The Justice Dimension of Sustainability: A Systematic and General Conceptual Framework

Abstract

We discuss how the normative dimension of sustainability can be captured in terms of justice. We (i) identify the core characteristics of the concept of sustainability and discuss underlying ethical, ontological and epistemological assumptions; (ii) introduce a general conceptual structure of justice for the analysis and comparison of different conceptions of justice; and (iii) employ this conceptual structure to determine the specific characteristics and challenges of justice in the context of sustainability. We demonstrate that sustainability raises specific and partly new challenges of justice regarding the community of justice, the judicandum, the informational base, the principles, and the instruments of justice.