Articles


Research Report: Understanding Community Involvement and Engagement Withing Community Justice

Published 18/03/2009
Type Article
Author(s) Katharine McKenna
Corresponding Authors Katharine McKenna and Alex Culshaw, Senior Research Managers, ECOTEC
DOA
DOI

Community Justice attempts to achieve various outcomes. Extensive community engagement and involvement is one of these and the extent to which this is achieved can distinguish community justice as distinct from traditional justice models. This article presents the findings of a research project exploring community engagement within community justice through a series of models and testing these to improve validity; assessing uniqueness of community justice; and, supporting implementation and understanding of community justice elsewhere. Adopting a realist perspective (Pawson and Tilley, 2007) the research employed a literature review and innovative e-Delphi method. Findings from the research corroborate the veracity of proposed models and  demonstrate how they can be used to explore and understand community justice in different settings. Additionally several characteristics of community justice that can be classified as unique but highlight potential tensions are discussed