In the face of commons grabbing and privatisation, the defence of the commons has been a rallying flag for environmental justice (EJ) movements and an object of inquiry for EJ scholars. Conversely, commons studies have rarely explicitly drawn on ‘justice’ as an analytical concept or vocabulary of action. While the latter may result from the initial focus of commons studies on the conditions that support sustainable commons governance, commons scholarship is evolving and embraces today multiple tangential fields. In this chapter, we scrutinise and unpack how justice and commons have been empirically, normatively and conceptually articulated within different bodies of scholarship working on commons. Our objective is to identify trends and research gaps and to reflect on promising research avenues to further advance the consideration and conceptualisation of justice in commons studies.
We first examined the role of institutions in different theories of justice and how early research conducted under the Bloomington school has considered and conceptualised justice in its analytical tools. We then conducted a historical narrative review of the diverse literature on commons that explicitly mentions justice, including institutionalist studies of the commons and critical studies on commons and commoning. We examine how these strands have framed and conceptualised justice, which forms of injustice have they highlighted and which ones have been under-addressed, with a particular attention to gendered and intersectional forms of injustice.
Our results evidence a dramatic increase in how commons have been articulated with justice issues since the mid-2010s and suggest that the literature drawing from critical studies has played an important role in renewing and reinvigorating how justice has been considered in commons studies. In particular, critical commons scholars have examined new research objects and broadened the dimensions and the subjects of justice initially considered. We conclude with research perspectives to further constructive engagements on justice within the commons literature.
