Measure for Measure: A People-Centred Approach to Tailoring Justice

The research bridges the growing international research discourse on people-centred justice, with practices on the ground in Victoria. People-centred justice shifts the focus in systems and processes from institutions to individuals—their needs, capabilities, and experience.

The exploratory People-Centred Justice Model at the heart of Measure for Measure was built from an analysis of what participating practitioners working in the 66 initiatives identified as underpinning success. The research identified common elements associated with effective practice across diverse service models, legal issues and populations. The model provides a structured but flexible way of understanding how initiatives operate and what contributes to their effectiveness. 

In the model, the elements practitioners identified as giving initiatives the best chance of success are organised across three levels:

Foundations

Organisational conditions:

• alignment with purpose and values
• leadership, trust, and culture
• the right people
• technology and digital infrastructure
• funding

Initiative level

How justice initiatives are designed and delivered:

• purposive design
• collaboration and coordination
• accessible and timely pathways
• embedding capability
• learning and adapting

Individual level

The way services engage with people:

• responsive person-led support
• provision of choice
• continuity and supported transitions

Trust is a consistent and unifying theme running through each level, a connective thread underpinning relationships between practitioners, organisations, communities, individuals, and the broader justice system.

Importantly, the model also recognises there is a spectrum of practice in the initiatives; from lighter-touch service, which enables greater reach; to high-resource, more intensive examples supporting a smaller number of clients, often with more complex needs.

The value of the exploratory model lies in creating a shared language and a common foundation to examine existing practice, guide the design of new initiatives, and, critically, structure the evaluation and research that will tell us more about what effectively works, for whom, and under what conditions.

The initiatives spanned a range of legal issues, populations and service models, and collectively reveal a shared commitment to tailoring responses to the needs and capabilities of individuals and communities.

Across the 66 initiatives, organisations were delivering services to a specific population or area of law, or both. Initiatives responded to diverse legal needs, including civil law, family law, and criminal matters; and supported Victorians facing financial disadvantage, experiencing or at risk of family violence, homelessness, migration challenges, and other forms of disadvantage. Family violence-related initiatives were most prevalent, with 71% of the initiatives targeting this area of law.

Analysis of the participant responses generated a set of common elements seen to underpin initiative success, which was used to build the exploratory People-Centred Justice Model. The elements in the model were common across problem types, demographics and services, and robust enough to apply to highly diverse service provision, from intensive, integrated assistance to high-reach online initiatives. Consequently, the model can be reliably used to support service design and evaluation, and is a useful starting point from which to test other hypotheses.

Nearly two-thirds of initiatives (65%) involved one or more external partners. Participants noted that complex and compounding legal matters often benefited from a more interdisciplinary response. Research participants described collaborations with health providers, other legal services, community organisations, and other allied professionals as central to successfully reaching the people the initiatives were designed to serve.

Trust surfaced as a central feature of success in the studied initiatives, a common theme at every level of practice: between practitioners and service users, between partner organisations and personnel, and across the broader justice system. The findings consistently pointed to the critical role of trust in shaping what is effective and sustainable. Participants described trust as something that needs to be built and nurtured.

Across the research participants, building capability at every level was seen as key to effective practice. A core element of the People-Centred Justice Model was building the legal knowledge, skills and confidence of the service users, as well as growing the expertise of practitioners and the capability of their organisations.

Many of the participating initiatives placed explicit emphasis on developing legal capability, as a dedicated focus and through interactions which helped change people’s relationship with the law.

Practitioners also described how collaboration enhanced their own skills, and those of partners, creating more effective and sustainable ways of working.

Four out of five initiatives (79%) identified funding and resourcing as the most significant barrier to initiative success. There's also a lack of robust, consistent outcomes data, which crimps potential.

There is growing interest in evaluation, outcomes measurement and evidence-based practice, but many organisations face constraints in resources, capability, and infrastructure to embed this practice. Without dedicated resourcing, including for staffing, data collection, outcomes measurement and evaluation, the evidence needed to assess what works, compare interventions, or build compelling cases for investment, replication, and scaling is thin.

Sustainability and scalability remain ongoing challenges. Even where initiatives are identified as effective, they often struggle to secure ongoing funding or expand beyond pilot stages.

Without a stronger evidence base and more coordinated system-level support, promising practices risk remaining confined to localised contexts.

Fragmentation remains a defining feature of the justice ecosystem. Much of the innovation and effort continues to occur in pockets, confined to individual projects and/or organisations. Systemic and effective strategies that target prevalent legal issues remain difficult to identify, let alone progress, and structural and funding constraints continue to limit the capacity to test, evaluate, maintain, and scale promising approaches. There are also limited mechanisms for sharing learning or coordinating efforts.

This fragmentation is reinforced by competitive and often short-term, project-based funding, which can discourage collaboration and frustrate long-term planning.