What is it about?
This chapter describes a multi-year research project conducted with an Australian government partner, the Environment Protection Authority (EPA) Victoria. Traditionally, environmental regulation focuses on enforcing rules and issuing penalties. This project explored how restorative justice, an approach that prioritises repairing harm and rebuilding relationships, can be used instead. The authors spent years interviewing nearly 200 staff members and over 50 community and industry stakeholders, observing their daily work and running a pilot project. The authors looked for what they called 'turning up the restorative dial'. This means finding small, practical ways to make regulatory work more inclusive and focused on healing the damage done to both the environment and local communities.
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Why is it important?
While restorative justice is commonly used in schools or the criminal courts, its use in environmental regulation is pioneering and still relatively rare. This work is timely because protecting the environment requires more than just laws; it requires 'flexible, imaginative and innovative' ways to encourage people to take responsibility for their actions. This research is unique because it provides a practical checklist for future researchers and government agencies. It demonstrates how a large bureaucratic organisation can shift its culture from one of simple social control to one of active social engagement, ensuring that those impacted by pollution and other environmental harms have a direct voice in how that harm is fixed.
Perspectives
As researchers, we believe that you cannot study restorative justice without being restorative in your own approach. This means the research was not just about collecting data, but about building deep, trusting relationships with the people inside the EPA. One of the most inspiring parts of this journey was discovering 'restorative champions' - staff members who were already using these values in their work by listening deeply to communities and finding creative solutions to environmental problems. We hope our reflections on being humble, flexible and attentive to the needs of practitioners will encourage others to imagine a more relational and restorative future for environmental protection.
Felicity Tepper
Australian National University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Researching Restorative Justice in an Environmental Regulatory Organisation, December 2025, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1163/9789004729827_015.
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