ABSTRACT
While there is a recognition that recovery is a process that takes place over time and is both personal and unique to each individual, there is increasing awareness that effective reintegration and sustainable recovery requires acceptance from local communities and from a range of statutory bodies, such as housing services and employment regulation. Excluded and marginalized populations, including those suffering from addiction problems, require not only specialist care and support, but effective pathways to reintegration into communities for recovery to be holistic and stable. This is a central component of what has been termed by Granfield and Cloud (1999) as ‘recovery capital’ and refers to the sum of resources available to support effective reintegration. Using the case study of gambling treatment services, primarily in the UK, the chapter will outline models for supporting and sustaining change involving models of regulation of service delivery. Recovery capital is used as an organizing principle for governance and regulation in addiction treatment—including the partnerships of peers and helping professionals in building and sustaining recovery in communities. The resulting frameworks and models are used to support and ensure quality systems that enable the building of trust and confidence between stakeholders. Our particular focus is on the role of regulatory systems in creating strengths-based approaches to prevention and treatment, and on constructing models for building social and community capital as a core part of specialist delivery. The concept of regulatory capital is introduced as a systems approach to trust and relationship building between regulators (who in the gambling industry in the UK are also the funders), those who deliver services and those who engage with those services in a multi-party model of governance. However, we will argue that the community is a key ‘fourth element’ in building bridges to community resources and is a key stakeholder in strengths-based and developmental regulatory models.
