Considerations of justice in ecosystem services research. A systematic literature review

The ecosystem service (ES) literature has been criticized for adopting a homogenous approach to communities and failing to consider social diversity, power structures influencing access to nature’s benefits, and participation in the planning and management of ES. Still, despite the growing body of literature on ES, considerations of environmental justice (EJ) tend to fall short in ES strategies. EJ scholarship has traditionally parsed out a framework of justice based on a trilogy of dimensions. That is, distributive justice, meaning the fair distribution of access, costs, benefits and risks associated with ES for all social groups; interactional/recognition justice, related to the recognition of needs, values, and preferences of all beneficiaries in relation to ES; and procedural/participatory justice, referring to the fair integration of all affected groups into ES-related decision-making processes. The goal of this comprehensive analysis is to understand how ES research addresses justice dimensions and identify major trends. This has been carried out through a systematic literature review. We analysed published academic papers (n=687) that explicitly considered and examined ES and EJ, or alternatively, equity and fairness, in the title, abstract, and keywords of Scopus and Web of Knowledge databases. We examined geographical and temporal distribution of the case-studies, the groups/types of ES analysed (i.e., provisioning, habitat, regulating, cultural), the distribution-recognition-procedure justice dimensions considered, and the social groups related to (in)justice. Moreover, we classified three main ecosystem locations (i.e., urban, rural and protected areas) to compare the different trends and perceptions that arise from each context. Preliminary results include predominance of distributional EJ analyses in urban ES research, while interactional/recognition emerges focused in protected areas and conservation context. Further, we analyse the role and involvement of stakeholders in ES-based justice assessments and point out potential knowledge gaps.