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Many democracies find it difficult to act swiftly on problems such as climate change and biodiversity loss. This is reflected in long-standing debates in research and policy about whether democratic practices are capable of fostering timely, large-scale transformations towards sustainability. Drawing on an integrative review of scholarly literature from 2011 to early 2021 on sustainability transformations and the democracy-environment nexus, this article synthesises existing research on prospects and pitfalls for democratising sustainability transformations. We advance a new typology for understanding various combinations of democratic/authoritarian practices and of transformations towards/away from sustainability. We then explore the role of democratic practices in accelerating or obstructing five key dimensions of sustainability transformations: institutional, social, economic, technological, and epistemic. Across all dimensions we find substantial evidence that democratic practices can foster transformations towards sustainability, and we conclude by outlining a set of associated policy recommendations.

We develop a conceptual framework to empirically analyse conceptualizations of ‘justice’ in the context of profound transformations of the earth system. Equity and justice have become central issues in public discourses, political documents and research agendas. However, what justice implies in practice is often elusive. The conceptual framework that we advance seeks to bring structure, clarity, simplicity and comparability among different interpretations of justice in global change research. It reduces the wealth of five broad normative approaches to systematic, parsimonious answers on three key concerns any analyst of justice is facing: the subjects of justice and their relationship; the metrics and principles of justice; and the mechanisms on the basis of which justice is pursued. Our framework is designed for use in empirical analysis. We illustrate its usability by investigating two recent policy documents: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the founding documents of the ‘Future Earth’ research platform.

The study of planetary justice is an emerging research field that explores questions of justice on a planetary scale, particularly in the context of the profound global environmental and systemic challenges our earth system is facing. The connection between environmental conditions, human well-being, and justice and equity has been established over the past decades through both academic research, and advocacy and campaigning. However, despite the growing attention and priority of this concept, divergences exist between what is meant by ‘justice’ by different actors in all arenas, including academia. This article uses a framework first developed by Biermann & Kalfagianni (2016, 2018) for empirically analysing what concepts of justice are present in global change research, how this has changed over time, and what patterns or contradictions can be observed. By exploring what concepts, principles and mechanisms of justice emerge from global change research, the paper supports the further development of a ‘planetary justice’ research agenda in the study of earth system governance.

The Earth System Governance project is a global research alliance that explores novel, effective governance mechanisms to cope with the current transitions in the biogeochemical systems of the planet. A decade after its inception, this article offers an overview of the project's new research framework (which is built upon a review of existing earth system governance research), the goal of which is to continue to stimulate a pluralistic, vibrant and relevant research community. This framework is composed of contextual conditions (transformations, inequality, Anthropocene and diversity), which capture what is being observed empirically, and five sets of research lenses (architecture and agency, democracy and power, justice and allocation, anticipation and imagination, and adaptiveness and reflexivity). Ultimately the goal is to guide and inspire the systematic study of how societies prepare for accelerated climate change and wider earth system change, as well as policy responses.