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The International Journal of Restorative Justice

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Issue 1, 2021 Expand all abstracts

Brunilda Pali
Brunilda Pali is a Senior Researcher at the Leuven Institute of Criminology, KU Leuven, Belgium, and a Lecturer at the Department of Political Sciences, University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Ivo Aertsen
Ivo Aertsen is Emeritus Professor of Criminology, Leuven Institute of Criminology, KU Leuven, Belgium. Contact author: Brunilda.pali@kuleuven.be.
Article

Access_open A future agenda for environmental restorative justice?

Keywords restorative justice, restorative practice, environmental justice, environmental regulation
Authors Miranda Forsyth, Deborah Cleland, Felicity Tepper e.a.
AbstractAuthor's information

    The challenges of developing meaningful environmental regulation to protect communities and the environment have never been greater. Environmental regulators are regularly criticised for failing to act hard and consistently, in turn leading to demands for harsher punishments and more rigorous enforcement. Whilst acknowledging the need for strong enforcement to address wantonly destructive practices threatening communities and ecosystems, we argue that restorative approaches have an important role. This article explores a future agenda for environmental restorative justice through (1) situating it within existing scholarly and practice-based environmental regulation traditions; (2) identifying key elements and (3) raising particular theoretical and practical challenges. Overall, our vision for environmental restorative justice is that its practices can permeate the entire regulatory spectrum, going far beyond restorative justice conferences within enforcement proceedings. We see it as a shared and inclusive vision that seeks to integrate, hybridise and build broader ownership for environmental restorative justice throughout existing regulatory practices and institutions, rather than creating parallel structures or paradigms.


Miranda Forsyth
Miranda Forsyth is Associate Professor at the School of Regulation and Governance in the College of Asia and Pacific in the Australian National University, Australia.

Deborah Cleland
Deborah Cleland is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Regulation and Governance in the College of Asia and Pacific in the Australian National University, Australia.

Felicity Tepper
Felicity Tepper is a Senior Research Officer at the School of Regulation and Governance in the College of Asia and Pacific in the Australian National University, Australia.

Deborah Hollingworth
Deborah Hollingworth is a Principal Solicitor at the Environment Protection Authority Victoria, Australia.

Milena Soares
Milena Soares is a public servant at the Técnica de Desenvolvimento e Administração,Brazil.

Alistair Nairn
Alistair Nairn is Senior Engagement Advisor at the Environment Protection Authority Victoria, Australia.

Cathy Wilkinson
Cathy Wilkinson is Professor of Practice at Monash Sustainable Development, Australia. Contact author: miranda.forsyth@anu.edu.au.
Article

Why an atmosphere of transhumanism undermines green restorative justice concepts and tenets

Keywords green restorative justice, transhumanism, technological progress, animals, bioethics
Authors Gema Varona
AbstractAuthor's information

    Arising from the notions of green criminology and green victimology, green restorative justice can be defined as a restorative justice focused on environmental harm. Harm in this case is understood as criminalised and non-criminalised, and as individual and collective behaviours damaging the ecosystems and the existence of human and non-human beings. Impacts of environmental harm affect health, economic, social and cultural dimensions, and will be experienced in the short, medium and long term. Within this framework, after linking restorative justice to green criminology and green victimology, I will argue that the current weight of the cultural and social movement of transhumanism constitutes an obstacle to the development of restorative justice in this field. The reason is that it fosters individual narcissism, together with the idea of an absence of limits in what is considered technological progress. This progress is seen as inevitable and good per se, and promotes the perception of a lack of social and moral accountability. This reasoning will lead to some final reflections on how restorative justice has to constantly reinvent itself in order to keep creating a critical and inclusive justice of ‘otherness’. By doing so, restorative justice must join the current interdisciplinary conversation on biopolitics and bioethics.


