What do we mean when we talk about justice?
IIED’s new manifesto emphasises its determination to address social, economic and environmental injustices. Karen Wong-Perez explores the richness and power of the diversity of tones, textures and voices for justice in contemporary social movements.


The richness and power of the diversity of tones, textures and voices for justice in contemporary social movements (Photo: wildpixel, via iStock)
Each pain and each rage take a name, a face, a story, a painful and indignant void. The world and its history are thus filled with absences, and those absences become a murmur, a strong word, a shout, a scream. Ours is a message of rage, of courage. Because we know that same pain. Because we have the same rage in our guts. Because being different, we resemble each other in this way.
Subcomandante Insurgente Galeano, EZLN, 2015
Different conceptualisations of justice and injustice make different claims about justice. Naming them produces a sense of action and agency. Looking back, we see social movements have used multiple ways to describe the many forms of injustices they fight against, whose varied struggles, pains and rages give shape to multiple conceptualisations of justice.
Unequal power is expressed through the imposition of concepts and framings, thus destroying subaltern ambitions and narratives. This is how injustice is perpetuated through forgetfulness, impunity and oblivion.
So, why is it important to name different notions of justice, all separately? Naming forms of justice and injustice not only produces a sense of action and agency, but also makes it possible to actively claim the right to tell one's own story, the subaltern story – countering dominant conceptual framings and expanding the vision of what is socially desirable.
All of this is not abstract, however: narratives, mindsets and framings define the paradigms that shape public policies that have tangible impacts on all of us.

The indivisibility of justice (Photo: Illustration via Rawpixel, CC0 1.0, Jodie Frosdick, IIED)
Approaches to justice
Humans have tried for centuries to understand what justice is and how to achieve it. Those who follow the social contract tradition ask: "How do institutions and individuals behave in a just society? What social contract would be unanimously accepted by all from an impartial standpoint?". Consequently, they focus on identifying the ideal arrangements of a just society and the principles of justice to guide perfectly just institutions.
Followers of the social choice tradition begin their analysis by seeing the world as it is. This requires comparisons between what is just and unjust to identify manifest injustices. They focus on naming, understanding and removing these injustices. Injustice is often more tangible than justice, so many social movements follow this tradition to understand justice. Some use a combination of both traditions.
Our different understandings of justice affect how we address justice issues. Different concepts of justice articulated by social movements reflect the starting points used to tackle multiple manifestations of injustice, for example:
Climate justice makes visible disproportionality in the social, economic, health and intergenerational impacts of, and responses to, climate change on individuals, groups and countries that have contributed little to this crisis.
Climate justice advocates emphasise industrialised countries’ and corporations’ historical contribution to climate change and how they have profited from the extraction and use of fossil fuels – linking it with carbon colonialism. They demand climate reparations and a just transition towards a low-carbon future. They highlight that addressing the climate crisis is a necessary condition for other intersectional justices.
Environmental justice makes visible the unequal distribution of environmental benefits and hazards such as air pollution, water pollution and increased exposure to toxic and hazardous waste: disproportionately affecting marginalised and racialised communities (also termed environmental racism).
It highlights certain groups’ exclusion from decision-making about natural resource management and the lack of recognition of different ways of being and knowing (linked to justice as recognition and epistemological justice).
Racial justice makes visible discrimination, racial prejudice, structural oppression and cumulative disadvantages that harm people based on race. It highlights the colonial roots and legacies of racial violence. It involves dismantling structures of interpersonal, institutional and systemic racism to ensure equal opportunities and the recognition and repair of damages (linked to restorative or reparative justice).
Gender justice makes visible the structural inequalities that perpetuate gender-based discrimination, exclusion and violence from an intersectional perspective.
It challenges binary thinking about gender and seeks to rectify deeply ingrained structural inequalities that perpetuate gender-based discrimination, violence and exclusion, with an intersectional focus. It sees not only to equalise conditions and opportunities, but also to rectify historical and systemic gender injustices.
Multispecies/ecological justice makes visible the wrongs committed towards other species through their abuse and commodification. It seeks the recognition of Earth beings, such as animals, plants, forests, rivers and ecological systems, as legitimate rightsholders worthy of living their lives according to their capabilities. Recognising their interests implies moral and political obligations for the institutions that comprise society’s basic structure.
The indivisibility of justice
Social movements have articulated many more conceptualisations of justice, each making visible particular challenges. Angela Davis, prominent feminist political activist, philosopher and author – citing Martin Luther King Jr. – speaks of the indivisibility of justice, highlighting that we cannot separate different causes and struggles and that justice cannot be compartmentalised. It transcends borders and demands collective commitment.
Consequently, we could imagine justice as the light emitted at the centre of a polyhedron with many sides. Each side reflects the light in a particular way, and people positioned at different points see a different shade.
What is the common light in the multiple definitions of justice? Author Naomi Klein argues that, despite their diversity, different claims for justice have something in common: resistance to a system of beliefs that imposes hierarchies of value and life. In this system, supremacy, control and security of the few are upheld at the expense of the many.
Historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn pointed out that once a group of people acquires a way of thinking, a conceptual framework, it also acquires a criterion for choosing the problems which, according to that way of thinking, can have solutions. Thus, problems perceived from dominant notions are the only problems a community will admit.
What do different notions of justice achieve?
A concept of justice names a struggle. It makes visible the particularities of multiple manifestations of injustice and produces a sense of agency from which subaltern narratives rise as a flag for finding common ground and strengthening social movements.
It also helps to install new paradigms and new conceptual frameworks to make specific problems visible, offering tools to understand and measure them, and to design strategies to solve them.
Plural notions of justice emerging from grassroots and social movements will inform IIED’s work, in 2024 and beyond, as we implement our newly published 'Manifesto for a thriving world' and work with others to promote fairer, more sustainable economies.