Navigating Environmental Justice Framework: A Scoping Literature Review Over Four Decades

The scoping literature review examines nearly four decades of scholarly contributions, navigating the evolution of the environmental justice framework from its nascent roots to its contemporary dimensions. It aims to provide a comprehensive overview of its conceptual trajectory, identifying key themes, pillars, and current directions. Spanning 7001 publications, the review employs lexical-metric content analyses to synthesize the corpus and reveal semantic clusters and temporal trends. The data underscore the increasing scholarly interest in environmental justice, manifested in a well-established field of study and multidisciplinary approaches. The analyses identify four pillars underpinning the framework: assessing built environment quality, mitigating climate change effects, promoting responsible research and innovation (RRI), and emphasizing human dimensions. The pillars reflect the classical justice dimensions (i.e., distributive, procedural—also in its participatory sense—and recognition justice, respectively), while restorative justice is a cross-cutting dimension. They undergo significant transformations over time, defining some directions toward which the current scientific debate seems to orient: ensuring everyone’s well-being, realizing just transition, reducing global inequalities, and facing societal challenges together. Overall, the review delineates two complementary and interconnected frameworks: environmental justice as a theoretical framework for global issues and environmental justice as a concrete framework for situated issues. The conceptual frameworks have implications for environmental governance and activism, advocating for democratic, participatory, and cooperative approaches. Furthermore, they suggest avenues for future research, particularly in understanding social dynamics that bridge global and local concerns, aligning research agendas with the interests and needs of affected communities.