Planetary Justice Taskforce

The Planetary Justice Taskforce of the Earth System Governance Project brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars who are concerned with questions of justice in the context of profound transformations of the earth system. The Task Force has been in operation since 2018 with a launching workshop in Utrecht University in the Netherlands. It is meeting annually under the auspices of the annual Earth System Governance conferences, either physically or online.

The Taskforce aims to address all normative dimensions related to justice in the context of sustainability governance. It is non-exclusive and addresses justice across spatial and temporal scales, across human and non-human realms, and across all practice and theory, forms of governance, and ecosocial processes. It aspires to advance the systematic understanding of justice as well as to galvanize communities of research and practice that integrate planetary justice into their work. 

Practically, the Taskforce works to accommodate dialogue through frequent webinars, interdisciplinary workshops and panels on thematic issues at Earth System Governance conferences and other venues, and joint publications in the form of special issues and edited volumes. It has produced two defining special issues on this topic: one with the Earth System Governance Journal https://www.sciencedirect.com/journal/earth-system-governance/vol/6/suppl/C and one with Environmental Politics https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/fenp20/33/7 and contributed to a related special issue of Environmental Philosophy https://www.pdcnet.org/envirophil/content/envirophil_2022_0019_0002_0221_0240 in response to Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Climate of History.

In the past two years, the Taskforce has been undertaking a major effort to explore and record perspectives on planetary justice across the world – https://www.earthsystemgovernance.org/events/

The Task Force is jointly coordinated by Agni Kalfagianni, Stefan Pedersen and Dimitris Stevis.

Agni Kalfagianni is professor of management of international social challenges at the Erasmus School of Social and Behavioural Challenges, Erasmus University Rotterdam, in the Netherlands. She specializes in the effectiveness, legitimacy, and ethical and justice considerations of private and transnational forms of governance in the sustainability domain. Agni has been co-chair and member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the Earth System Governance project. She is Editor-in-Chief of International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics and co-Editor-in-Chief of the Global Environmental Governance book series by Routledge, She is currently leading the BEYOND GIVING project, on philanthropic foundations and global justice in sustainability governance, funded by the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

Dimitris Stevis is professor of international politics and founder and co-director of the Centre for Environmental Justice at Colorado State University, USA. He specializes in the international political economy of environment and labour with particular attention on just transitions. Ongoing research examines just transition in care and along the lithium lifecycle in the USA. Recent publications include Just Transitions: Promise and Contestation (Cambridge University Press, 2023),  The Palgrave Handbook of Environmental Labour Studies (2021, coedited with Nora Räthzel and David Uzzell) and a special issue of Environmental Politics on Planetary Justice (2024, coedited with Agni Kalfagianni and Stefan Pedersen).

Stefan Pedersen is an honorary research fellow at the School of Global Studies, University of Sussex, in the United Kingdom. He specializes in planetary politics, mainly from an Earth system governance and environmental political theory perspective. He is a joint coordinator of the Planetary Justice Task Force of the Earth System Governance Project. He has recently been a SEI Visiting Researcher at the Sydney Environment Institute, University of Sydney and will later in 2025 be a Planetary Scholar in Residence Fellow with the Panel on Planetary Thinking, Justus Liebig Universität Giessen. Currently, he is co-editing a book on planetary politics. He has also co-edited (with Agni Kalfagianni and Dimitris Stevis) a 2024 special issue of Environmental Politics on Planetary Justice.