Gema Varona
Gema Varona is a Senior Researcher at the Basque Institute of Criminology, University of the Basque Country, Donostia/San Sebastián, Spain. Contact author: gemmamaria.varona@ehu.eus.
Article

Environmental justice movements and restorative justice

Keywords restorative justice, environmental conflicts, environmental justice movements
Authors Angèle Minguet
AbstractAuthor's information

    The worldwide existing environmental conflicts have also given rise to worldwide environmental justice movements. Using a diversity of tools that range from petitions to legal actions, what such movements have often shown is that environmental conflicts rarely find a satisfactory resolution through criminal judicial avenues. Given this reality, the important question then is whether there is a place within environmental justice movements for a restorative justice approach, which would lead to the reparation or restoration of the environment and involve the offenders, the victims and other interested parties in the conflict transformation process. Based on the analysis of environmental conflicts collected by the Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade project (EJOLT), and more specifically on two emblematic environmental conflict cases in Nigeria and in Ecuador, the argument will be made that it is essentially due to the characteristics of environmental conflicts, and due to the fact that they almost never find a satisfactory resolution through traditional judicial avenues, that environmental justice movements ask for a restorative approach, and that restorative justice is a sine qua non condition to truly repair environmental injustices, as long as the worldview and nature of the victims is taken into consideration.


Angèle Minguet
Angèle Minguet is a researcher at the Research Centre in Political Science, Université Saint-Louis – Bruxelles (CReSPo), Belgium. Contact author: angele.minguet@gmail.com.
Article

Restorative justice conferencing in Australia and New Zealand

Application and potential in an environmental and Aboriginal cultural heritage protection context

Keywords restorative justice conferencing, environmental offending, Aboriginal cultural heritage offending, connection to the environment
Authors Mark Hamilton
AbstractAuthor's information

    Indigenous people may suffer harm when the environment, sacred places and sacred objects are destroyed or damaged. Restorative justice conferencing, a facilitated face-to-face dialogue involving victims, offenders, and pertinent stakeholders has the potential to repair that harm. This article explores the use of conferencing in this context with case law examples from New Zealand and New South Wales, Australia. As will be discussed, the lack of legislative support for conferencing in the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales means it is doubtful that such conferencing will develop past its current embryonic state. As well as using restorative justice conferencing to repair harm from past criminality, this article suggests that further research should explore the use of restorative justice to resolve present conflict, and prevent future conflict, where there is a disconnect between non-Indigenous use of the environment and Indigenous culture embedded in the environment.


Mark Hamilton
Mark Hamilton, PhD, is a lawyer and teaching fellow in the Criminology and Criminal Justice programme and the Law programme at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. Contact: mark.hamilton@unsw.edu.au.
Article

A maximalist approach of restorative justice to address environmental harms and crimes

Analysing the Brumadinho dam collapse in Brazil

Keywords environmental law, maximalist approach, restorative justice principles and concepts, decision-making process, sanctioning rules
Authors Carlos Frederico Da Silva
AbstractAuthor's information

    In this article, the author analyses court cases arising from the rupture of the mining tailings dam in the city of Brumadinho, Brazil, on 25 January 2019. In a civil lawsuit context, legal professionals recognised damage to people and the environment during hearings involving a judge, prosecutors, lawyers and corporate representatives. The centrality of the victims’ interests and the need for remedial measures prevailed in the agreements signed mainly to provide urgent relief and restore damage to the ecosystem. In the criminal lawsuit dealing with the same facts, there have not yet been acquittals, non-prosecution agreements or convictions. By employing a socio-legal approach to contrast different types of legal reasoning, this article explores the possibilities of restorative responses in civil proceedings and explains the lack of them in criminal justice. In highlighting some characteristics of punishment theories that hinder a possible restorative justice approach, the article offers a critique of a penal system mostly linked to argumentative competition rather than persuasive conflict resolution. The author argues that jurisprudence should address transdisciplinary concepts, such as responsive regulation, restorative efforts, proportionality and individualisation of punishment. The discussion can shed light on the decision-making process to allow environmental restorative justice responses to crimes.


