Informal economies are not ‘ungoverned spaces’: there are informal security and justice providers, and often the state and elites are heavily involved. But how are security and justice being organized in the informal economy, for whom, and by whom? And who benefits? These questions were taken up at an Interactive Brainstorm of the Knowledge Platform Security & Rule of Law on November 23, 2015.

Three highlights

• Engagement with the informal economy means engaging with intricate power dynamics, blurred lines between state and non-state, licit and illicit: how will an intervention interact with these?
• Approaching the informal economy with a “criminal justice lens” is not productive: rather, investigate the development trajectories of security and justice provision, to find how actors can be induced to change for the better.
• Cases suggest there are certain tipping points, when informal systems change. Where are these tipping points, and what makes things go bad?

Common features

How security and justice are being organized, and to what extent this is a success, differs greatly from place to place: yet there are also common features. From gangs in Nairobi, to transport associations in Kampala, and heroin trade in Tajikistan, it is clear that the relation with the state matters for the success of informal systems. Often there are intimate relations between the state and informal (even criminal) actors, blurring the lines between state and non-state, licit and illicit. Similarly, it is clear that elites benefit disproportionately of these arrangements, with some cases suggesting a trickling up of microcredit from the lower to the higher echelons. These linkages were illustrated by a wealth of empirical case material from Mali, Tajikistan, Colombia, Afghanistan, Uganda, Rwanda, and Kenya.

But different trajectories

It is important to gain a better understanding of the development trajectories of different forms of informal security and justice provision, to understand how informal security and justice are organized, and how interventions may affect this. Many of these systems find their origin in informal economic activities. To what extent does this origin in profit creation, affect the inclusion of economically marginalized groups in these systems? Are there ways to make these systems more inclusive and egalitarian? Political involvement often critically affects these organizations, as shown by the rise and demise of the urban transport association UTODA in Uganda. Similarly, “mafia style agreements” with governments or the international community condoning certain activities, while prohibiting other types of activities, have a strong effect on the development of the informal economy and, consequently, security and justice provision.

And consequences for intervention

The informal economy has proven a remarkably resilient phenomenon, and thus requires humility in attempts to change this. Often the informal economy is approached with a “criminal justice lens”,  while actually, the informal economy is business as usual, representing a system of governance that precedes colonialism. Engagement means engaging with intricate power dynamics, and facing the question how an intervention will interact with these. Open spaces, competing networks, tipping points present potential entry points to influence the way informal economy and justice are organized. The intricacy of the linkages in the informal economy means that interventions should allow room for experimenting and learning.

These are some of the first answers: a more extensive summary report will become available in the coming weeks.The conversation also continues online: participants were invited to write blog posts which will be published on our website. You’re invited to join the conversation: share your comments, or write a new blog post.

Since 2000, the Malian justice sector has been subject to repeated cycles of reviews and ensuing donor investments, but so far without much result. After 15 years of “Groundhog Day” in Mali, with the same story over and over again, how to break this cycle?

On 2 November 2015,  organizations in The Netherlands working on rule of law in Mali came together to discuss the challenges and opportunities for rule of law programming, building on a discussion note analyzing the past years of rule of law programming in Mali.

Some key takeaways

• There is a need to map the customary system, to understand the landscape and political economy
• Focus on individuals that are interested in change, and how you can support them
• Social media have potential but are no silver bullet: tie this to other media that are being used by Malians
• Get rid of output thinking, move to a focus on learning instead of accountability, with rapid feedback loops

Four interlinked issues stood out and shaped the discussion:

1. There are still many questions about customary law

In conversations with justice officials, they indicate they work with informal authorities, and there also are provisions in the criminal code for this. Others deny the existence of customary law apart from Islamic law, and linkages are denied in the official narrative. While customary law may provide opportunities for justice sector reform, it also is an exclusive, elitist system. There is a need for a better understanding of what is there, analyzing the parties and interests involved.

2. What to do with blockages at central level: supporting the “Nelson Mandelas”

In focusing  on citizens and end-users, blockages at the central level are a challenge. Political parties are formed around leaders that have been around for decades, lack clear party programs, and are not responsive to citizens. Political will is strongly geared towards ethnic patronage systems. Nevertheless, there are individuals who are interested in change, who need support. But who are these “Nelson Mandelas”, and does the international community know how to support them effectively?

