse concerning the anonymity and invisibility of social work. This narrative footprint can be seen most clearly in the disasters of 2010 and 2015, which occurred in more advanced stages of neoliberalism in Chile. In line with Dominelli (2015), the lack of recognition of social work has implications not only for its visibility, but also for the way in which disaster interventions address ethnic and gender issues. This situation is visible in other studies too, such as the one carried out by Hickson and Lehmann (2014). This relationship between social work, disaster, and neoliberalism is also critically addressed in another research (e.g. Navarro, 2019; Yoshihama and Yunomae, 2018). In accordance with Ahmed-Mohamed (2012: 463), ‘neoliberalism and postmodernity can affect the development of social work’.

Nevertheless, social work must address this issue in its professional training and in international forums, given that ‘it is not possible to escape or ignore neoliberalism, both its logic and the governing practices associated with it, in direct social work’ (Bay, 2019: 943). A critical approach possibility appears from the use of intersectionality as an analytical instrument in complex situations as post-disaster in neoliberal contexts (Hill and Bilge, 2016). Harms and Alston (2018) note that an intersectional approach helps social workers’ to understand community vulnerabilities. Nevertheless, our results show that social workers intervention in the 1985, 2010, and 2015 cases did not take account of intersections. This, in concordance with neoliberal ideology about social fabric fragmentation and boosting competition to get funds for the long-term recovery process.

It is interesting to make a contrast with the results of other studies; for example, Harms et al. (2020) carried out a scoping review about social workers’ practices in relation to disasters. They concluded that in social work, there is a wide variety of post-disaster practices research, but not so much about prevention or preparation. However, the texts studied by Harms et al. did not include disasters in Latin America or other southern developing countries. Maglajlic (2018) points to the importance of community social work in Asia-Pacific in post-disaster, distinguishing a difference with the Western countries that now have a low participation in community practices. Das (2021) agrees on the importance of communities in managing post-disaster situations, but he adds the need to boost the social workers’ abilities to face complex situations, such as extreme climate events. This perspective coincides with the findings about the loss of autonomy in decision-taking and the growing disconnection of social work with the communities.

Conclusion

Many countries have a long history of disasters, while simultaneously being governed by neoliberalism. Even though the results of this research are relevant to post-seismic disaster situations, its conclusions encourage reflecting on the type of neoliberal normality that occurs in other contingent scenarios; for example, climate change or the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. This debate is particularly important for social work in impoverished or developing countries and regions. Research suggests that there is a need for further critical discussion of how social work has been colonized by neoliberalism, even in seemingly neutral matters such as post-disaster intervention (Harlow et al., 2013; Wallace and Pease, 2011).

The social workers’ testimonies express the neoliberal colonization of post-disaster intervention. In relation with the contexts, a three-decade review shows the growing influence of neoliberalism in the recovery process of the 1985, 2010, and 2015 earthquakes. The public policies and social services involved with the post-disaster are implemented under help-focalization rules, social security privatization, a lower participation of state agencies and an extensive use of military forces for security tasks. The testimonies’ review allowed us to suggest four important issues that arise from the interviews. In a longitudinal perspective in a neoliberal context, social work intervention in post-disaster situations sees improvement in technification and material resources access, but on the other hand, it lost decision-making autonomy and knowledge of the affected community.

Our observations in the narratives of the social workers who intervened after the earthquakes in Chile in 1985, 2010, and 2015 relate to how neoliberalism has become more entrenched over time. These narratives reveal that social work has become a part of the neoliberal normalization process, whose purpose is to favor a post-disaster recovery that prioritizes the institutional and the external, less in touch with the knowledge, practices and community responses that emerged in the wake of the aforementioned earthquakes. The field of social work requires further reflection on the contradiction between the global neoliberal project and the life of local communities. The results of our research on the transformation of social work performance over time are consistent with a perspective on social intervention that is critical of neoliberalism. The above is intended to call out a problem that emerges not only in the professional practice of social work, but also in the university education of this field under neoliberal contexts.

Footnotes

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by ‘Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico, ANID Fondecyt-Chile’ [11170939].

ORCID iD

Juan Saavedra

Author biographies

Juan Saavedra is a Social Worker and Doctor in Human Sciences. He is an Associate Professor in the Social Sciences Department, Universidad del Bío-Bío.

Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta is a Social Worker and has a Master’s in Social Anthropology. She is a part-time Professor in the Social Work School, Universidad de las Américas.

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