This Special Collection encourages submissions that speak to the diversity of contexts, histories, geographies and practices where sustainability transformations are being pursued, enabled, contested, and subjugated. It aims to unpack questions of transformations to what, and how we generate evidence of these just and equitable transformations to sustainable futures? We see the need to advance the empirical link between justice and transformations as an important contribution.

 The critical importance of ensuring justice and equity in sustainability transformations is now firmly established. This role becomes only more important across all levels of society and governance in a world of increasing geopolitical tensions and conflicts, escalating sustainability challenges and impacts, technological disruption and change, multilateral breakdown, and historically entrenched and growing inequality in many places. This creates profound complexity across contexts and over time, raising new and urgent questions about how the role of diverse justice and equity issues manifest within sustainability transformations.

 How transformations are experienced on the ground by people and communities can be highly multifaceted and call into question what transformation even means to people in their situated and lived experience. At regional and national levels, processes of transformation (such as just transitions from fossil fuels, action to protect and restore biodiversity on land and at sea, and green and renewable infrastructure development) are contested in many ways that often mobilise issues of justice and equity from varying angles. At the same time, global interconnections such as shifting transnational resource flows (e.g., critical minerals), global negotiations over climate and biodiversity, and debates over global commons such as oceans, genetic diversity,  the potential collapse of entire ecosystems like coral reefs, and even earth-space access highlight many longstanding and new justice and equity issues in sustainability transformations.

 The need to better understand how to navigate diverse justice and equity issues within this changing landscape comes into focus as a key priority for sustainability scholars. Justice and equity may look very different in different places and even different places and times. While sustainability transformation scholarship has not necessarily overlooked this diversity, it is now important to centre this as a key research agenda, both to understand diverse empirical settings, and to critically reflect on - and strengthen - concepts and theories of sustainability transformations in a rapidly changing world. More deeply, this raises challenging underlying questions about how to bring together planetary frames and understandings (which help to grasp critical earth system processes and dynamics) alongside deep recognition of ‘peopled places’ (involving profound societal diversity, multiplicity, and difference) in sustainability transformations.

 This Special Collection will explore and critically reflect on the challenges of navigating diversity in justice and equity across space and time. Key questions include, but are not limited to:

• How can epistemic justice and decolonial praxis and perspectives be more inclusively incorporated into transformations research?
• How might futures thinking be combined with historical embeddedness to elicit better evidence for more equitable and just sustainability transformations?
• How do imperatives for rapid transformations and radical change interact with the simultaneous need for careful attention justice and equity which might seem to require ‘slowing down’ disruptive changes and vary in different contexts and moments in time?
• How do both proximate and deeper structural factors in governance, society, politics, and technological changes affect justice and equity in sustainability transformations?
• How can arts-based practices and methods enable a stronger focus on equity and justice in transformations research and practice?

 We are primarily interested in original Research articles, but also welcome strong and original Concept and Perspective articles.

 Submission guidelines

The collection will open to submissions on 18th August 2025 and will close on 28th February 2026.

Please select the ‘Sustainability Transformations Towards Justice and Equity: Navigating diversity across space and time’ option from the special issue dropdown in ScholarOne.  For detailed manuscript preparation instructions and submission guidelines, please refer to "Instructions" for Authors.