Restorative and Responsive Human Services

In Restorative and Responsive Human Services, Gale Burford, John Braithwaite, and Valerie Braithwaite bring together a distinguished collection providing rich lessons on how regulation in human services can proceed in empowering ways that heal and are respectful of human relationships and legal obligations. The human services are in trouble: combining restorative justice with responsive regulation might redeem them, renewing their well-intended principles. Families provide glue that connects complex systems. What are the challenges in scaling up relational practices that put families and primary groups at the core of health, education, and other social services?

This collection has a distinctive focus on the relational complexity of restorative practices. How do they enable more responsive ways of grappling with complexity than hierarchical and prescriptive human services? Lessons from responsive business regulation inform a re-imagining of the human services to advance wellbeing and reduce domination. Readers are challenged to re-examine the perverse incentives and contradictions buried in policies and practices. How do they undermine the capacities of families and communities to solve problems on their own terms?

This book will interest those who harbor concerns about the creep of domination into the lives of vulnerable citizens. It will help policymakers and researchers to re-focus human services to fundamental outcomes at the foundation of sustainable democracies.

Gale Burford is Professor Emeritus of Social Work, University of Vermont. His practice, teaching, and research has focused mainly on social work in statutory settings including child protection, youth justice, and corrections. With colleague Joan Pennell, he was co-principal investigator of the Newfoundland & Labrador Family Group Decision Making Project, which employed a unique participatory design cited internationally as a model approach for carrying out research at the intersections of child maltreatment and domestic violence. He has taught, carried out research and program evaluation activities, and consulted with programs internationally. Projects include finalizing an evaluation of a multi-year effort by the state of Vermont to embrace strength-based and other relational approaches to the regulation of offenders' behavior and an evaluation of the state of Maine’s use of restorative justice with youthful offenders. He is currently consulting on projects using restorative justice approaches in Leeds, England, and Milan, Italy.

John Braithwaite is a Distinguished Professor and Founder of RegNet (the Regulatory Institutions Network) at the Australian National University. Since 2004 he has led a 25-year comparative project called Peacebuilding Compared. He also works on business regulation and the crime problem. His best known research is on the ideas of responsive regulation and restorative justice. Reintegrative shaming has also been an important focus. Braithwaite has been active in the peace movement, the politics of development, the social movement for restorative justice, the labour movement and the consumer movement, around these and other ideas for 50 years in Australia and internationally. He was winner of the Law and Society Association International Award in 2017.

Valerie Braithwaite is an interdisciplinary scholar and professor of regulatory studies in the Regulatory Institutions Network, Australia National University (ANU). With a disciplinary background in psychology, her work focuses on the interplay between regulators and regulatees, the governing, and the governed. Her work addresses the ways in which individuals and groups engage with regulations imposed by government and other authorities in fields as diverse as caregiving, health, taxation, school and workplace bullying, work safety, migration, agriculture, child protection, charities and education. Braithwaite has served as an advisor on regulatory policy in areas of education, work safety, charitable organizations, immigration, taxation, aged care, and affirmative action. She served on the Australian Government’s ATO Cash Economy Task Force (1995-2005) and the National Skills Standards Council (2011-14). In 2013, with Kwong Lee Dow, she conducted a review of regulation in higher education for the Australian Government.