Restorative justice as a pathway to hope

• Pages: 527-529
• Author: Nigel South

RESTORATIVE JUSTICE AS A PATHWAY TO HOPE

Nigel South

Emeritus Professor of Sociology and Criminology, University of Essex, UK

In recent years, oods, res and cyclones have raged around the world in

ways that signal the increasing threat and harms of global warming and climate

change, features of the age we now call the Anthropocene (or, as some prefer,

the Capitalocene). Southeastern Australia and the Amazon Rainforest have

burned, coasts of India, Bangladesh and the USA have been battered by winds,

and parts of Europe have felt the force of oods - and so on. According to Dryzek

and Pickering (2018: 58), in this “disrupted Earth system”, the “very existence

of some low-lying Pacic island states is threatened by sea level rise, yet it is

overwhelmingly emissions produced in industrialized states that have caused

the problem. The Anthropocene not only reveals new sorts of injustice but also

intensies pre-existing injustices.” This point is emphasised by Forsyth et al

(2021: 18) who observe that “Environmentally destructive practices continue

to disproportionately affect the poor and disenfranchised as well as more-than-

human spaces and lives”. So, familiar questions emerge: What is to be done?

How can such injustices be remedied?

There have, of course, been many critical responses to these various issues

and challenges: raising general awareness, employing new (and old) legal and

criminological tools, reporting and prosecuting cases of environmental crime,

and promoting ideas like ecocide, responsibility and reparation (Higgins et

al, 2013; Pali and Aertsen, 2021). However the current system of governance

is weak and dependent on models of deregulation and voluntary compliance

(based on the belief that the market will provide effective and efcient remedies)

and legislative-balancing-acts (where agencies tasked with encouraging rule-

compliance are also charged with prosecuting and penalising offenders) (South

and Brisman, 2012). In addition, systemic problems of regulatory capture (where