Security and justice programming in fragile and conflict-affected situations often remains technocratic, siloed, and insufficiently attuned to context, despite more nuanced thinking in recent policy documents. How can policy be implemented more effectively? This report summarises discussion at an expert meeting hosted by ODI in November 2012. The report outlines challenges and summarises emerging recommendations. Key issues identified as requiring further thinking in order to improve security and justice outcomes are: organisational features of donors and their implementation processes, the politics of research and evidence, and the content of security and justice work. In addition, interesting new approaches by development agencies are noted.
There is international consensus that, in peacebuilding and statebuilding, the provision and quality of justice and security are critical to resilience and legitimacy in state-society relations. Yet, translating policy into practice poses many challenges in terms of content, levels and modalities of engagement, prioritisation and sequencing. In addition, crosscutting issues include:
- Integrating sector-specific expertise with in-depth country knowledge.
- Security and justice as fundamentally political components of the social compact.
- A need to ‘work politically’. How this is understood affects programming implementation.
- Keeping the state in sight – connecting the local and national levels.
Aspects of the policy content of security and justice work need further consideration and interrogation – not least in relation to the wider statebuilding agenda. The purpose of international interventions, the security and justice outcomes they aim to support, and the socio-political dynamics that they are embedded in often remain insufficiently considered. It is important to:
- Clarify objectives of security and justice programmes, while acknowledging multiple agendas and trade-offs.
- Spend time considering the robustness of the theories of change underpinning programming.
- Develop understanding of the root causes of conflict or violence, and how legacies of violence shape perceptions of justice and security needs.
- Work with the grain to understand and capture what works well locally, and what does not, but be clear about the objectives of working with non-state/informal actors and mechanisms.
- Focus on end users, but do not confuse this with promoting only societally focused solutions to security and justice provision.
- Reflect on how different modes of justice and security provision reveal the nature of state–society relations.
The results agenda raises questions about how to measure impact that is meaningful and relevant, and the role of evidence and research in informing how results are captured and defined. Reconciling ambitious objectives, the need for realism in terms of what is possible and attributable to internationally supported interventions, and what is measurable as an indicator of meaningful change, are major challenges. Key points identified are to:
- Draw more on end users’ perspectives.
- Be clear on how evidence (and which evidence) can best inform programme design and decisions on priority areas that are relevant to context. Research and evidence should be used more strategically to identify entry points and relevant modes of engagement, not to showcase policy choices.
- Consider the type of evidence that is relevant, and the value-added of methodological and disciplinary pluralism and of different sites and modes of research production.
- Separate out monitoring and evaluation. The former can contribute to maintaining programmes’ flexibility and relevance; the latter can assess the programme against longer-term objectives.
- Share research findings and facilitate platforms of exchange.
In relation to process and practice, donor organisations’ operating procedures, career incentives and human resource capabilities, and the domestic political environments in which they are located, condition security and justice programming on the ground. It is important to:
- Better understand the political economy of donor organisations.
- Better integrate political/diplomatic work with programming cycles to ensure alignment between the political and the technical.
- Build up the capabilities of country office staff to work more strategically in navigating the political dynamics of security and justice work. This requires balancing sector specialism, country expertise and politically nuanced governance work that is rooted in awareness of political context, developing and sustaining relationships with relevant networks and identifying opportunities for effective action.
- Improve the ‘connectedness’ between different programming and implementing processes and actors.