Carlos Frederico Da Silva
Carlos Frederico Braga Da Silva is a PhD researcher associated to the Graduate School of Sociology at the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil, and to the Canadian Chair of Legal Traditions and Penal Rationality, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, Canada. He also works as a state judge in Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil. Contact author: carlosfrebrasilva@gmail.com.
Article

Imagining a community that includes non-human beings

The 1990s Moyainaoshi Movement in Minamata, Japan

Keywords restorative justice, community, environmental damage, spirituality, Japan, the Moyainaoshi Movement
Authors Orika Komatsubara
AbstractAuthor's information

    This article offers a vision of a community that includes non-human beings. After suffering environmental damage, a community is often harmed and confused. Restorative justice may have the potential to intervene in divisions with a community approach. However, though environmental damage affects both human and non-human beings, restorative justice typically concerns itself with human communities. Therefore, through a review of the literature I consider what non-human beings mean for a community, focusing on the Moyainaoshi Movement (MM) in Minamata, Japan, in the 1990s. This movement aimed to reconstruct the community after severe, long-term pollution. First, I examine the motivations of several stakeholders that worked to reconstruct the Minamata community in the 1990s. Second, I clarify the role of non-human beings in the vision of community as practiced by the MM. I find that non-human beings served as symbols to connect human beings within the community. Finally, I conclude that a vision of a community that includes non-human beings can propel community reconstruction in our current political realities, and I reveal that in studying this concept of community in restorative justice, listening to victims’ voices is of paramount importance.


Orika Komatsubara
Orika Komatsubara is working under a Research Fellowship for Young Scientists from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS). This study was supported by Grant Number 20J00091. Contact author: orika1982@gmail.com.
Notes from the field

Access_open Focus on victims and the community: applying restorative justice principles to wildlife crime offences in South Africa

Authors Annette Hübschle, Ashleigh Dore and Harriet Davies-Mostert
Author's information

Annette Hübschle
Annette Hübschle is a senior research fellow in the Global Risk Governance Programme in the Law Faculty at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Ashleigh Dore
Ashleigh Dore is the wildlife and law manager at the Endangered Wildlife Trust and heads the Restorative Justice Project, South Africa.

Harriet Davies-Mostert
Harriet Davies-Mostert is the head of conservation at the Endangered Wildlife Trust, the senior manager of the Restorative Justice Project, South Africa and a Fellow of the Eugène Marais Chair of Wildlife Management at the Mammal Research Institute, University of Pretoria. All authors are members of the Restorative Justice Steering Committee of the Wildlife Crime Restorative Justice Project undertaken by the Endangered Wildlife Trust under the WWF South Africa Khetha Programme and supported by USAID.Contact author: Ashleigh Dore at ashleighd@ewt.org.za. Acknowledgment: the authors would like to thank Mike Batley and Lara Rall for their helpful comments and feedback on earlier versions of this note. Acknowledgment 2: The funding for this research was provided in part by the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 804851).

Jordi Recorda Cos
Jordi Recordà Cos is a co-director at INSTA Environmental Law Consulting, La Canonja, Spain, environmental engineer with a French public administration, and facilitator of restorative circles. Contact author: jrecorda@instajuridic.com.

Lawrence Kershen
Lawrence Kershen QC is a mediator and restorative justice facilitator in London, United Kingdom. Contact author: kershen@europe.com.

Maria Lucia Cruz Correia
Maria Lucia Cruz Correia is an artist, activist and environmental researcher, Belgium. Contact author: mluciacruzcorreia@gmail.com.
Conversations on restorative justice

A talk with Rob White

Authors Albert Dzur
Author's information

Albert Dzur
Albert Dzur is Distinguished Research Professor, Departments of Political Science and Philosophy, Bowling Green State University, USA. Contact author: awdzur@bgsu.edu.

Tanya Jones
Tanya Jones is a PhD researcher, University of Dundee, Dundee, United Kingdom. Contact author: t.w.jones@dundee.ac.uk.