Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

252
Towards safer and more secure cities
There have been
many examples of
projects that have
been implemented
in a locality because
they have been seen
elsewhere and have
been
copied…without any
understanding of the
extent to which the
apparent success of
the project was
dependent upon a
particular set of
local circumstances
The importance of
evaluation has come
to be more widely
recognized, and
more programmes
funded with public
money have
undertaken and
published
evaluations as a
condition of
receiving support
the territory of key members of the partnership? The
significance of this goes back to the issue of the motivations
of some partnership members. Are they there
primarily to make an unbiased contribution to the work
of the partnership, which includes the possibility of
change within their own organizations, or are they
principally there to defend their territories, which they
see as being threatened by the partnership process?
• Does the partnership genuinely add value to what was
done previously? Is this added value measurable, or is
there a widely held view that the partnership is mainly a
‘talking shop’ that adds very little in real terms?
These ten questions do not deal with every issue about the
work of partnerships; but they are derived from many of the
main criticisms that have been made about partnerships.
Consequently, careful consideration of these questions
should help partnerships to structure themselves and their
work in ways that help them to overcome many of these
criticisms. Underlying all of this is the question of commitment.
Are people truly committed to partnership processes
because they see them as having the potential to add value to
existing methods of working, even if this challenges their
existing political or executive territories? Or is this process
merely fashionable window dressing, which is not going to
be allowed to operate in challenging ways but is merely there
to give the impression of change and modernity? The will to
make partnership work for the benefits that it is capable of
bringing, rather than to confine it to the margins by refusing
to allow it to challenge existing orthodoxies and territories,
is of fundamental importance. This is, in particular, a
challenge to local authority leaderships since they often find
themselves in leadership roles in relation to the process of
partnership and thus need to set the tone for what the
partnership is and what it could become.
Adaptation to local circumstances, rather
than uncritical borrowing
There have been many examples of projects that have been
implemented in a locality because they have been seen
elsewhere and have been copied, sometimes without any
proper evaluation of the original project and almost always
without any understanding of the extent to which the apparent
success of the project was dependent upon a particular
set of local circumstances. It is easy, in one sense, to see the
superficial attractions of an approach of this nature – it may
appear to offer a quick fix, it certainly gives the impression of
action being taken, and it appears to short-circuit the learning
process. Many projects of this nature, however, have
proved not to be as successful as was hoped, and from this
experience has come a greater willingness to recognize that
borrowing what appear to be good ideas must be dependent
upon an understanding of the particular context in which
they were originally applied and a recognition of the necessity
to think carefully about how they might need to be
adapted to local circumstances. These circumstances might
be physical, political, cultural, resource or skills based, or of
many other types. Indeed, a simple list such as this underlines
the need for care when undertaking such activities
since any one or a combination of these activities could be
sufficient to make something that is apparently very effective
in one locality more doubtful in another.
A good example of this is the difficulty often experienced
in applying ideas from the developed West to the
developing world. For example, the British approach to
integrating planning for crime prevention within planning
processes may be seen as a useful model. But this has
happened over a long period of time in a planning system
that is now well established and in a police force that has
adopted CPTED as one of the areas where it will offer crime
prevention advice and in so doing will liaise with planners.
Even so, there are limitations in terms of what it has yet
achieved and there are areas of controversy between police,
planners and the development community that remain
unresolved. 41
There are also important issues about training, about
buy-in to this philosophy, and about how well connected this
thinking is with other policy drives. None of these things
would necessarily stop other localities from going down this
road or from trying to learn from the British experience. But
they all should cause people to stop and think carefully about
how to do this in their local context where the likelihood is
that many or even all of these characteristics may be different.
In particular, how to fit such an approach into local
planning systems given their stages of development, how to
develop capacity among planners and the police in order to
make something like this effective, and how to generate
acceptance of an approach of this nature given the other
priorities of planning systems are important questions that
need careful thought.
The importance of evaluation
A major review of crime prevention programmes in the US
that was published in 1997 concluded that ‘Many crime
prevention initiatives work. Others don’t. Most programmes
have not yet been evaluated with enough scientific evidence
to draw conclusions.’ 42
The situation has probably improved: the importance
of evaluation has come to be more widely recognized, and
more programmes funded with public money have undertaken
and published evaluations as a condition of receiving
support. 43 Nevertheless, the case for evaluation still needs to
be made because there is much that is done in this field that
is either not evaluated, is assessed in the most perfunctory
manner or is declared to be successful without much (if any)
evidence to support such a claim. The review by UN-Habitat
of the experience of delivering Safer Cities strategies in
African cities 44 not only reinforces this point, but also
focuses on the different kinds of evaluative activity needed
at various stages of the Safer Cities process. These are as
follows:
• at the stage of the initial assessment of the issues;
• when thinking about whether the strategy actually
seeks to address the issues identified as fully and as
effectively as possible;