Contributive justice (Lat. iustitia contributiva) involves individuals’ obligations to society for the common good,2 often manifesting itself as community volunteer projects (reforestation, waste collection) or corporate social responsibility.3

Distributive justice (Lat. iustitia distributiva), concerns what society owes its individual members in terms of the just allocation of resources.4 It divides a benefit or burden by following some criteria that compare the relative merits of the participants. This form of justice dictates the duty of the state to distribute benefits and burdens equitably among the populace. Examples include corporate and individual tax rates, universal health coverage, state income assistance, subsidised housing, social security eligibility, college tuition aid, and similar programmes to establish a societal safety net for the less fortunate. Within the concept of redistribution, it raises the question of equality and equity. Equality means each individual or group of people is given the same resources and opportunities, regardless of their circumstances. In social and racial justice movements, equality can increase inequities in communities as not every group of people needs the same resources or opportunities allocated to them to thrive. While equity considers the circumstances and tries to mitigate the considerable differences, it is a perception of fairness in the distribution of resources within social and professional situations.5

Commutative justice (Lat. iustitia commutativa) pertains to obligations between individuals, particularly in business transactions. It demands fundamental fairness in all agreements and exchanges, holding businesses ethically and financially accountable for any harm resulting from their products.6 However, this reciprocity also applies here to the relationship between generations.7

Corrective justice (Lat. iustitia correctiva) is based on the idea that liability corrects an injustice committed by one person against another (whether contractual or tortious).8 If a company pollutes the environment, it may be obliged to repair the damage under corrective justice, such as cleaning up the polluted areas or paying compensation to those affected by the pollution. Another approach focuses on whether one party has committed a transactional injustice and the other has suffered a transactional injustice. In other words, it can be considered compensatory justice. However, distributive justice and corrective justice differ in how they construe equality. Distributive justice, therefore, embodies proportional equality, in which all participants in the distribution receive their shares according to their respective merits under the criterion in question. Corrective justice, in contrast, features the maintenance and restoration of the notional equality with which the parties enter the transaction.

Among the traditional concepts, very close to corrective justice, restorative justice can be mentioned in relation to sustainability, and legal transformation which is a paradigm shift in the understanding and application of justice.9 Rather than relying on retributive models that emphasise punishment and deterrent capacity regarding future behaviour, restorative justice promotes trust, empathy, and reconciliation as a means of restoring relationships. Restorative justice has been applied to environmental harms not just as a violation of legal norms, but rather in terms of breach of the community’s overall well-being. It offers another level of accountability and requires the engagement of victims, local communities, and offenders in dialogical and reparative processes, with the goal of restoring overall community harmony. The restorative justice process can serve various responses as corrective to harm inflicted upon the local community, for example: initiating restoration of the environmental harm, a public apology, a work project for the community or an educational program about environmental decision making. Aotearoa (New Zealand) offers a generally applicable example of restorative justice models for sustainability;10 using māori constructs such as whakapapa (genealogy) and kaitiakitanga (Eng. guardian, stewardship) to land use disputes.11 In Māori thought and law, whakapapa, or genealogy, specifies the relationships between people, land (whenua), and all other natural entities defining a relationship that requires consideration, care and respect. Kaitiakitanga, guardianship or stewardship, arises from this genealogy, defining the individual and collective position in relation to the environment as protectors, who do not own the environment, but must protect the mauri (life force) for the current generation and the next. Within the realm of legal frameworks, particularly New Zealand’s environmental law and treaty-based jurisprudence underpin most notions of sustainability, claiming to take the ecological responsibility that is fundamentally relational, rights-bearing and indigenous, and is focused on environmental integrity for the long-term.12 In this sense, the concept of legal pluralism provides a means to de-colonise justice systems, while injecting sustainability into legal doctrine through localised and culturally set practices. Narrowly, restorative justice contributes to the greater evolution of law by promoting deliberative democracy and purposeful justice. These solutions contest the conventional, hierarchical (top-down), and ordered legal paradigm and encourage more bottom up, participatory, dialogical, and contextual responses. In practice, this can take the form of community mediation, environmental tribunals with public participation, or dolloped or hybrid encounters, where statutory law intersects with customary norms. The evolution of these modes of being illustrates that all kinds of legal objectives may be evolved to be ‘fit for purpose’ within socio-ecological constraints of sustainability.

The principle of justice attempts to strike the right balance in other, different kind of conflicts. Current generations need to ensure that their decisions do not violate the rights of future generations, who have no pathway for representing their own interests. The principle of justice does not refer only to temporal justice,13 which ensures that current generations do not abuse any type of resources and that they do not make decisions that will adversely affect the living conditions of future generations, but also refers to spatial justice, or equal access to resources and the environment among current generations.14 Together, these principles and responsibilities convey that current generations accept as a moral duty towards future generations the need to live sustainably by preserving natural and economic resources for the use of upcoming generations.

These dimensions of justice and sustainability, especially intergenerational equity, concern fundamental moral and philosophical dimensions of the long-term well-being of human society; they aim at the long-term sustainability of social, economic and environmental development. This justice should be applied not only between members of the present generation (intra-generational justice), but also between different generations (inter-generational justice).15 It is important to emphasise this because their interests may sometimes conflict, for example, between economic growth and environmental protection. The ethical basis of intergenerational justice is responsibility for the future, which provides the moral foundation of the principle of sustainability.

For the purposes of the legislator, the following conclusions can be drawn: sustainability standards should take into account, (i) long-term impacts on the environment, (ii) protection and conservation of environmental resources or natural resources, (iii) reduction of inequalities and equal opportunities, (iv) development of economic systems, and (v) addressing global challenges and international cooperation.