Embedding justice in agroecological transitions: a practice-informed framework for food and land system transformation

Agroecological transitions are widely recognised as essential to achieving just and sustainable food system transformation. However, governance frameworks guiding such transitions often overlook structural inequities, power asymmetries, and historical injustices. This paper develops a Justice-Embedded Transitions Management framework that integrates four justice dimensions – recognitional, procedural, distributive, and restorative – across the temporal phases of system change: pre-development, take-off, acceleration, and stabilisation. Drawing on principles of justice, equity, decolonisation, and inclusion, the framework embeds justice considerations from the outset rather than retrofitting them as post-hoc assessments. The conceptual model is grounded in empirical insights from two participatory engagements with UK food and land system actors: a co-created workshop with 20 participants and a policy consultation webinar with 73 participants. These engagements explored how justice is conceptualised, experienced, and enacted within agroecological transition pathways. Findings highlight that justice concerns are not phase-specific but systemic, requiring continuous attention throughout transitions. Cross-cutting themes include epistemic exclusion, tokenistic participation versus genuine co-design, and eligibility criteria functioning as distributive gatekeeping. Justice dimensions interact dynamically and interdependently: recognitional failures in early phases produce distributive and procedural injustices later, while procedural exclusion perpetuates misrecognition throughout. The paper contributes to sustainability science by offering a practice-informed, temporally grounded governance framework for just agroecological transitions. It concludes with implications for theory, practice, and policy, emphasising anticipatory justice mapping, reflexive governance mechanisms, and co-produced tools as critical to enabling inclusive, historically situated, and equity-centred transition pathways transferable across diverse geographic and political contexts.