Ecosystem services and sustainability have become prominent concepts in international policy and research agendas. However, a common conceptual ground between these concepts is currently underdeveloped. In particular, a vision is missing on how to align ecosystem services with overarching sustainability goals. Originally, the ecosystem service concept focused on sustaining human well-being through biodiversity conservation. Nevertheless, studies within the field also consider appropriation beyond carrying capacities, and natural resource management that involves environmentally damaging inputs as ecosystem service provision. This brings the ecosystem service concept into conflict with the core goal of sustainability, i.e. achieving justice within ecological limits over the long term. Here, we link the ecosystem service concept to sustainability outcomes operationalized in terms of justice. Our framing positions sustainability as an overarching goal which can be achieved through seven key strategies: equitable (1) intergenerational and (2) intragenerational distribution, (3) interspecies distribution, (4) fair procedures, recognition and participation, (5) sufficiency, (6) efficiency, and ( 7) persistence. Applying these strategies has the potential to re-focus the ecosystem service concept towards the normative goal of sustainability. We identify research needs for each strategy and further discuss questions regarding operationalization of the strategies.

To achieve sustainable development, it is evident that new approaches to governance are required to govern the transformation of the economy and enable the replacement of unsustainable technologies and practices. Very much like new technologies and social innovation, institutional innovation emerges from the bottom up by non-state actors aiming to facilitate the governance of transformation. What is the potential of such institutional innovation?A sustainable economy fulfills societal needs in a fundamentally different way to the current economic system. Improvements to the efficiency of existing technologies or practices appear insufficient for achieving sustainable development within the planetary boundaries. Disruptive, systemic and transformational changes appear necessary in order to replace existing technologies and practices to establish a sustainable economy. Such innovations often start out in niches; however, the scaling up and the ultimate replacement of current socio-technical systems requires governance to allow for the coordination of actors, the reorganization of socio-technical systems and the mobilization and allocation of resources. As governmental institutions are part of the current (non-sustainable) systems and thereby fail to provide coherent, integrated and transformative governance, we explore whether institutional innovation from non-state actors can step in to provide governance of transformation processes. Based on explorative qualitative case studies of networks in the food sector, city planning and reporting tools, we analyze the potential of bottom-up institutional innovations to coordinate actors in transformation processes.

We argue that economicsas the scientific method of analysing trade-offs-can be helpful (and may even be indispensable) for assessing the tradeoffs between intergenerational and intragenerational justice. Economic analysis can delineate the "opportunity set" of politics with respect to the two normative objectives of interand intragenerational justice, i.e. it can describe which outcomes are feasible in achieving the two objectives in a given context, and which are not. It can distinguish efficient from inefficient uses of instruments of justice. It can identify the "opportunity cost" of attaining one justice to a higher degree, in terms of less achievement of the other. We find that, under very general conditions, (1) efficiency in the use of instruments of justice implies that there is rivalry between the two justices and the opportunity cost of either justice is positive; (2) negative opportunity costs of achieving one justice exist if there is facilitation between the two justices, which can only happen if instruments of justice are used inefficiently; (3) opportunity costs of achieving one justice are zero if the two justices are independent of each other, which is the case in the interior of the opportunity set where instruments of justice are used inefficiently.

Abstract:We discuss how the normative dimension of sustainability can be captured in terms of justice. We (i) identify the core characteristics of the concept of sustainability and discuss underlying ethical, ontological and epistemological assumptions; (ii) introduce a general conceptual structure of justice for the analysis and comparison of different conceptions of justice; and (iii) employ this conceptual structure to determine the specific characteristics and challenges of justice in the context of sustainability. We demonstrate that sustainability raises specific and partly new challenges of justice regarding the community of justice, the judicandum, the informational base, the principles, and the instruments of justice.