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A Systematic Literature Review of Tensions Between Urgency and Justice in Sustainability Transitions

Democracy
Environmental Policy
Governance
Green Politics
Political Participation
Public Policy
Social Justice
Climate Change
Jonas Meuleman
Ghent University
Claire Dupont
Ghent University
Jonas Meuleman
Ghent University

Abstract

The accelerating environmental crises of climate change and biodiversity loss demand urgent political action toward sustainability transitions. Yet, this push for rapid change often conflicts with principles of social justice and equity. This systematic literature review (SLR) aims to deepen our understanding of how these tensions between urgency and justice materialise in sustainability transition research and to explore pathways for their reconciliation. Transition studies tend to be fragmented across two rarely consolidated strands: one emphasises socio-technical innovation for rapid, efficiency-driven transitions, and the other centres on just transitions that integrate ecological and social justice imperatives. The dynamics between temporal and justice dimensions introduce significant complexity into environmental governance, leading to diverging sustainability visions and trade-offs. Prioritising speed may deepen existing inequalities, fuel social frustration, and trigger democratic backlash. Conversely, an excessive emphasis on justice may slow down or delay policy action. Left unresolved, these tensions undermine prospects for democratic, meaningful, and maintained sustainability policies. Emerging exploratory efforts, e.g., by Ciplet and Harrison (2020) and Newell et al. (2022), highlight the critical importance of these tensions in environmental politics. However, systematic insights into how they manifest and pathways for navigating them remain limited. Guided by the PRISMA protocol, we systematically analyse peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters from 1992 to 2024 that specifically address tensions or trade-offs in urgency and/or justice dynamics within social sustainability studies. An initial search yielded approximately 1,600 results across Web of Science and Scopus, screened for relevance based on title and abstract using ASReview, an open-source machine learning tool. Informed by an early review of literature, a comprehensive codebook is used for mapping how urgency and justice are defined, operationalised, and linked in the literature. First, the review synthesises literature to develop a conceptual framework that maps the interactions between urgency and justice, and which boundary conditions shape or intensify these dynamics across governance contexts and sustainability domains. Second, it adopts a reflexive lens to identify conceptual blind-spots and problematise dominant conceptualisations of justice, urgency, and their interactions. Based on emerging insights, this review supports previous research that positions democratic innovations (such as deliberative citizens’ assemblies) as pathways for reconciling these tensions through more inclusive and pluralistic policymaking (Pickering et al., 2022). Ultimately, the review advances environmental politics scholarship by deepening theoretical debates on urgency-justice dynamics in sustainability governance and generating a new agenda to guide future research. 1. Ciplet, D., & Harrison, J. L. (2020). Transition tensions: Mapping conflicts in movements for a just and sustainable transition. Environmental Politics, 29(3), 435–456. https://doi.org/10.1080/09644016.2019.1595883 2. Newell, P., Geels, F. W., & Sovacool, B. K. (2022). Navigating tensions between rapid and just low-carbon transitions. Environmental Research Letters, 17(4), 041006. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac622a 3. Pickering, J., Hickmann, T., Bäckstrand, K., Kalfagianni, A., Bloomfield, M., Mert, A., Ransan-Cooper, H., & Lo, A. Y. (2022). Democratising sustainability transformations: Assessing the transformative potential of democratic practices in environmental governance. Earth System Governance, 11, 100131. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esg.2021.100131