Adapting with justice: a governance framework for equitable urban resilience beyond the environmental justice triad

Abstract Urban adaptation can redistribute protection, public investment, land value, and displacement risk across neighborhoods and social groups. This scoping review, reported in accordance with PRISMA-ScR, synthesized scholarship on justice, governance, and equitable urban resilience. Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar were searched for English-language publications from January 2000 through February 2026, supplemented by backward reference checking. After duplicate removal, title/abstract screening, and full-text assessment, 79 studies were included. A combined deductive–inductive thematic synthesis, organized with MAXQDA Analytics Pro, identified three interlocking governance pillars: justice architectures, accountable co-production, and context-tuned strategies. Across the included studies, equitable adaptation was repeatedly discussed in relation to enforceable rights, distributional targeting, meaningful community authority, attention to compound and context-specific risks, anti-displacement safeguards, and durable operations and maintenance. By contrast, consultation without decision authority and adaptation investment without housing protection were described as risks for reproducing exclusion, unequal access, and climate gentrification. The review translates these patterns into five assessable governance checkpoints: rights and intergenerational accountability, distributional targeting, shared decision authority, scale and compound-risk fit, and anti-displacement protection and benefit durability. The resulting framework is an analytically derived and testable governance framework rather than a validated causal model. It provides a structured basis for evaluating whether urban adaptation is environmentally effective, socially just, institutionally accountable, and durable over time.