Making sense of vulnerability and structural injustices in just food system transitions

• The pluralist perspective to vulnerability is applied to just transition context. • Vulnerability is conceptualized as the result of experienced challenges and structural injustices. • Analytical framework offers a practical tool for making sense of vulnerability in just food systems transition. • Effective just transition policies must tackle system lock-ins impacting of vulnerability. • Racist and ableist norms are underexplored in the just transition context. Ecological crises, as well as the policies designed to combat them, are both likely to affect disadvantaged and marginalized groups in unequal and disproportionate ways. This places the question of vulnerability at the centre of the just transition agenda, where it is critical to evaluate whether different justice claims are rooted in privilege or vulnerability. However, the concept of vulnerability has received insufficient attention in just transition scholarship. Building on a pluralist perspective to vulnerability, this paper brings clarity to how the concept should be defined and understood in the context of just food system transition. We conceptualize vulnerability at the intersection of experienced challenges and structural injustices, based on interviews with 34 stakeholders in the Finnish food system. We build and test an analytical framework that combines a bottom-up definition of vulnerability with the role of system lock-ins. Our framework offers a tool for making sense of vulnerability in food system transitions. It facilitates the design of just transition policies that tackle system lock-ins as structural drivers of vulnerability and as barriers to its mitigation. Further, we show that focusing on vulnerability in just transition research foregrounds underexplored perspectives, such as the food system injustices created by racial and ableist norms.