The practice of crime prevention: design principles for more effective security governance

South Africa has had a comprehensive crime prevention policy agenda for some time in the form of the 1996 National Crime Prevention Strategy and the 1998 White Paper on Safety and Security. Despite this, prevention has remained very much a second cousin within the South African criminal justice family, notwithstanding the fact that there is widespread agreement that it warrants far more attention. In this article we briefly review some of the principal obstacles to effective crime prevention. Our understanding of ‘crime prevention’ is a broad one – it involves simply asking the question: How can we reduce the likelihood of this happening again? This question opens up a range of preventative possibilities. Whether they are of a socio-economic, environmental or law enforcement nature depends on the nature of the (crime) problem. On the basis of our analysis, we propose three design principles to be followed if we, South Africans are to establish crime prevention as a central focus of our security governance. These design principles articulate what might be thought of as ‘best thinking’ rather than ‘best practice’

Local capacity policing

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Municipalities, politics, and climate change: an example of the process of institutionalizing an environmental agenda within local government

Political issues can influence the delivery of services and other goals, such as environmental sustainability, within municipalities. However, the influence of political factors on the institutionalization of environmental issues within municipalities has not been examined. We investigate these issues using a case study of a South African municipality that has made considerable progress in institutionalizing environmental issues (particularly climate change related) in the last decade, despite a change in political leadership. The presence of the following factors promoted the institutionalization of environmental governance: (i) political champions; (ii) networks between the municipality and other organizations, and dense networks within the municipality; (iii) benefits for the municipality from environmental actions. Political issues can enable the process of institutionalization (e.g. by stimulating innovation through political party competition) and also hinder it through political instability (which for e.g. disrupts patterns in champions and networks) and clientelism (which can cause environmental projects to be discontinued)

Governing-through-harm and public goods policing

Among scholars of law and crime and practitioners of public safety, there is a pervasive view that only the public police can or should protect the public interest. Further, the prevailing perception is that the public police predominantly governs through crime—that is, acts on harms as detrimental to the public good. We argue that governing harm through crime is not always the most effective way of producing public safety and security and that the production of public safety is not limited to public police forces. An approach of governing-through-harm that uses a variety of noncrime strategies and private security agents as participants in public safety is often more effective—and more legitimate—than the predominant governing-through-crime approach. We reflect on case studies of noncrime intervention strategies from the Global South to bolster the case for decoupling the link between the public police and public goods. A new theoretical framing needs to be pursued

Meditative Reflections on Nils Christie’s "Words on Words" - through an African lens

Like so much else that comes from the pen of Nils Christie, his "Words on Words" that have inspired this special issue, and with which it begins, have, as they so often do, inspired us to engage in a meditative reflection on his words and their implications for our thinking and practice. We have sought, through these reflections on the wisdom of Christie’s words, to better understand the security governance practices we have been studying, developing and, sometimes, promoting

Changes in Governance: A Cross-Disciplinary Review of Current Scholarship

The aim of this paper is to explore for a broader legal audience what researchers and theorists in a wide range of fields have made of the ferment in governance, and to identify important lessons for people interested in how to improve it locally, nationally, and internationally. We seek to link what lawyers are writing to a rich literature on governance theory and practice in other fields. Specifically, we address two main problems. The Description Problem poses the question of what is the most accurate, as opposed to the formal, description of where governance is located and how it is exercised? The Prescription Problem is how to reform or replace institutional forms and constraining norms that no longer perform the functions they once did. In the words of Roberto Unger, legal scholars tend towards a kind of “institutional fetishism” in matters of governance, behaving as if the only institutions that can deliver the goods of good governance are those that have done so in the past. The Prescription Problem in this light is a challenge to practice true innovation in governance

City of Cape Town Solar Water Heater By-law: Barriers to Implementation

The study of implementation has had tremendous importance for the study of policy. It opened up the black box of ‘after-a-formal-decision’ politics and demonstrated, among other things, that the political process continues all the way through to the final output of the policy process (Bardach 1977). It addressed the complexity of achieving policy goals, offered new insights into the importance of lower-level actors in policy, and attended to the effects that clients and extra-government groups had on the policy result (Schofield 2001). It became one of the most important sources for the development of new perspectives that tried to capture how policy processes cross the public-private divide, as evidenced by the new focus on governance (Rhodes 1997) or networks (Marin and Mayntz 1991). Implementation research has been particularly valuable in two somewhat contradictory ways

The tensions of cyber-resilience : from sensemaking to practice

The growing sophistication, frequency and severity of cyberattacks targeting all sectors highlight their inevitability and the impossibility of completely protecting the integrity of critical computer systems. In this context, cyber-resilience offers an attractive alternative to the existing cybersecurity paradigm. We define cyber-resilience as the capacity to withstand, recover from and adapt to the external shocks caused by cyber-risks. This article seeks to provide a broader organizational understanding of cyber-resilience and the tensions associated with its implementation. We apply Weick’s (1995) sensemaking framework to examine four foundational tensions of cyber-resilience: a definitional tension, an environmental tension, an internal tension, and a regulatory tension. We then document how these tensions are embedded in cyber-resilience practices at the preparatory, response and adaptive stages. We rely on qualitative data from a sample of 58 cybersecurity professionals to uncover these tensions and how they reverberate across cyber-resilience practices