Global Report on Human Settlements 2007 - PoA-ISS

256
Towards safer and more secure cities
Many determinants
of crime and
violence are local in
context and are
better tackled
through local
interventions
Capacity-building at the local level
One of the most important tasks that partnerships and other
implementing agencies need to undertake as an early part of
the process of tackling crime and violence is an assessment
of the extent to which what they want to do might be limited
by the capacities of the relevant organizations and individuals.
This should be followed up by a programme designed to
address capacity limitations over a reasonable period of time.
Put differently, implementing organizations need to audit
the skills available to them in relation to what they want to
do and to put in place actions to tackle the deficiencies
identified. This may need to be seen as a process that will
take a reasonable amount of time; in the short term, there
may be limits on what can be achieved. The critical issue is
the need to recognize the relationship between what the
implementing body wishes to do and the human capacity
that is available to get this done effectively. The failure to
take cognisance of this partly accounts for why programmes
in this field sometimes struggle.
Discovering from an audit process of this kind that
there is a shortage of the appropriate skills typically raises
two types of issues. The first relates to resource – are the
resources available to bring in more people with the necessary
skills and experience? The second is a staff development
issue – can existing staff be helped in sufficient numbers to
develop the required skills? These are not mutually exclusive
alternatives, but they may well operate over different
timeframes, with the former approach probably being
quicker. Very often, the resources are simply not available
for wholesale programmes of recruitment in order to bring
in the required skills; as a result, for many organizations,
staff development is a necessary component of seeking to
develop new functions or to undertake new initiatives. A
judicious combination of bringing skills in from the outside
and improving existing staff capabilities is often the response
to this situation. But most organizations with limited
budgets would probably take the view that investing in staff
development is a better long-term option than relying on
imported skills, even though the latter, in the short term,
might enable action to be undertaken more quickly.
For example, the decision to pay more attention to
the principles of CPTED in managing new development and
in tackling the crime problems experienced by existing
development will require people in the architecture,
planning and police communities who are knowledgeable
about these issues and have practical experience of working
in these fields. Internationally, but not always locally, expertise
of this kind is available and can be brought into
organizations by various means in order to kick-start
programmes of this nature. One example of initiatives of this
kind might be relatively short-term international secondments
of skilled and experienced professionals. But
in-service training programmes can also help to develop a
cadre of people who build up these skills over a period of
time. Programmes that seek to link these two elements in
appropriate ways so that external expertise is used not just
to begin work in the field, but also to institute training
programmes that can then be expanded upon by their early
participants, may have much to offer in these terms.
Over time, activities of this kind can develop relationships
with the formal structure of skills and qualifications
development in a country so that they become part of its
more formal awards programmes, often through further or
higher education institutions or professional bodies. But it is
likely that the focus will be on the more immediate benefits
of capacity development. One of the most valuable learning
tools in this context is the initial work being undertaken to
implement programmes so that there are benefits from these
activities not just in terms of the specific achievements, but
also in the opportunities they offer in developing the skills of
those who either participate in these processes or observe
them at close hand. The kinds of skills that are important
here include not just direct hands-on skills, but also reflective
skills, so that people are able to think about what is
going well or badly, and to consider appropriate action as a
consequence.
It also needs to be acknowledged that capacity development
issues permeate the work both of local authorities
and of partnerships at all levels; thus, the potential scale of
this challenge may be daunting. To take just four groups of
stakeholders by way of illustration, the development needs
of different groups of professionals; partnership members;
the local development community and its various agents; and
members of community groups may all be different, not just
from each other, but also within each of these groups. It is
very unlikely that a partnership would be able to put in place
a single programme that could tackle all of these differing
needs at the same time. But what a partnership could do in
this situation is to acknowledge the nature and the extent of
this task, commit itself to addressing it over a reasonable
period of time, and make a start on what it is able to do
immediately. In making decisions on matters of this nature,
the partnership will want to take into account the benefits
that will ensue not just to its own immediate operations, but
also to the capacities of various stakeholders (including
community members and groups) to contribute more effectively
in implementing the overall strategy.
Improving capacity should be seen by partnerships
and other implementing bodies as seeking to establish a
continuous trajectory of improvement. In the UN-Habitat
Safer Cities Programme, this responsibility is often carried
out through the Safer Cities coordinator (who will also need
training for this role), who is able to draw on some training
modules that have already been developed by UN-Habitat for
particular issues. 49 The ability to do things such as this is one
of the real benefits of a programmatic approach because it
means that cities that have decided to undertake Safer Cities
projects can learn directly in this way from the accumulated
experience of Safer Cities work elsewhere.
Integrating crime prevention into urban
development
Many determinants of crime and violence are local in
context and are better tackled through local interventions.
The impacts of crime and violence are also to a large extent
local. It is therefore quite understandable that crime and
violence are increasingly becoming subjects of concern for