Journal of Sustainable Tourism

Just sustainability transitions in tourism

The tourism sector stands at a critical crossroads. Amid accelerating climate crises, deepening socio-economic inequalities, biodiversity loss, enduring structural marginalisation, and regional conflicts, calls for systemic transformation have become increasingly pressing and unavoidable (Magnusson et al., 2024; Mzembe & Filimonau, 2024; Rastegar & Ruhanen, 2023). While initiatives such as green transitions and the push toward net-zero have gained traction, driven by decarbonisation strategies, energy transitions, and technological innovations (Gössling & Scott, 2024; Rastegar & Becken, 2024), these pathways are far from politically neutral. Transitions are not merely technical adjustments to energy systems or consumer behaviour; they are profoundly political processes that shape who benefits, who bears the burdens, and who has a voice or is silenced in the governance of change.

Sustainability transitions demand a critical interrogation of governance mechanisms, institutional lock-ins, market structures, and cultural imaginaries (Niewiadomski and Brouder, 2024). Yet, approaches to transition within the tourism and hospitality sector often remain entrenched in technocratic and neoliberal logics that sideline questions of equity, power, and historical injustice (Mzembe et al., forthcoming). These omissions risk perpetuating and even exacerbating the very inequalities that sustainability agendas seek to address. A growing body of tourism and hospitality scholarship reveals that sustainability and justice are frequently treated as separate concerns (Rastegar, 2022, Tops & Lamers, 2024). This disconnect presents a timely opportunity for scholars to advance integrated theoretical and empirical work that meaningfully connects sustainability transitions with justice-oriented perspectives.

Recent scholarship in tourism and climate policy (e.g., Rastegar & Becken, 2024; Booyens et al., 2024) underscores the growing relevance of Just Transitions, a concept rooted in environmental and labour movements and increasingly institutionalised by global organisations (e.g., ILO, 2016; UNFCCC, 2023). In this Special Issue, we adopt the broader and more critical framework of Just Sustainability Transition (JST). This approach moves beyond narrow carbon and labour-focused agendas to interrogate fundamental questions: Who transitions? How do transitions unfold? What historical and place-specific factors shape them? For whom are these transitions imagined? And how does tourism contribute to or hinder wider sustainability transitions? These questions, often sidelined in dominant sustainability narratives, lie at the heart of the JST approach. JST foregrounds the reality that sustainability transitions in tourism are neither politically neutral nor uniformly experienced. They are embedded in structural inequalities, shaped by global power asymmetries, and conditioned by uneven capacities for participation, adaptation, and governance.

Despite the continued dominance of growth-oriented paradigms and market-led solutions in tourism which tend to obscure deeper questions of recognition, procedural, distributive justice, and restorative (Rastegar & Ruhanen, 2023), emerging research across climate justice, regenerative tourism, multispecies ethics, and decolonial critique (Becken, & Rastegar, 2025; Isaac, 2022; Isaac & Farkic, 2024; Isaac & Hall, 2025; Rastegar, 2025) reveals the transformative potential of centring justice in tourism transitions. This Special Issue aims to advance critical debates by providing a platform for theoretical, conceptual, and empirical contributions that interrogate and reimagine transitions in tourism and hospitality through a justice lens. We particularly welcome work that draws on intersectional, decolonial, ecological, feminist, Indigenous, and multispecies justice perspectives to illuminate the tensions, trade-offs, and transformative potentials embedded in the sector’s transition pathways. We also encourage submissions that conceptualise JST as a longitudinal and staged process, one that enables the identification and tracking of transitional justice markers across research, policy, and practice. This approach reframes sustainability not merely as a technical or managerial challenge, but as a profoundly normative and political project that demands inclusive, reflexive, and justice-oriented transformation.

Indicative Themes (not exhaustive):

• Governance frameworks and institutional innovations for embedding justice in tourism transitions
• Power, agency, and the role of private and public actors in driving (or resisting) transitions
• Just sustainability transition imaginaries and realities across geographies: Global South and Global North perspectives
• Intermediaries, social movements, labour unions and civil society in shaping justice-oriented transitions
• Tourism workers’ rights, precarity, and vulnerability in the context of transition
• Climate change adaptation and mitigation through the lens of climate justice
• Multispecies justice and posthuman perspectives in sustainable tourism
• Gender justice and intersectionality in transition governance
• Island and Indigenous tourism economies: toward self-determined transition pathways
• Transition tourism: exploring new business models and regenerative alternatives
• Methodologies for researching justice in sustainability transitions
• Temporality and just transitions