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.

This book is available for free in PDF format as Open Access from the individual product page at www.routledge.com. It has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Gale Burford is Emeritus Professor of Social Work, University of Vermont, and currently a visiting scholar of restorative justice at Vermont Law School. Until his retirement from University of Vermont in 2014, he was Director of the University-State Child Welfare Training Partnership and Principal Investigator for the Vermont Community Justice Consortium. Gale first came to university teaching and research in 1981 at Memorial University of Newfoundland with experience as a foster and group home parent, caseworker and social work practitioner, trainer, supervisor, manager and senior administrator in services for children, young people and their families. He has taught, carried out research and program evaluation activities and consulted with programs internationally mainly on social work in statutory settings including child protection, youth justice and corrections. His best known research focuses on the use of family engagement and restorative approaches at the intersection of child protection and interpersonal violence.

John Braithwaite is a professor at RegNet (the School of Regulation and Global Governance) at the Australian National University. Since 2004 he has led a comparative project called Peacebuilding Compared (see johnbraithwaite.com). He also works on business regulation and the crime problem. His best known research is on the ideas of responsive regulation and restorative justice. Braithwaite has been active in the peace movement, the politics of development, the social movement for restorative justice, the labor movement and the consumer movement, around these and other ideas for 50 years in Australia and internationally.

Valerie Braithwaite is an interdisciplinary scholar and professor of regulatory studies in RegNet (School of Regulation and Global Governance), Australian National University. With a disciplinary background in psychology, her work focuses on how relationships of hope, trust and distrust ebb and flow between regulators and regulatees with often unexpected outcomes for society. Her work encompasses a diverse range of fields including human services. On behalf of the Australian Government, Braithwaite has conducted reviews of regulation in higher education and vocational education. Her most recent report “All Eyes on Quality” addresses how regulation can build learning communities and incentivize high performance and innovation.