IIASA Justice Framework

Since 2021, under the leadership of the Equity and Justice (EQU) Research Group, researchers across IIASA have worked towards the first iteration of this descriptive guideline for science and policy. Two Strategic Initiatives projects, JustTrans4All and fairSTREAM, along with other externally funded research projects, FireLogue and RAINFOREST, as well as two IIASA wide workshops and one YSSP project, have collectively contributed to creating this high-level reference framework for ongoing work on justice at IIASA.

The IIASA Justice Framework provides researchers and policy-makers with clear terminology and a comprehensive set of categories to systematically consider justice in its multiple aspects in their work across diverse contexts. It is simple and flexible enough to allow for context-specific applications. The framework is meant to be accessible across disciplines, powerful in terms of capacity to express a variety of justice ideas, and modular so researchers can select and deploy the aspects that are most appropriate or useful.

The Justice Framework has generated significant interest, leading to the involvement of many researchers both within and outside of IIASA in further applying, expanding and refining it. Here are a few examples of our current initiatives: 

• A tool for co-designing fair mitigation scenarios (Schleifinger et al.)
• Guidance materials for scenario development (Kikstra et al.)
• The Justice Model Intercomparison Project (Brutschin et al.)

Work in the Equity and Justice (EQU) Research Group focuses particularly on the development of protocols for procedural justice in the context of transdisciplinary research and knowledge co-production (Hanger-Kopp and French et al.). Moreover, a first draft evaluation tool will be tested in the specific national context of IIASA Observer Member Brazil (Hanger-Kopp et al.).