There is a growing consensus that security needs to be approached just as much from the perspective of protecting individuals and communities from violence, as from the degree to which defence spending crowds out development expenditure. It is important to understand the composition of the security sector as a whole.
Aiming to provide practical guidance for DFID governance advisers and country programme managers considering how to support the security sector, these guidelines set out the key actors but focus more narrowly on the military, paramilitary and intelligence services as well as the civilian structures responsible for their oversight and control and the related institutional machinery that manages the security sector. The various chapters explain the involvement of other donors and UK government departments, diagnoses the situation and considers how to design an intervention. Chapters 5 to 11 look in more detail at the seven main areas identified as likely entry points for reform.
Important conclusions include:
- To help recipient governments develop a wider reform strategy and to strengthen political support for change, it is important to take a comprehensive view of the overall reform process. Reforms must be set in the wider context and start with an understanding of what the particular security sector is for. However, caution must be exercised where the military is entrenched in the overall fabric of the state or where a civilian government is relying on it to maintain power
- Security sector programmes will generally need to address two sets of issues: The quality of governance and technical competence. Reform on one front but not the other is unlikely to work. The answer is to set reforms internal to the security sector in a wider reform programme that strengthens the appropriate instruments within the civilian policy sectors
- Entry points for reform need to be chosen according to local circumstances. However, the guidelines have identified seven key areas: (1) Building public awareness and engagement; (2) building strategic planning capacity; (3) strengthening legal and constitutional frameworks; (4) strengthening civil oversight mechanisms; (5) strengthening financial management systems; (6) facilitating war-to-peace transitions; and (7) improving human resource management.
The sequencing of reform may well be difficult where reforms are politically sensitive or the regulatory framework is weak. In many cases, the starting point may be to address problems outside the security sector, relating to wider questions of administrative capacity and political governance. With the military often being the most developed of national institutions in many situations where security is compromised, the main political challenges are identified as:
- Disengaging the military from politics and other non-military roles
- Redefining security roles and creating a civilian policy-making role so that civilian policy sectors can contribute effectively to the formulation of security policy
- ‘Re-professionalising’ the military, and ensuring its restructuring and demobilisation suits the new political environment
- Managing relations with donors to ensure that international assistance is consistent with national needs and priorities and does not undermine national policy-making processes.
