Defining equity
Equity is defined as ‘fairness’ and ‘justice’ in the ways people are treated, according to the Cambridge Free English and Merriam Webster dictionaries. Indeed, the concepts of fairness, justice and equity are considered cornerstones of a healthy society in Western culture (Carrell and Dittrich, 1978), and have their antecedents in the moral philosophies and political theories of Aristotle and Plato, and more recently of Rousseau, Locke and Hobbes. But what does it mean to be treated in a fair and just manner? These questions have long been contested because the concepts are so situated in context, power relations, subjectivity, culture and personal experience, rendering a universal definition of equity impossible. One foundational articulation of equity which contributed to Western equity scholarship was proposed in the 1960s by J. Stacy Adams in relation to employee and workplace relations (Adams, 1963). Following this, Rawls proposed two principles of justice pertaining to the distribution of benefits and burdens, drawing on theories of libertarianism, egalitarianism and meritocracy (Rawls, 2009). As noted by Cook and Hegtvedt (1983), ‘equity theory’ in Western scholarship has been more generally a theory of distributive justice. Responding to this, Leventhal (1980) and others argued that legal, economic and sociological research on social equity in public management had mainly focused on the problem of allocation (of rewards, punishments and resources), and that there were several issues in equity theory such as a uni-dimensional focus on merit, a lack of consideration of process and the exaggerated importance of fairness in social relationships. Leventhal’s contribution to the revision of equity theory was to highlight procedural as well as distributive equity as necessary foci of justice rules.
Amid the race riots and racial inequalities of the mid-twentieth century the concept of ‘social equity’ was applied by Frederickson (1971) to account for the role of social policy and public administration in the fair, just and equitable development of public policy and distribution of public services. Much social equity scholarship has focused historically on race, gender, and class as domains, but there are a variety of inequity foci including for example: ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, region, disability status, immigration status, and language of origin (Wooldridge and Gooden, 2009). The concept of environmental justice as it relates to unequal distribution of the negatives from environmental degradation also gained currency (e.g. Pellow et al., 2001).
More recently, there has been renewed interest in the concept of social equity and the role of international institutions, such as the United Nations, arising in part from the challenges of globalisation and climate change (Guy and McCandless, 2012). Both procedural and distributive dimensions of equity are acknowledged in various global governance initiatives and assessments, including the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP); the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Allen et al., 2018), and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (or SDGs, hereafter). For example, SDG6 considers equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all; SDG9 promotes affordable and equitable access to infrastructure for all; SDG15 seeks fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resources; and one target of SDG17 concerns promoting a universal, rules-based, open, non-discriminatory and equitable multilateral trading system under the World Trade Organization.