Access and allocation firmly ground the concept of human security in the larger context of social justice, posing serious challenges for equitable earth system governance.The focus on capabilities brings together a range of ideas addressed inadequately in traditional approaches to the economics of welfare. The capabilities approach highlights the importance of real freedoms in the assessment of persons’ relative level of advantage, promoting a more realistic balance of materialistic and non-materialistic factors in evaluating human welfare and a concern for the distribution of substantive opportunities within society.Research on access to and allocation of environmental resources in a deliberative system of democratic governance builds on and extends an existing limited research literature on the implications of deliberative democratic practices for environmental justice policy and governance.More equitable access to and allocation of environmental “goods” should be a focus for a next generation of environmental research characterized by improved normative understanding as well as more meaningful and reflexive potential for sustainability transformation.