‘We assumed it would all be fairly straight forward’: Exploring early implementation of the recommendations of the Victorian Royal Commission into Family Violence

Over the past decade, royal commissions have been increasingly employed to address some of Australia's most pernicious and persistent problems. However, their recommendations often languish unimplemented. Research on why so many proposals fail to make it into policy and practice is divided. To explore the fraught road from recommendation to reform, this article analyses the early implementation of the recommendations of the 2016 Royal Commission into Family Violence (Victoria, Australia) from a relational vantage. To do so, this article brings attention to the under‐explored insights of advocates and frontline service providers and their relationship to post‐royal commission reform processes. Their relational accounts of corroborations, contradictions, and contestations move the contemporary predominate question of if implementation happens to more nuanced questions about when it occurs, what is implemented, who does it, and how it happens. The difficulties participants faced in the early implementation phase of the reforms demonstrate implementation alone is not a panacea for the problems royal commissions face post‐inquiry.Points for practitioners Improving the implementation of royal commissions’ recommendations requires centring the perspectives of those with specialised knowledge and who deliver related services. Recommendations to address challenging social problems need to be designed to evolve, often rapidly, to the constantly changing contexts that they are enmeshed within. An implementation for implementation's sake approach risks obfuscating the contestations of what royal commissions find and cementing potentially problematic initiatives.