ABSTRACT
The focus throughout this book has been on gaining an understanding of individual and community perspectives of fairness and justice in natural resource sharing. The main purpose of this final chapter is now to show why justice is important in environmental decision making and to make the case for environmental decision making to be carried out within a theory of justice. As the previous chapter has shown, there are many practitioners in natural resource management who understand that a fair approach can achieve solutions that are perceived by those involved as fair and equitable. This chapter draws the findings from the earlier chapters together, with the aim of showing how concepts and the practical experience of justice can be put to use in the challenge to increase the social acceptance of decisions and enable better decisions to be made. Another aim is to show practitioners in resource sharing what fairness and justice in decision-making processes really mean to those involved and why they need to understand the importance of different aspects of justice in gaining social acceptance of decisions.
