Righting Past Wrongs Through Restorative Justice: Managerial Motivations for Collaboration

ABSTRACT Nonprofits are crucial to state collaborations as their embedded nature in communities allows them to gain the trust necessary to facilitate change and enhance strengths. As nonprofits collaborate with the public sector to tackle systemic challenges, understanding managerial motivations for collaboration and implications for social change is essential. By exploring innovative restorative justice policies designed to right injustices through investment in locally designed and community‐supported programs, we examine expressive and instrumental motivations as well as public service motivation for engaging in restorative state collaborations. Restorative justice, the idea that harm in a community should be reconciled rather than punished, is an approach frequently used by human service nonprofits and has recently received increased support through public policy. Through semi‐structured interviews of public managers and service providers, we ask what influences nonprofit and state organizations to collaborate in a restorative justice context. Our analysis shows that service providers pursue collaborations for resources, legitimacy, and to foster solidarity, advocacy, and social capital, while public organizations are motivated to gain expertise, build trust, enhance nonprofit capacity, and support reconciliation through restorative justice. This exploratory study enhances our understanding of the motivations for collaboration from both state and service providers' perspectives while acknowledging that nonprofit managers view these decisions through both instrumental and expressive lenses. Public managers focused on rational, affective, and normative purposes. We found the RJ policy context provided mechanisms to engender true partnerships, focusing on mutual dependence for success and enhancing their respective roles in the collaboration.