3. Corruption and the potential of social media to tackle this

Corruption is described as the number 1 problem, which decades of interventions have failed to adequately address. Though the international community often focusses on high-level corruption, it is the local, petty corruption that makes people suffer daily. Through social media, citizens have the potential to expose bad governance and corruption and put pressure on the government (see for example the Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi). It can also be used to collect data for advocacy – being mindful that is important to protect sources of information, and to verify the data.

4. Putting into practice the flexible, iterative, participatory programming that is needed

A citizen-centered approach, moving beyond the established partners (NGOs and the national government), requires flexible and participatory programming. One way to approach this is through problem-driven iterative adaptation (PDIA), with four core principles:

• Focus on locally defined problems and solutions
• Move away from short-term programs and fixed designs
• Focus on learning, not accountability, with rapid feedback loops in which donor and recipient can learn from each other
• Actively engage a broad set of actors throughout the process to make sure change is legitimate and viable.

Dutch Rule of Law program in Mali

The Dutch program in Mali takes the social contract between the government and its citizens as starting point. Citizens are the primary focus, to develop the justice sector from the grassroots. This takes time, considering that even the best performing countries need forty years to rebuild a functioning rule of law system. The process requires long-term commitment and realism about the risks involved, and what matters is the Malian process, development in mindsets, rather than infrastructure. 

Photo credit: the Kenyan activist Boniface Mwangi, by Alan Gichigi, www.alangichigi.com

Governance and accountability were put center-stage at the recent SCIENTIA meeting on the EU and Security Sector Reform (SSR), with two civilian experts sharing their experiences on EU missions in Ukraine and Afghanistan.

Flour and cake are like donor funding and security

Flour is not the cause of cake: similarly, donor funding and capacity development are not the cause of security. Security has to do with the strength of equitable and accessible institutions, and the relationship between the government and its citizens. This means accountability is at the heart of SSR, helping to enable institutions to become more powerful than the people who populate them.

Accountability does not begin and end with individual capacity: instead, political conditions have to be addressed. To address  this in SSR processes, the right expertise is crucial, in multidisciplinary teams capable of handling both the technical and political aspects. “We’re not asking a doctor to build a hospital…” – so can we ask a policeman to reform the security sector?

Lessons from research and practice

The two civilian experts and several researchers shared a number of lessons, highlighting the political nature of SSR:

• Team composition is crucial. It is important to balance expertise and diversify team thinking, to prevent tunnel vision. As a team, it takes time to develop a shared SSR language.
• Have the flexibility to respond to windows of opportunity: in order to position the mission and build credibility with local counterparts, and gain quick successes.
• Have realistic ambitions, keeping in mind SSR is a long-term process. But this does not exclude quick wins, balance the “hunger for early success”, with the long-term goals.
• Address different levels. In SSR missions, training is the easy part. The ministerial development process is more complicated, but should not be  ignored.
• Engage in political dialogue, both in the country hosting the mission, as well as in home countries of mission experts. Home governments and national interests have a strong influence: “you cannot imagine the impact of these on the mission headquarters”.

Reflections on The Netherlands and the EU

What is the added value of the European Union in SSR missions? And what role can The Netherlands play in putting the focus on governance and accountability?

• The EU has the most comprehensive package of tools at its disposal, of all western organizations.
• The Netherlands can play a role in encouraging the shift in focus from outputs to outcomes, sharing own experiences with programming in for example Burundi, and inviting other countries to share as well.
• To overcome the challenge of coordination between different missions, a solution may be for one country to second experts to all these missions, so that these can facilitate collaboration.

“The issue isn’t cleaning the trash, the issue is keeping the trash out of the river" said Rachel Kleinfeld at a lunch meeting at the Knowledge Platform Security & Rule of Law, to underscore that reform of Rule of Law is a deeply political issue. The complexity and interdependency of rule of law requires new thinking on how to do interventions, and on how to measure outcomes of non-linear processes.

A shift in equilibrium

Rachel discussed her work on programming for complex environments, and her new research on how countries with high levels of violence got better. Rachel emphasized that typical policy reform is not linear, and it takes a long time. When the problem is not a flaw in the system, but rather the system itself, a shift in equilibrium is required to a new system altogether. 

