Dalia D'Amato-Pihlman and Topi Turunen: What’s next for sustainability transformation: the role of law and justice

Transformative change towards a more sustainable society requires better understanding of the role of legal systems and of justice. In our recent literature review, we explored how change is expected to occur in environmental governance, and what kind of roles can law play in this change. In a forthcoming second scientific article, we examine how justice and its many dimensions, link to transformative governance.

What is transformative governance?

Transformative governance is an emerging concept in science and policymaking. It strives to realise the systemic, structural changes needed to address complex and interlinked sustainability challenges. Such challenges include developing and maintaining a good quality of life for all, while curbing climate change, resource depletion, pollution, and biodiversity loss globally.

To strengthen the conceptual foundations of transformative change, one can draw from elements that other governance approaches consider crucial for generating change. According to our literature review, collaboration, leadership, learning, plurality, empowering, innovation and vision are key mechanisms for change.

These findings are in line with the assessment on transformative change recently released by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). The assessment suggests that transformative governance should be integrated, accountable, inclusive and adaptive. This means strengthening biodiversity values across sectors, securing multi-lateral collaboration and accountability of diverse societal actors and sectors, and leveraging learning through diverse knowledge systems.

Beyond a black-and-white perspective on the role of law

Law is often seen as either a barrier or an enabler to change in environmental governance. Law can prevent or slow down change as seen in the careful regulation of novel materials, feed or food. It may support transformative processes by enabling citizen participation in policymaking, or increasing accountability for certain actors, for example by setting mandatory reporting duties for companies. However, this dual perspective oversimplifies the role of law.

Law is often seen as either a barrier or an enabler to change in environmental governance. 

Legal scholars have an important gap to address in the research on transformative governance, which needs more nuanced analyses of the role of law in sustainability transformations, leveraging different analytical perspectives. Environmental governance literature mostly approaches the role of law from the perspective of observers outside the legal system, for example social science scholars. This external perspective is important to point out the changes needed in the legal system.

However, an internal perspective of the legal system, as experienced by judges and lawyers, is also needed to understand the practical functioning of the legal system, how decisions are made, and what real-world constraints shape the system.
To enable transformative change in the broader society, changes in the legal system must take place not only through visible laws and regulations, but also through the deeper legal structure, which consists of fundamental legal principles, concepts, and institutions at the levels of legal culture and the deep structure of law.

Justice has many faces

Changes in a democratic society should be implemented fairly, and this calls for understanding the complexity of justice issues.

Justice has multiple dimensions, some of which are often more heavily emphasized in academic literature or policy processes. Justice is not only about the distribution of environmental costs and benefits. It also includes, for example, the capacities and opportunities of different societal actors to participate in or influence decision-making and to respond to change, as well as the rights of voiceless groups worldwide, including future generations or non-human actors. In our ongoing work, we are teasing out the relationship between justice and transformative governance, focusing on how multiple dimensions of justice are addressed from international to local level.

About the authors:

Dalia D’Amato-Pihlman is a senior researcher at the Finnish Environment Institute working on biodiversity governance. She has a pet sourdough starter whose name is Rufus.

Topi Turunen is a senior researcher working with environmental law and the circular economy policies.  On his free time, Topi is trying to get his newborn son to tolerate him practicing woodwind instruments.

The authors gratefully acknowledge their colleagues who participated in co-developing the research on which this post is based: Kaisa Korhonen-Kurki, Antti Belinski, David Lazarevic, Paula Leskinen, Erkki-Jussi Nylén, Minna Pappila, Outi Penttilä, Samuli Pitzén, Niina Pykäläinen, Suvi Vikström, Minna Kaljonen, Maija Faenhle, Maria Ojanen, Linda Karjalainen and Francesca Frieri.

Opinions of blog contributors do not necessarily reflect the official views and opinions of the Finnish Environment Institute.
 

Further reading:

Korhonen-Kurki K., D'Amato D., Belinskij A., Lazarevic D., Leskinen P., Nylén E.-J., Pappila M., Penttilä O., Pitzén S., Pykäläinen N., Turunen T., Vikström S.: Transformative governance: Exploring theory of change and the role of the law. Earth System Governance 23, 100230 (sciencedirect.com) 

O’Brien, K., Garibaldi, L., Agrawal, A., Bennett, E., Biggs, O., Calderón Contreras, R., Carr, E., Frantzeskaki, N., Gosnell, H., Gurung, J., Lambertucci, S., Leventon, J., Liao, C., Reyes García, V., Shannon, L., Villasante, S., Wickson, F., Zinngrebe, Y., and Perianin, L. (eds.).: IPBES, 2024. Summary for Policymakers of the Thematic Assessment Report on the Underlying Causes of Biodiversity Loss and the Determinants of Transformative Change and Options for Achieving the 2050 Vision for Biodiversity of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. IPBES secretariat, Bonn, Germany (zenodo.org).