This research program is interested in the scope and efficacy of Environmental Restorative Justice in diverse contexts.

Environmental Restorative Justice is a way to prevent and heal environmental harm. Rather than just focussing on what rules have been broken and who should be punished, Environmental Restorative Justice:

• Focuses on healing to humans, animals and nature as well as repairing relationships
• Empowers victims to tell their stories of impact
• Requires direct participation of those responsible for causing harm to listen deeply, and take responsibility
• Enables accountability beyond traditional sanctioning and punishment

This research agenda includes two projects:

Preventing and addressing environmental harm through restorative justice (Australian Research Council)

This multi-year ARC Linkage project aims to explore how the processes and values of restorative justice do or could operate in the context of environmental harm. We also investigate what a focus on harm to nature and ecosystems contributes to the theory and practice of restorative justice.

The project brings together restorative justice experts from RegNet with the Victorian Environment Protection Authority, which has experimented with Restorative Justice for over a decade and now seeks to understand how it can be more broadly applied, using the principles of action based research.

The project seeks to draw on and build upon the EPA’s history of experimentation with restorative justice, identifying opportunities to situate restorative justice approaches at all stages of environmental regulation, both before and after harm has occurred.

Introducing justice into the UN’s Decade of Ecosystem Restoration: A community of practice for research and action (Asia-Pacific Innovation Program)

This project will create a theoretical, empirical and policy agenda for incorporating justice into the UN’s Decade on Ecosystem Restoration “the Decade”, a 10-year plan to promote efforts to “prevent, halt and reverse the degradation of ecosystems worldwide”, beginning in 2021.