The Idea of Social Justice

This chapter briefly reviews key theories of social justice. Throughout this review, it arrives at the conclusion that social justice as such is both relational and distributive. These two analytically distinct but interrelated aspects of social justice can enable normative evaluation of innovative and developmental activities within state borders and beyond them. Establishing a society in which people relate equally to each other, presupposes a certain threshold of equal distribution of material resources. The threshold can be only determined by the level of equality of relations in such society. The application of relational justice in innovation very much depends on public action. Through grassroots innovation movements and networks, relational principles emerge as a normative framework within which a plurality of innovative products and processes provide solutions to low-income societies.