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.