How countries with high levels of violence, get better

Rachel’s new research on how countries with very high levels of violence (including Honduras, Colombia, Georgia) succeeded in reducing violence, shows that this complex change does not primarily have to do with improvements in rule of law. Instead, in many cases, deals were made with the violent elites, leading to temporary improvement and vicious circles of state collusion and loss of legitimacy. In order to sustainably improve, the system had to jump to a new equilibrium, and three crucial things needed to happen simultaneously:

1. The bad actors have to misstep, losing allegiance of citizens
2. Citizens need to get together and be ready to make change happen
3. A politician has to seize the momentum to ride it to power

When this happens, the new power holder will have an overwhelming mandate to draw in power and change the system – with the risk that this may lead to new authoritarianism.

Planning, programming and measurement together, constantly

In order to work on security and rule of law reform in such complex environments, planning, programming and measurement should go together constantly, Rachel explained. Since interventions are often temporary, it is important to identify actors on the ground that will make this their life mission, to build a coalition of local people with deep knowledge, and plan the program together with them: in this way, planning is part of the action. 

A challenging shift in mindset

A lively discussion underlined the importance of short links between donors and local partners, a focus on fewer places of intervention, iterative and flexible programming and assessment, and long-term involvement. The discussion also brought out that it requires time to develop deep knowledge and short links. This means working in complex environments requires delegation of certain authority for making changes, to the people executing the programs. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ new approach in developing strategic partnerships is a way to deal with this. Still, changing the way of working requires a challenging shift in mindset, to start using theories of change as living documents, and not as alternative results frameworks, and to focus on measuring outcomes versus outputs. 

High on the policy agenda

The lunch meeting underscored that security and rule of law reform is a challenging process, and that developing new ways to measure the effects of investments in this sector is high on the policy agenda. These new ways should focus on learning, testing assumptions and doing justice to the challenges of working on security and rule of law, to counter inflated ambitions, and enable substantiated choices to focus long-term efforts on a limited number of cases.

Favelas in Brazil, high-risk communities in Trinidad, sectarian neighborhoods in Beirut, war-torn Mogadishu, and Nigeria’s second most populous city, Kano: all of these places host multiple actors making claims on the legitimate use of force. The complexity and geographic spread of this topic provided rich substance for a recent event on Plural Security in the City.

Governance is the key question

“In the African context, plural policing and plural security have always been the norm”: Etannibi Alemika (University of Jos) emphasized that plural security is not a new phenomenon despite the recent uptick. But traditional forms of governance previously active in regulating plural security appear to be waning. Who drives plural security, who controls it, who coordinates it, and what kind of interactions exist between actors? According to Dr. Alemika, these are the questions on which to focus future attention.

 Scope for cooperation, but also competition

In many contexts, policing is a lucrative business. This can lead to situations of cooperation, but also of competition. The power to enforce laws, hand out permits, and collect taxes attracts all kinds of political interests. Alice Hills (Durham University) illustrated how plural security in Mogadishu and Kano involves actors competing for scarce resources, where bargaining is central, and practices and behavior can be erratic. Bruce Baker (Coventry University) demonstrated a case of cooperation with the example of the national taxi drivers association in Uganda, who regulated a bus station in Kampala. In such contexts, it is not necessarily technical expertise that leads to the effective maintenance of order: “much of policing is essentially about social skills”.

Blurred lines between actors

A challenge for outsiders is that the boundaries between police and nonstate actors are very ambiguous , Alice Hills underlined. Similarly, Rivke Jaffe (University of Amsterdam) described a strong involvement of political parties in security provision in Beirut, raising questions as to whether security provision should be described as plural or hybrid. And even within the formal Brazilian police force, as described by Juan Salgado (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas), different entities behave differently according to the time of day or even depending on the side of a street.

So how to engage?

The day explored the consequences of engaging with plural security providers. Working with local arrangements is often championed as a good practice, but participants also raised concerns about moral relativism and a derogation of international standards. The highly political nature of security provision ensures that any reform or engagement will be complex and results will be defined by local dynamics. Some participants pointed to the need for more realistic narratives to set out the risks and challenges of intervention.

