Sustainability Justice and Just Sustainability

Exploring and defining theoretical and empirical connections and tensions between sustainability and social justice

Guest editors:

Johanna Bergström (johanna.bergström@ju.se) and Paola Sartoretto (paola.sartoretto@ju.se), Jönköping University, Sweden

This special issue seeks to encourage discussions that take a transdisciplinary perspective and empirically grounded outlook to establish theoretical and methodological relations between sustainability and social justice as historically and socially situated processes. All too often, sustainability serves as a panacea for presenting and selling products and ideas with a superficial positive connection to the values of caring for nature and environmental consciousness. At the same time, there have been attempts to specifically address the relation between sustainability and social justice, going beyond the purely environmental dimensions of sustainable development. For example, Törnblom, Popa, and Krütli (2023), argue that even though sustainability entails issues of justice, there is a lack of frameworks to apply social justice to concrete situations when procedural and distributive aspects of justice come to fore. The idea of circles of sustainability, which illustrates the interlinkages among the environment, society and economy (Adams et al. 2019; Fredriksen et al. 2021; Hudler et al. 2021; Reames and Wright 2021) highlights the interconnectedness of the environment, economy and society and underscores the impossibility of ignoring sustainability’s social aspects. However, it does not conceptually clarify these aspects. Vallance et al. (2011) suggest that the techno-scientific aspects of sustainability that rely on objective data and scientific evidence need to be nuanced with social sciences and humanities perspectives, including metaphors, stories and symbols, to account for everyday individual and collective experiences. In these conceptual discussions, social justice is frequently identified as a condition for the fulfilment of social aspects of sustainability; however, social justice is also a contested term that prompts debates on the politicisation and depoliticisation of discussions about future imaginaries in the face of impending environmental collapses and crises with social consequences. This conceptual blurriness reflects a certain reluctance in both academia and industry to recognise the social and political aspects that permeate and underpin economic systems and humans’ relations with nature. Furthermore, the redistributive character of social justice often generates tensions in those who advocate for more orthodox views of economic sustainability that are based on the idea of free and unregulated markets.

We invite contributions from scholars in all social sciences fields addressing the following themes from transdisciplinary empirical perspectives:

• political aspects of sustainability
• global tensions and inequalities in sustainability research and practice
• intersectional power analysis in sustainability research grounded on embodied knowledge
• decolonial views on sustainability
• mobilization of the social justice concept to address sustainability practices in applied field including, but not limited to, educational practice, urban planning, tourism,
• collective and community aspects of social justice in relation to sustainability practices and policies
• just transition in practice across different sectors and regions
• tensions between sustainability initiatives and social justice

References

Adams M, Klinsky S, Chhetri N (2019) Barriers to sustainability in poor marginalized communities in the United States: the criminal justice, prison-industrial complex and foster care systems. Sustainability 12:220.

Frederiksen P, Morf A, von Thenen M, Armoskaite A, Luhtala H, Schiele KS, Strake S, Hansen HS (2021) Proposing an ecosystem services-based framework to assess sustainability impacts of maritime spatial plans (MSP-SA). Ocean Coast Manage 208:105577.

Hudler K, Dennis L, DiNella M, Ford N, Mendez J, Long J (2021) Intersectional sustainability and student activism: a framework for achieving social sustainability on university campuses. Educ Citizsh Soc Jus 16:78–96.

Reames TG, Wright NS (2021) The three E’s revisited: how do community-based organizations define sustainable communities and their role in pursuit of social sustainability. Sustainability 13:8825.

Törnblom, K. Y., Popa, R. G., & Krütli, P. (2025). Are social justice and sustainability interdependent? If so, how and under what conditions? Sustainable Development, 33(1), 1269-1283.

Vallance S, Perkins HC, Dixon JE (2011) What is social sustainability? A clarification of concepts. Geoforum 42:342–348.