Epistemic justice: An ethical basis for transdisciplinary and transformative sustainability research

Abstract The idea of epistemic justice can help to resolve tensions between different ethical motivations in the transdisciplinary and transformative research literature as to why extra-scientific knowledge holders need to be included in knowledge production processes.Justice is the social mission and the ethical motivation for knowledge production in the sustainability sciences. To support transformations towards more just societies, alternative forms of knowledge production are needed that include the contributions of extra-scientific knowledge holders. The paper identifies inherent tensions within the literature on transdisciplinary and transformative research (TDTR) between different ethical motivations for involving these knowledge holders. Some point to justice claims derived from the social mission of TDTR; others emphasise forms of justification described in this paper as epistemic prudence. However, it is possible to resolve these tensions by referring to the idea of epistemic justice. The paper introduces this idea to reconstruct ethical intuitions within TDTR. In doing so, it invites TDTR practitioners to critically rethink their ethical motivations in order to advance work on the normative foundations of TDTR.