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In the introductory column of ‘Environment and Justice’ in The Community Psychologist, Riemer and Voorhees (2009) highlighted the issues of justice, power, participation, and vulnerability related to the Global Climate Change crisis. They introduced some potential contributions community psychologists can make in the face of environmental degradation. These suggestions focused on the need for people worldwide to adopt practices that mitigate human induced climate change, and address the unequal distribution of climate change effects to, and the need for adaptation of, those communities who are already the most vulnerable due to gender, culture, poverty or geography. In this article, I will introduce some of my own thoughts about the intersections of the Global Financial (GFC) and the Global Climate Change (GCC) crises, and how these dual crises have brought into awareness the way that current forms of democracy address social and environmental issues by creating boundaries and exclusions.

Natural resource management (NRM) is being seen increasingly as involving complex ecological and social/political settings and thus requiring changes to the research and development (R&D) adopted in the past. NRM R&D has been characterised by predominately positivistic and reductionistic methodologies. Recent attempts to deal with complexity in NRM settings required input from many scientific disciplines including the social sciences. It also involved the use of contextual approaches the nature of the substantive domain is understood in the framing of questions. In using a substantive approach, the importance of considering NRM R&D as a human activity has been recognised and this offers opportunities for community psychologists. In dealing with complex ecological and social systems, there is also opportunity for a reciprocity between NRM methodologies and the development of applied methodologies in community psychology.

Reflections and learnings from our involvement in contextual analyses of large collaborative/participatory research and development programs within NRM are captured within this paper. The authors deconstruct community psychology’s involvement in NRM with reference to a metaphorical understanding of the concept of iatrogenesis, a term used to refer to the unintended consequences of any form of intervention by health care professionals. Such a deconstruction creates an awareness of the lack of recognition of community psychology’s involvement in the replication of systems of NRM which ‘do no harm’, rather than create structural change. Although new structural processes that take into account the issues raised within this paper are yet to be defined, concepts such as biopolitics and biogovernmentality, are considered as platforms for understanding how these processes may begin to be conceptualised, for the future of community psychology’s role within NRM.

Kurt Lewin’s comment about the need to integrate psychological theory and practice famously has been mythologised in academic psychology in a distorted, self-serving form. Myths may serve to create a sense of collective identity, but in professional arenas myths can lead to distortions of the nature of theory and practice. We argue that some central tenets of community psychology have developed mythical status and, as such, perform social as well as conceptual functions. We argue that the unexamined status of these myths can lead to difficulties in praxis, the theory-practice interface. This has led to misunderstandings of people and community. For example, although community psychology was to be operationalised at broader levels (i.e., societal, community and organisational) as well as the individual, the prevailing zeitgeist of positivistic psychological thinking dominated actual practice and community psychology’s myths have contributed to the failure to recognise the dominance of individualistic thinking, with little conceptualisation and operationalisation occurring beyond the individual level. This has led to poor implementation of the ecological approaches epitomised by contextualism.

Ecological analysis is fundamental to community psychology (Rappaport, 1977). An ecology epistemology implies that a systemic or contextual research approach should be prevalent; however reviews of community psychology research indicate that individualistic research and theory still dominate (Speer et al., 1992). We assert the need to increase contextualist research. To understand the nature of contextualist research, its underlying assumptions are discussed in the context of other research frameworks. We further argue that the dominance of positivism in community psychology is both inappropriate and misguided, and comes from a misunderstanding of the nature of people, and consequently, community. A deconstruction of personality theory is presented to allow a better understanding of people in context. Through this deconstruction, we argue for a grounded approach to research that operationalises contextualism.

Access to safe, clean and affordable water is a basic human right and a global goal towards which climate change poses new challenges that heavily impact the health and wellbeing of people across the globe and exacerbate or create new inequalities. These challenges are shaped by a number of geographical and social conditions that, apart from the risks of weather-driven impacts on water, include water governance and management arrangements in place, including pricing tariffs, and the interplay of social and economic inequalities. Building on examples from Australia, Scotland and England and Wales that illustrate access to water in different types of water provision systems, and regarding to aspects of access, quality and affordability, this paper explores the types of challenges related to water poverty in the context of climate crisis and reflects on the multiple dimensions of water poverty oriented social policy at the interplay of climate change associated risks.