Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

254
Towards safer and more secure cities
Increasingly,
partnership
approaches have
emerged as the most
appropriate vehicle
for addressing
problems of crime
and violence
from their political arms. It is no coincidence in this context
that it was African city mayors who were instrumental in
taking the action that led to the establishment by UN-Habitat
of the Safer Cities Programme.
■ Role of local authorities
It is, however, important to recognize that local authorities
cannot do it all. Their powers and their resources are finite,
and other players in the local environment are simply better
at doing some things than local authorities. This is one of the
reasons why, increasingly, partnership approaches have
emerged as the most appropriate vehicle for addressing
problems of crime and violence. It is not necessary for local
authorities to be in the forefront of providing leadership for
partnerships, and there are many examples of respected
local players who are not from the local authority who do
this, and do it very well. But what is critical is that the local
authorities, whether playing leadership roles or not, are fully
supportive of the work of their partnerships. This means not
just making formal statements of support for specific
actions, but also being willing to align their own policies,
practices and budgets with the work of the partnership so
that this becomes part of their mainstream work, rather than
a marginal extra. If this means changes for the local authority,
they should be willing to embrace change if it enables
crime and violence to be tackled more effectively. The
relationship between the partnership that is tackling crime
and violence and the local authority is probably the single
most important relationship of all; and both the partnership
and the local authority need to recognize this for what it is
and to put the time and effort into this relationship to ensure
that it is an effective one.
■ The spirit of partnerships
It is worth emphasizing that partnerships are most likely to
flourish if their members take on board what might be
described as ‘the spirit of partnership’. This means that
partners commit to the enterprise, rather than to the
defence of their own territories; that everyone is treated as
an equal; that partners seek to promote the aims and objectives
of the partnership not just when they are sitting around
the table, but also in their everyday working and community
lives; and that contributions are valued according to their
quality and not their source. Many of the difficulties that
partnerships have experienced have probably arisen at least,
in part, because key partners have not fully adopted the
spirit of partnership, which inevitably lessens the likelihood
that the model will achieve its full potential. Thus, it is
important to acknowledge that partnerships are much more
than simple coordination mechanisms, and that they represent
an attempt to do much better through joint working
than individuals and organizations are capable of doing in
isolation. To maximize the likelihood of this happening,
however, it is necessary for all partners to recognize and to
commit to the spirit of partnership whole heartedly.
■ Structural problems affecting partnerships
There are two common structural problems affecting the
work of partnerships and the local authority’s contributions
to them. The first is the problem of the boundaries of jurisdictions,
and the second is the difficulties that national
governments can experience in committing to partnerships
that effectively require them to give priority to particular
localities. The problem of the boundaries of jurisdictions is a
common one that takes many forms. Typically, the local
government structure of large urban areas is a fragmented
one, which often involves several local authorities covering
different parts of the city that may well involve two tiers of
government each having responsibility for particular
services. Similarly, the basis on which the police operate
does not follow the same set of boundaries and is often
commanded at a broader spatial scale than that of the
individual city. It is also known that problems of crime and
violence do not respect local government or police administrative
boundaries. All of this can combine to present real
issues for the structuring of partnerships to tackle urban
crime and violence; realistically, it is unlikely that structural
changes to produce a much better set of boundaries will
solve these problems in the short term.
This situation requires a considerable amount of
pragmatism in many quarters and it can also test sorely what
has been discussed about the spirit of partnership. Often, a
practical way forward starts from an acknowledgement that
there may be more than one spatial scale that is appropriate
here, so that broad strategic issues covering the scale of a
whole conurbation may need different partnership structures
than interventions in individual communities
experiencing particular kinds of problems. This can make the
structure of partnerships in the area very complex, and it
almost certainly will raise issues about how the various
partnerships relate to each other; but it may well be a
partnership structure that is both achievable and congruent
with the real world situation. The need here is to reach
agreements about ways forward relatively quickly, and not to
let the difficulties of this process get in the way of what the
real task is, which is addressing the problems of crime and
violence. It is probably helpful to acknowledge that there is
no such thing as a perfect structure, and that what matters
most is getting something that works and that partners are
prepared to commit to as quickly as possible, rather than to
wrangle endlessly about alternative approaches.
The difficulty that governments often have with
committing to individual spatial partnerships is not usually a
political one, but is more often the problem that government
departments or ministries are simply not set up in ways that
enable spatial differentiation of this kind. So a typical
problem for them would be when they are asked to do
something that they regard as being inconsistent with their
general policies and practices, or when they are asked to
adjust their budgets in order to make more resources available
to a particular area than would normally occur. They can
also have real difficulties with how they are represented in
particular spatial partnerships since it can be genuinely difficult
for someone from one ministry to represent the full
range of governmental interests. It can be equally unhelpful
for people from several ministries to be in attendance, not
least because it tends to give the impression that government
coordination is poor and that these are people