Distributive justice in the pursuit of agricultural sustainability

Abstract

While there is a trend towards improving agricultural sustainability, the implementation and uptake of sustainability initiatives will be facilitated if burdens imposed on those expected to participate are perceived as fair. In order to judge whether the distribution of benefits and burdens of agricultural sustainability improvement is fair, there needs to be clarity around which principles can be plausibly used to judge fairness in the context of sustainability enhancement. The research sought to understand how New Zealand agricultural enterprises conceptualise equity or fairness concerns surrounding environmental enhancement. A vignette survey method was used to elicit views on fairness in different distributive justice vignettes. The results suggest that farmers often prioritise fairness concerns over productive efficiency concerns. It was found that in the interest of equity, a grower who was seen to be struggling financially should receive lower environmental improvement targets. Conversely, additional burdens were allocated to a grower who contributed little effort to improving his environmental performance. In contrast to the arguments of many distributive justice theories, the respondents did not give additional support to a struggling grower whose adverse circumstances were caused by events outside of his control. The thesis demonstrates that farmers are sensitive to distributive justice concerns, and that these concerns could have an important role in the development of successful sustainability assessment initiatives. It also highlights the importance of studying equity concerns in a specific context and challenges both the reliance on theories of distributive justice, and the generalising to real world distributive justice challenges of justice research undertaken with student samples. The thesis progresses distributive justice and social choice literature through the application of theoretical principles of distributive justice to a real-world scenario with a practitioner sample. In doing so, the thesis provides insights on the applicability of theoretical notions of fairness to the construction of an effective sustainability assessment initiative.