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36Understanding Urban Safety and SecurityInformal communityinstitutions have acritical and centralrole to play inpreparedness toaddress futureproblems as much asduring immediateemergenciesDisasters offer anopportunity forinstitutional changenormally a male-dominated, top-down, technical approach ofinstitutions involved in managing safety and security. Inmany contexts, women have either been ‘ignored’ by theseinstitutions or ‘protected’, rather than allowed to be activeparticipants in the processes that directly affect them.In contrast, it is apparent that the weaknesses andlack of financial capacity of formal municipal, state or provincialinstitutions are important underlying contributors to thechronic condition affecting vulnerability of individualcommunities. These weaknesses are actually amplified bythe fact that they frequently refuse to recognize and/orcooperate with community-level institutions. The strategicquestion, therefore, is how this gap can be bridged tostrengthen urban institutional capacities, whether to reducecrime and violence, to regulate housing and land markets sothat people’s rights to secure tenure are honoured, or toanticipate and mitigate the impacts of disasters.This Global Report will suggest that each of thesethreats to urban safety and security represents a majoropportunity to reform and strengthen institutions. In thecase of disasters, this means not returning to the status quoante, but rather seeking new forms of representation,decision-making and accountability in formal institutions, aswell as the recognition that informal community institutionshave a critical and central role to play in preparedness toaddress future problems as much as during immediateemergencies. In a word, disasters may represent a politicaland economic opportunity for the poor. 51 This opportunityhas been amply demonstrated in the myriad efforts by disastervictims in Sri Lanka and India to use disaster recoveryefforts to address security of tenure issues.This insight has profound implications in developingan effective analytic and policy approach to the issues ofurban safety and security. For many years, international institutions,following national and local practices around theworld, took the position that responses to disasters were notthe right time to undertake institutional reform. They arguedthat victims had immediate material needs for food,medicine and shelter, and that the institutions best suited toproviding those services were existing institutions.Institutional reform or strengthening was viewed as amedium- or long-term goal to be addressed after short-termpriorities were met. The problem with this perspective isthat, in most cases, considerable responsibility for the disasterin the first place lay with the practices of existinginstitutions. It makes little sense to give them moreresources to distribute and to manage in ways that havepreviously proven to be ineffective. It is the classic case of‘throwing good money after bad’.Finding an effective and sustainable institutionalsolution to critical problems does not mean accepting thestatus quo ante as desirable or even as second best. Rather, asa growing body of case experience is showing – for example,in communities who survived Hurricane Mitch in Guatemalaand Honduras – disasters offer an opportunity for institutionalchange. 52As subsequent chapters will present in some detail,institutional strengthening covers a wide spectrum ofsubjects, from clarifying institutional mandates, ensuringbudgetary resources, improving personnel practices, buildingleadership, requiring accountability, improving processesof formulating policies and regulations, designing effectivework programmes, and sensibly allocating institutionalcapacities. With respect to each of the three threatsaddressed by this report, these institutional challenges havedifferent technical meanings and priorities. Their urgencydiffers from city to city and from country to country,depending upon existing local institutional capacities as wellas the significant threats to security. The critical questions topose are: what should be changed? How much time is there?Who is responsible for making change happen? Clearly, onesize does not fit all.Juridical framework of international lawA second pathway to social resilience is the emerging juridicalframework of human rights as elaborated upon in theinternational instruments cited in Chapters 5, 6 and 11. Inthe context of this Global Report, international law andemerging human rights mean different things in each of thethree challenges to urban safety and security. For example,in the arena of tenure security, emerging rights refer to therights of urban residents to protection from eviction in theabsence of prior alternative housing arrangements. What isnoteworthy and new is that the juridical framework ofhuman rights adopted at the international level – the processof establishing legal norms – is increasingly being applied tolocal urban circumstances, including in the areas of crimeand basic needs. This might also be applied in somecountries as the right to effective governance and delivery ofservices. The existence of human rights, therefore, canempower urban residents to ‘claim’ and/or defend theirrights when these rights are under threat. This changes thepolitical environment in which they live.While the outcomes of appropriate institutionalbehaviour addressing urban safety and security are criticaldeterminants of the impacts of hazards and risks of variouskinds, they also need to be understood as highly transitoryand dependent upon political circumstances at a particularhistorical moment. Institutional responses to urban crimeduring the term of one mayor may be effective and have anappropriate balance between prevention and punishment;but the next mayor can have an altogether differentapproach. It is therefore critically important to establishenduring norms of behaviour that can guide institutionalbehaviour and protect the citizenry over time. In this regard,the growing body of human rights laws relating to diverseaspects of human security should be seen as ‘emergingrights’, not yet fully acquired or even accepted in somecountries, but of growing importance.The concept of emerging rights is important becauseit signifies a process by which a ‘right’ comes to be recognizedas legitimate and judiciable in a court of law, or ascoined in several legal instruments: ‘the progressive realization’of various rights. This covers a wide and ever expandingrange of human behaviour across countries – for example,the emerging rights of producers of intellectual propertysuch as recorded music, or the emerging rights of prisoners