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
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.
de Goer de Herve, M., Schinko, T. , & Handmer, J. (2023). Risk justice: Boosting the contribution of risk management to sustainable development. Risk Analysis 00 1-15. 10.1111/risa.14157.
Schinko, T. , Berchtold, C., Handmer, J., Deubelli, T. , Preinfalk, E., Linnerooth-Bayer, J., Scolobig, A., Serra, M., & Plana, E. (2023). A framework for considering justice aspects in integrated wildfire risk management. Nature Climate Change 13 788-795. 10.1038/s41558-023-01726-0.
Kikstra, J. , Mintz-Woo, K. , Zimm, C. , Schinko, T. , Pachauri, S. , Min, J. , Brutschin, E. , Hoffmann, R., & Rogelj, J. (2023). A Guide for Describing Aspects of Justice in Climate Scenario Research. In: 16th IAMC Annual Meeting, November 14-16, 2023, Venice, Italy.
Zimm, C. , Mintz-Woo, K. , Brutschin, E. , Hanger-Kopp, S., Hoffmann, R., Kikstra, J.S. , Kuhn, M., Min, J. , Muttarak, R. , Pachauri, S. , Patange, O. , Riahi, K. , & Schinko, T. (2024). Justice considerations in climate research. Nature Climate Change 14 22-30. 10.1038/s41558-023-01869-0.
Hanger-Kopp, S., Kikstra, J. , Mintz-Woo, K. , Scheifinger, K., Schinko, T. , Wallimann-Helmer, I., Wong, C., Woodhouse, E., & Zimm, C. (2024). IIASA/EQU Justice Framework: A descriptive guideline for science and policy. IIASA Working Paper. Laxenburg, Austria: WP-24-012
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