Charles Dhewa

Doing epistemic justice in sustainable development: Applying the philosophical concept of epistemic injustice to the real world

By Charles Dhewa

Originally conceptualized by the philosopher, Miranda Fricker, epistemic injustice—unfair treatment of individuals and groups in knowledge-related and communicative practices—is increasingly being employed to delineate individual and collective injustice in healthcare, information sciences, education and sustainable development. Embedded in many other forms of social injustice and inequality, epistemic injustice is a particularly serious problem for sustainable development, undermining the global community's ability to deal with ‘wicked’ problems. Building on the more conceptually developed, philosophical framework of epistemic injustice and recent research from other fields, this article develops a holistic action-oriented framework of epistemic justice, namely fair treatment in knowledge-related and communicative practices, for sustainable development and beyond. It also adds to the current framework of individual and collective injustice by including a range of new insights on structural and systemic epistemic injustice, such as linguistic injustice and epistemicide. © 2023 The Authors. Sustainable Development published by ERP Environment and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.