The interaction between justice and anticipation: Four mechanisms of reproducing injustice

There is a growing recognition and demand that sustainability transformations should be ‘just’, as visible in European Union policy or the United Nations (UN). Therefore, it is essential to understand and build links between futures and justice discourses. Hence, the aim of this SI is to document empirically and conceptually the way justice discourses and futures bear on societal transformations, putting at its center their interplay. Contributions were invited to investigate the role of future thinking in unpacking sustainability transformations, dealing with questions such as: What is the effect of this interaction of discourses at different levels, like daily practices, procedures, on institutions and/or on policy? How are futures strategically used to legitimize particular justice discourses and vice versa? We identify four underlying mechanisms that help explain how existing injustices are reproduced in societal transformations through the interaction between futures and justice discourses: (1) presentification; (2) utopian dismissal; (3) tangible future bias; and (4) anticipatory justification. By examining the connection in literature and underlying mechanisms, the notion of ‘futures justice’ emerges to be essential to reducing injustices: integrating epistemological perspectives in thinking about futures into the processes of societal transformations.