Under the leadership of the Equity and Justice Research Group of the IIASA Population and Just Societies Program, researchers from across the Institute have spent the past three years working towards the first iteration of the IIASA Justice Framework – a descriptive guideline for science and policy. The framework is now available on the IIASA website and as an IIASA working paper.

Two projects under the IIASA Strategic Initiatives Program, JustTrans4All and fairSTREAM, along with other externally funded research projects, FireLogue and RAINFOREST, as well as two IIASA wide workshops and one project conducted as part of the IIASA Young Scientists Summer Program (YSSP), have collectively contributed to creating the new high-level reference framework for mainstreaming ethical aspects in ongoing work at IIASA and beyond.

The IIASA Justice Framework provides researchers and policymakers 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. Current initiatives include the development of guidance materials for describing aspects of justice in climate mitigation scenario research and a tool for making explicit justice preferences in such scenario development processes.

Work by researchers in the Equity and Justice Research Group focuses particularly on the development of protocols for procedural justice in the context of transdisciplinary research and knowledge co-production. Moreover, a first draft evaluation tool will be tested in the specific national context of IIASA observer member Brazil.

“Insufficient attention to perceptions of justice is a major issue slowing progress on climate change and other major policy issues. At the forefront of global change research, IIASA has put justice at the heart of its research strategy and with this co-designed framework, we want to support Just Transitions research and policymaking,” concludes Equity and Justice Research Group Leader, Thomas Schinko.

Further information

The IIASA/EQU Justice Framework

IIASA Working Paper on the Justice Framework

Related Publications

Johannesson, P., Zhemchugova, H., & Hanger-Kopp, S. (2022). An Ontological Analysis of Justice. In: Proceedings of the 16th International Workshop on Value Modelling and Business Ontologies (VMBO 2022), held in conjunction with the 34th International Conference on Advanced Information Systems Engineering (CAiSE 2022), Leuven, Belgium, 6-10 June 2022.

News

Eldery woman heat

10 October 2024

New tool provides knowledge on heat stress vulnerability in cities for more targeted adaptation

Heat-related deaths and diseases are a major concern in Europe amid increasing extended periods of extreme heat. A new study proposes a novel way of quantifying and projecting future vulnerability to heat stress in different areas of a city, providing local decision makers with knowledge for designing more effective adaptation strategies to minimize health impacts of heat stress.
Aerial View of Urban Landscape at Sunset. Warm Light Bathing City Rooftops.

16 July 2024

Mapping global rooftop growth for sustainable energy and urban planning

A novel machine learning framework developed by IIASA researchers to estimate global rooftop area growth from 2020 to 2050 can aid in planning sustainable energy systems, urban development, and climate change mitigation, and has potential for significant benefits in emerging economies.
Israel on blue digital planet Earth with network.

08 March 2024

The Archimedes Center: advancing systems analysis in Israel

In 2023, IIASA collaborated with Tel Aviv University and the Israeli Ministry of Innovation, Science, and Technology, to set up a new national research center focusing on a broad set of scientific fields related to systems analysis in Israel.