Environmental Restorative Justice: Activating Synergies

Abstract

In this concluding chapter, some of the main themes from the other chapters of this handbook are discussed. After a short introduction, a second section identifies the common thread between the authors of the book. What brings them together is the search for an innovative and encompassing framework to develop restorative justice—seen as a shared relational ethos—to the broad field of environmental crime and harm. In the third section, the concept of environmental ‘harm’ is explored, as it appears to be complex and multifaceted. Harm is looked at from a broad eco-centric perspective, including other-than-human beings and nature. This complex understanding of harm poses enormous challenges to restorative justice to come up with appropriate answers for ‘doing justice’. Section 4 deals with the way justice can be conceived as ‘ecological’ or ‘inter-species’ justice, taking into account epistemic challenges and its intergenerational dimension. The next section examines how existing legal systems deal with environmental injustices. Here, also the debate on criminalising ‘ecocide’ from a restorative justice perspective is highlighted. This all results in a sixth section, which looks at environmental restorative justice in practice: which stakeholders have to be involved or represented and how can a process of participation focusing on desired outcomes be envisaged? This chapter concludes by asking for a balance between the needed exploration of an innovative framework for eco-justice, on the one hand, and the development of a clear conceptual framework for environmental restorative justice allowing for practical applications, on the other hand.

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