Towards a contextualised understanding of youth justice policy-making: what, who and how?

Youth justice policy making has been conceptualised as a reductionist, linear and decontextualised process dominated by governmental actors producing static policy ‘products’. However, semi-structured interviews with a range of expert policy actors illuminated youth justice policy-making (YJPM) as a complex, dynamic social construction shaped through relationships across professional contexts. Analyses discerned coherence from chaos in YJPM contexts characterised by simultaneous stability-change, conflict-ambivalence, short-termism and precarity. YJPM contexts were constructed and experienced by experts working in governmental and non-governmental contexts as the relational and dynamic features shaping the mechanisms through which policies are made and operate over time at multiple different levels of the social system.