It is now broadly recognised that in the long term there cannot be security without development, nor development without security. This briefing explains the concept and practice of ‘community security’, an innovative and effective approach that builds security from the bottom up by empowering communities, authorities and security providers to work together to find local solutions to the security problems they face.
This briefing also sets out how this approach can contribute to broader peacebuilding and statebuilding, for example, by linking local level results to national and regional reform processes and frameworks.
Key Findings:
- In different contexts, community security enables various stakeholders to collaborate and address the causes, consequences and risks of conflict, violence and insecurity, strengthening the conditions for sustainable peace.
- By connecting people more constructively with representatives of the state, including security providers and local authorities, community-based approaches to security can help improve state-society relationships and increase state legitimacy.
- Advocacy and engagement with local, sub-national and national actors is crucial to work to scale and embed community security approaches into wider policies and practices.
- Saferworld’s programmatic approach to community security revolves around the following five steps: 1) Preparation and conflict analysis; 2) Identify and prioritise security problems and needs; 3) Action planning; 4) Implement action plans and monitor; and 5) Evaluate, learn and plan improvements.
Recommendations:
Saferworld’s experience in community security over the past ten years has highlighted a number of lessons for successful programming:
- Provide capacity building support for each step of the cycle to the main actors involved. This includes supporting local civil society organisations and community security working groups to manage and facilitate the process and, in some cases, to support police and authorities to be more effective in providing the services they are responsible for. Saferworld emphasises from the onset that the rationale and purpose of a community security process is to identify local solutions to local problems, not to rely only on externally imported ones.
- The process is a constant trust building exercise. Significant investment is required to build trust first between the organisation supporting the process and the community, and then between the community, their security providers and authorities. A long term and flexible approach is needed to make sure trust is established and maintained among all actors at all stages of the process and beyond.
- From reaction to prevention: applying problem solving approaches. A key aspect of the community security process is to transform how security problems are dealt with – moving from a reactive approach that only deals with symptoms of the problems, to a preventive approach that addresses their underlying causes and prevents their recurrence.
- Scaling up: linking the local to national level. When appropriate, advocacy and engagement with local, sub-national and national actors can be crucial to embed community security approaches in wider policies and practices.
