Addressing individual and community needs in the aftermath of campus sexual misconduct: restorative justice as a way forward in the re-entry process

ABSTRACT

Restorative justice is an approach to incidents of harm involving a high level of support and accountability for people who cause harm. To date, there is neither federal regulation nor commonly applied standard of care for re-entry to campus by a student who has been found responsible for sexual misconduct. Restorative justice re-entry circles represent a promising approach to the reintegration of students, taking into account the needs of the individual survivor, the student who violated policy, and the safety concerns of the campus community. Using a case study, this article outlines an example of a re-entry circle at a university in the United States and discusses the lessons learned with regard to concerns about the student’s mental health status, issues of race and racism on campus, and the role of a trauma-informed approach to circle practice in incidents involving a complex interplay of mental health, social status, and race on campus.     

Recasting Leadership Reform in Australian Local Government: A Typology from Political Theory

Changes to elected leadership in Australian local government have seen greater authority assigned to mayors in several jurisdictions. A Discussion Paper recently released under the auspices of the Australian Centre for Excellence in Local Government (ACELG) has recommended further reforms, arguing inter alia that mayors ought to enjoy a personal mandate and a stronger strategic role. This paper places these suggested reforms into context by developing a typology of local government leadership from political theory. We argue that this quadrilateral typology provides a critical portrait of recommendations for stronger leadership which, in this instance, have been transposed from two unitary systems of government (England and New Zealand) to the Australian federal system, without due consideration of the literature examining stronger mayoral roles. It is argued that caution should be exercised when redrafting legislation governing mayoral authority, a process presently underway in New South Wales (NSW).     

Accountability Practices in Public Child Welfare Services

The literature on child welfare caseworkers’ accountability practices is fairly scant. This article observes and unravels accountability in child welfare practices using interview data. Findings show that child welfare caseworkers (frontline workers) face multiple and conflicting goals and mandates imposed upon them by their organizations, systemic rules, procedures, their clients, and their own professional norms. There were conflicts among accountability sources and caseworkers manage accountability with multiple strategies. Most of the interviewees showed that they acknowledged the significance of accountability management. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Moral Values and Responsible Administration: Live Organs Transplant Systems in the United States and Germany

This article explores the unexpected ways in which recently introduced accountability mechanisms shape hospital administrators’ and physicians’ actions in Germany and in the United States. Though the reforms were designed to provide governments with more control over hospitals by increasing doctors’ and managers’ direct answerability to clients, this research finds that they fail to achieve these objectives by overlooking and clashing with existing behavioral settings within the medical sector. This analysis employs a newly synthesized theoretical framework at the nexus of ethics and accountability, as well as a comparative empirical exploration of the organ transplant systems in Germany and the U.S.     

Citizen’s Charter for Improved Public Service Delivery and Accountability: The Experience of Land Administration at the Local Government in Bangladesh

Improved public service delivery and accountability have increasingly turned out to be important issues in public sector management. In Bangladesh, there has been noteworthy progress, including the introduction of citizen’s charter since 2008. This article explores the contribution of citizen’s charter in improving public service delivery and accountability at the local government land administration, adopting a qualitative longitudinal study. Analysis of the findings reveals that most of the service recipients are ignorant about the charter even after 8 years of its introduction. The charters are mainly producer dominated and their grand rhetorics are far away to achieve in reality.     

What about Financial Sustainability of Local Government!—A Critical Review of Accountability,Transparency, and Public Assurance Arrangements in England during Austerity

Austerity strained the financial sustainability of governments and ability of policy-makers to address policy challenges, and so having appropriate accountability and transparency arrangements to assure the public they were getting value for money took on renewed urgency. Comparing and contrasting findings from a critical review of policy developments in English Local Government during the Conservative led coalition central government 2010–2015 with those from related studies on accountability and transparency more generally, the article offers key themes for practitioners and policy-makers seeking to build stronger democratic systems of governance that go well beyond the UK jurisdiction.     

Ambient accountability: intelligence services in Europe and the decline of state secrecy

Abstract

In the 1990s, judgments in the European Court of Human Rights concerning state surveillance forced many West European countries to introduce new parliamentary bodies and formal systems for accountability. Promising both greater transparency and lawful intelligence, these frameworks were then energetically rolled out to Central and Eastern Europe. Although officials boasted about their effectiveness, these formal accountability mechanisms have failed to identify serious abuses over the last decade. Moreover, the security regime in much of Central Europe still remains largely unreconstructed. The article argues that a robust culture of accountability cannot be conjured into existence merely by introducing new laws and regulations, or indeed by the increasing tide of media revelations about intelligence. However, it suggests that we are now seeing the rise of a more complex pattern of ‘ambient accountability’ which is at last challenging the secret state across Europe.     

Responsive planning in development interventions: consulting rights-holders in the Sanitized Villages programme in Kongo Central

This article empirically examines one of the most important causes of the non-implementation of human rights-based approaches to development (HRBAD): their alleged limited relevance for actors on the ground. The article argues that claims about local relevance can only be made after meaningful consultation with local rights-holders. Consulting local rights-holders in order to ensure responsive planning is not only relevant for HRBADs, but for development interventions more generally. The article presents new material on the Sanitized Villages programme in the Democratic Republic of the Congo to assess whether and how rights-holders are consulted, and identifies four mechanisms that can facilitate meaningful consultation.     

Is “good” resettlement policy unimplementable? Learning from advocacy in Cambodia

Accountability advocacy is an increasingly common approach to working with displaced communities. This article explores a resettlement scheme for an Asian Development Bank project in Cambodia in which advocacy interventions resulted in significant improvements in resettlement sites over the eight years of the project. Resettlement standards improved in some of the sites so much that they might now be called “islands of governance”, tightly ring-fenced from the otherwise limited support provided ordinarily to displaced or landless Cambodians. Given these extremes, the article considers whether “good” resettlement policy is implementable. It also argues that best practice resettlement principles, such as the requirement to minimise displacement – no matter how sensible or well-intended when designed at an international level – have the potential for negative unintended consequences in implementation. These impacts cannot necessarily be mitigated through formal monitoring, oversight, and technical assistance. Building on the knowledge already available, it identifies five considerations relevant to resettlement programmes as they continue to evolve.     

专家辅助人制度的问题与改革——基于我国侦查实践的研究

新《刑事诉讼法》设立的专家辅助人制度,将其适用范围限定在了庭审阶段。但根据我国目前的司法实践来看,刑事诉讼中的鉴定争议大都集中于初查或侦查阶段,因此部分侦查机关已将该制度应用于侦查阶段的鉴定程序中,并取得了较好的效果。由此看来,仅仅在庭审阶段建立专家辅助人,必然存在较多局限,而侦查阶段的鉴定程序建立专家辅助人制度势必具有必要性与可行性。因此,立法应根据诉讼实践,对目前的专家辅助人制度进行完善,以建立合理可行的侦查阶段专家辅助人制度。