What implications do different theoretical approaches to institutional change have for security sector reform (SSR)? How can evolutionary approaches be applied to SSR in practice? This paper from the Libra Advisory Group examines theoretical approaches to institutional change and their implications for SSR. It argues that an evolutionary approach to SSR can make the reform process more democratic and lead to transformations that are locally-owned and sustainable.
SSR has traditionally been dominated by top-down rationalist approaches in which projects and programmes entail defining a desired outcome and then working towards it. Such rationalist approaches underestimate the complexity of social processes and overestimate the ability of external reformers to understand and influence them. A rationalist approach to SSR involves designing reform programmes when local capacity to contribute is at its weakest, making the process inherently undemocratic. By contrast, the evolutionary approach to SSR involves giving security sector agencies the long-term capability and incentives to change in response to signals from society.
Evolution in the social world operates through four processes: variation, selection, retention and struggle for limited resources. Although it is impossible to predict or direct evolution, institutions can be enabled to become better ‘evolvers’. To do so involves:
- Setting the stimulating context, in which variation is encouraged. The evolutionary approach would encourage interaction to generate ideas and would be attentive to local reform initiatives, making variation more likely.
- Creating a selection environment whereby strategies can be tried out. The evolutionary approach supports increasing knowledge of the factors determining the success of security institutions, including informal constraints and people’s security concerns.
- Ensuring the retention of successful strategies through monitoring and feedback mechanisms. Retention processes can be imperfect. It is important to develop organisational capabilities to acquire, create, accumulate and exploit knowledge.
- Struggle over limited resources. For security providers, this entails struggle over not only financial resources, but also human resources and legitimacy.
Experience of SSR in Sierra Leone and Iraq demonstrates that the evolutionary approach to SSR can and does work in practice. In Sierra Leone, specialists on the ground avoided some mistakes by ignoring rigid instructions, while the absence of a well-defined strategy resulted in productive creativity. In Iraq, by contrast, planning based on fixed assumptions that were wrong led to ill-informed decisions and policies that were neither locally-owned, nor sustainable. Introducing the evolutionary idea into SSR programming would involve:
- Placing greater emphasis on variation – that is, introducing a range of new concepts and approaches that can be experimented with and adapted to local contexts. Programming would also focus on variation in the information that institutions receive.
- Ensuring that selection mechanisms operate effectively and that useful initiatives are identified, rewarded, sustained and replicated. This requires a focus on the dynamics of incentives, information, decision-making and resource allocation within an institution.
- Using planning techniques such as assessment tools and logical frameworks with far greater care and awareness of their limitations.
