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256Towards safer and more secure citiesMany determinantsof crime andviolence are local incontext and arebetter tackledthrough localinterventionsCapacity-building at the local levelOne of the most important tasks that partnerships and otherimplementing agencies need to undertake as an early part ofthe process of tackling crime and violence is an assessmentof the extent to which what they want to do might be limitedby the capacities of the relevant organizations and individuals.This should be followed up by a programme designed toaddress capacity limitations over a reasonable period of time.Put differently, implementing organizations need to auditthe skills available to them in relation to what they want todo and to put in place actions to tackle the deficienciesidentified. This may need to be seen as a process that willtake a reasonable amount of time; in the short term, theremay be limits on what can be achieved. The critical issue isthe need to recognize the relationship between what theimplementing body wishes to do and the human capacitythat is available to get this done effectively. The failure totake cognisance of this partly accounts for why programmesin this field sometimes struggle.Discovering from an audit process of this kind thatthere is a shortage of the appropriate skills typically raisestwo types of issues. The first relates to resource – are theresources available to bring in more people with the necessaryskills and experience? The second is a staff developmentissue – can existing staff be helped in sufficient numbers todevelop the required skills? These are not mutually exclusivealternatives, but they may well operate over differenttimeframes, with the former approach probably beingquicker. Very often, the resources are simply not availablefor wholesale programmes of recruitment in order to bringin the required skills; as a result, for many organizations,staff development is a necessary component of seeking todevelop new functions or to undertake new initiatives. Ajudicious combination of bringing skills in from the outsideand improving existing staff capabilities is often the responseto this situation. But most organizations with limitedbudgets would probably take the view that investing in staffdevelopment is a better long-term option than relying onimported 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 tothe principles of CPTED in managing new development andin tackling the crime problems experienced by existingdevelopment will require people in the architecture,planning and police communities who are knowledgeableabout these issues and have practical experience of workingin these fields. Internationally, but not always locally, expertiseof this kind is available and can be brought intoorganizations by various means in order to kick-startprogrammes of this nature. One example of initiatives of thiskind might be relatively short-term international secondmentsof skilled and experienced professionals. Butin-service training programmes can also help to develop acadre of people who build up these skills over a period oftime. Programmes that seek to link these two elements inappropriate ways so that external expertise is used not justto begin work in the field, but also to institute trainingprogrammes that can then be expanded upon by their earlyparticipants, may have much to offer in these terms.Over time, activities of this kind can develop relationshipswith the formal structure of skills and qualificationsdevelopment in a country so that they become part of itsmore formal awards programmes, often through further orhigher education institutions or professional bodies. But it islikely that the focus will be on the more immediate benefitsof capacity development. One of the most valuable learningtools in this context is the initial work being undertaken toimplement programmes so that there are benefits from theseactivities not just in terms of the specific achievements, butalso in the opportunities they offer in developing the skills ofthose who either participate in these processes or observethem at close hand. The kinds of skills that are importanthere include not just direct hands-on skills, but also reflectiveskills, so that people are able to think about what isgoing well or badly, and to consider appropriate action as aconsequence.It also needs to be acknowledged that capacity developmentissues permeate the work both of local authoritiesand of partnerships at all levels; thus, the potential scale ofthis challenge may be daunting. To take just four groups ofstakeholders by way of illustration, the development needsof different groups of professionals; partnership members;the local development community and its various agents; andmembers of community groups may all be different, not justfrom each other, but also within each of these groups. It isvery unlikely that a partnership would be able to put in placea single programme that could tackle all of these differingneeds at the same time. But what a partnership could do inthis situation is to acknowledge the nature and the extent ofthis task, commit itself to addressing it over a reasonableperiod of time, and make a start on what it is able to doimmediately. In making decisions on matters of this nature,the partnership will want to take into account the benefitsthat will ensue not just to its own immediate operations, butalso to the capacities of various stakeholders (includingcommunity members and groups) to contribute more effectivelyin implementing the overall strategy.Improving capacity should be seen by partnershipsand other implementing bodies as seeking to establish acontinuous trajectory of improvement. In the UN-HabitatSafer Cities Programme, this responsibility is often carriedout through the Safer Cities coordinator (who will also needtraining for this role), who is able to draw on some trainingmodules that have already been developed by UN-Habitat forparticular issues. 49 The ability to do things such as this is oneof the real benefits of a programmatic approach because itmeans that cities that have decided to undertake Safer Citiesprojects can learn directly in this way from the accumulatedexperience of Safer Cities work elsewhere.Integrating crime prevention into urbandevelopmentMany determinants of crime and violence are local incontext and are better tackled through local interventions.The impacts of crime and violence are also to a large extentlocal. It is therefore quite understandable that crime andviolence are increasingly becoming subjects of concern for