Engaging With Policymakers and Practitioners to Implement Restorative Justice in Europe: Lessons From 10 Countries in Restorative Justice: Strategies for Change

ABSTRACT

Research suggests that enabling greater participation in restorative justice can lead to strong social, health and economic benefits for people who commit offences, victims, communities and states. Yet, restorative justice remains partially implemented in Europe and many people cannot easily access services in practice, even in countries with national provision. Restorative Justice: Strategies for Change was a 5-year project aiming to promote the implementation of restorative justice in 10 participating countries around Europe. In each country a group of researchers, policymakers and practitioners brought together a larger group of professionals to co-create national strategies to advance restorative justice in criminal justice. Drawing on data including a post-project survey of partners (n = 25) and annual country reports (n = 39), we explore our partners’ perspectives and reported activities to investigate the impact the project may have had and the mechanisms that might have underpinned any impact. These findings indicate that connections built with policymakers and practitioners helped our partners understand, identify and create opportunities to work across the criminal justice sector, depending on local contexts, to develop restorative justice. The strength of this article lies in its international character: few projects on restorative justice implementation involve advocates in so many countries attempting similar approaches simultaneously, and information on all 10 countries is present in our data. Situating the results in the policy engagement literature, we propose that a ‘communities of practice’ model can help researchers instigate and co-lead multilevel, locally responsive platforms for implementing restorative justice and other important criminal justice reforms, making these findings of interest to a wide range of impact-oriented scholars.