The Law & Political Economy of Planetary and Earth System Justice

Earth system governance (ESG) addresses environmental sustainability but also economic equity and social welfare, placing a particular emphasis on the architecture of the international political and legal systems, agency, adaptiveness, accountability, and allocation & access to resources. The legal dimension plays a pivotal role in operationalizing justice across global ecological-socioeconomic systems: as the code of our contemporary integrated economies, law is in a unique position to allow for an ordered and inclusive encounter between ecological, economic and social interests. The question of justice is then fundamental for the determination of priority between those interests. But research on justice in ESG has diverged into two distinct strands - 'Planetary justice' and 'Earth system justice' - with very scant contribution from legal expertise. This absence has limited the ability to create legally actionable frameworks that reconcile ecological goals with economic imperatives and social demands. First, this contribution reviews and maps the split between the two scholarships, analysing their variations, distinctions, and interconnections. Second, it identifies their legal shortcomings. Third, it proposes a justice framework that integrates insights from both strands and other works on justice (Sen, McKeown, Wenz) to derive principles that are actionable within governance (including legal) systems. Recognizing the inherently political nature of refining such a framework, it concludes with a reflection on its potential implications for the political economy of both States and the global system, highlighting existing initiatives that align with the proposed approach and exploring their role in fostering equitable and sustainable ecological-socioeconomic governance.