Are social justice and sustainability interdependent? If so, how and under what conditions?

Abstract

Sustainability often entails dealing with issues of justice in the distribution of goods and bads, such as resources and restrictions. Applications of justice to concrete situations, including what is deserved and entitled, call for specifications of several issues, like the meaning of “deservingness” and “entitlement” and how justice should be accomplished. This is a key aspect for sustainability, as social arrangements that are not experienced as fair may not be long-lived. Conversely, justice may be an empty notion unless it is sustainable. With this in mind, we provide an inventory of factors to analyze the relationship between (un)sustainability and social (in)justice from a social psychological perspective. We (a) clarify the gist of the two subjective notions, (b) discuss their interdependences, (c) provide a list of factors for analyses, and (d) illustrate how they may be applied to two cases, one at a global level (food accessibility) and the other at a local level (distribution of renewable energy resources in communities). The proposed framework forms the basis of empirical analyses of the social dimension of sustainability.