Societal inequities and barriers to participation in societal decisions mean that some people and groups have difficulty in accessing sufficient resources to meet their essential needs. This increases the vulnerability of those who lack social and political capital in times of crises, such as climate change impact events. Collective action institutions can redress this inequity by facilitating the redistribution of essential resources from the wealthy to the vulnerable. In this article, we use a stylised agent-based model of a community subject to a climate change impact that affects the availability of an essential resource. We use it to explore the types of societal conditions and policies that contribute to the emergence of a collective action institution that effectively redistributes resources to ensure that people are able to maintain a sufficient level of welfare. We find that removing barriers to participation in societal decisions for vulnerable people, and increasing the sensitivity and urgency in the decision-making process to impacts in the community, help to realise effective collective action institutions. The key insight that our model helps to uncover is that participatory justice promotes timely distributive justice.

Scholars increasingly propose distributive justice as a means to foster effective and fair outcomes in climate adaptation. To advance the discussion on its place in climate policy, it is desirable to be able to quantitatively assess the effects of different principles of distribution on the well-being of unequally vulnerable individuals and groups. Here, we present an agent-based model of a stylized social–environmental system subject to an external stress such as a climate change impact, in which individuals with unequal access to resources attempt to fulfil an essential need through resource consumption. This causes environmental damage, and a balance must be found between the processes of resource consumption and environmental degradation to achieve well-being for people and stability for the environment. We operationalize different principles for redistributing resource access as interaction rules in the model and compare their tendency to allow such a balance to emerge. Our results indicate that while outcome patterns and effectiveness may vary among principles, redistribution generally improves well-being and system stability. We discuss some implications of our findings as they pertain to addressing the climate crisis and end by outlining the next steps for the research.