Selected takeaways

• Security provision is highly political and therefore engaging with security providers of any stripe requires careful approaches and a deep understanding of local power structures and how they are negotiated
• Boundaries between security providers, politics and the private sector are often blurred, and this powerful combination of actors can skew attention away from the needs and agency of citizens on the receiving end of security arrangements
• Though most security interventions focus on technical prowess and training forces, effective governance is more important for ensuring security arrangements are both effective and equitable

Key statements made during the day have been posted on Twitter, and now the conversation continues online. Participants were invited to write blog posts, which are being published on our website (see the first blog posts here). You’re invited to join the conversation by sharing your comments or writing a new blog post.

NWO-WOTRO Science for Global Development grants funding to seven research projects in the ‘Open call for evidence-based policy advice and tools’ within the Applied Research Fund of the research program Security & Rule of Law in Fragile and Conflict-Affected Settings. This Open Call aims to (develop tools that) provide new evidence-based insights in the underlying assumptions, feasibility and/or impact of policies on, or approaches for, security and rule of law in fragile and conflict-affected settings and unlock the knowledge for practitioner organizations.

The projects granted funding cover a variety of innovative approaches towards challenges of inclusive and hybrid security and justice provision, coordination and measuring in Burundi, Lebanon Afghanistan, Central African Republic, DR Congo, Kenya, Mali, Tunisia, and Uganda. The size of each project is about 100,000 euros, added up with over 160,000 euros in cofunding for the seven projects. All the projects will have a duration of six months.

New applications for the Open call for evidence-based policy advice and tools can be submitted for the last assessment round of 6 November 2015, as well as for the Call for Evidence-Informed Ideas within the Applied Research Fund.

The following projects will receive funding:

• Enhancing Local Peace Committees - facilitating stakeholder debate on the strategic choices involved in transitional justice in Burundi and DR Congo | Dr M. van Leeuwen - Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen  – The Netherlands. Local Peace Committees (LPCs) have become an important strategy to promote transitional justice, but it remains difficult to assure the involvement and leadership of local stakeholders. This project explores what the challenges are, and how local stakeholders can be better engaged in the strategic choices involved in supporting LPCs if decided to do so.
• Informing policy on plural security provision in urban contexts: Comparative insights from Lebanon, Kenya, and Tunisia | M.A. Price - Nederlands Instituut voor Internationale Betrekkingen Clingendael – The Netherlands. The project seeks to foster effective security and rule of law assistance by producing empirically-based, policy-relevant insights into how structures of local urban governance might interact with a plurality of local security providers in ways that deliver improved security outcomes for citizens.
• A Study of Monitoring and Evaluation Regimes and Statebuilding Capacity Building: the Case of Afghanistan | Mr K. Bush - University of York  - UK. The project aims to provide evidence-based recommendations and guidelines on how to nurture and harness Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) capacities within and between national and international actors, and to link them explicitly and systematically to the efficiency and effectiveness of statebuilding capacities of fragile states in conflict-affected contexts.
• Promoting coherence, coordination and complementarity in international support to the ICGLR’s response to conflict in Burundi and the Central African Republic | Mr V. Hauck MA  - European Centre for Development Policy Management  – The Netherlands. This project will identify practical ways to improve the way international support reinforces regionally-driven efforts. It will conduct desk and field research using political economy and conflict sensitivity analysis. Key outputs will be a policy brief providing guidance for good practice, a research report, a stakeholders' workshop and related dissemination activities.
• Urban refugee protection in Lebanon's hybrid security system: a research and action agenda | Dr M.N. Abi Yaghi - Lebanon Support  - Lebanon. This project will examine security measures applied in Lebanon in the context of the Syrian crisis and use evidence to inform policies on refugee protection and rule of law programming in hybrid security systems. The research will test the assumption that informal security actors fill a gap left by weak state institutions and include a comparative component with Jordan.
• Trialing tools for participatory gender analysis of conflict in Uganda | Dr C. Harris PhD  - University of London  - UK. There is limited understanding of how gender norms including both masculinities and femininities impact on conflict dynamics, including how they drive conflict, insecurity and exclusion. This project will develop a gender analysis of conflict methodology, building on existing best practices for participatory conflict analysis, academic methodologies and research on gender and conflict. Output will be a toolkit, a video and knowledge sharing events with stakeholders.
• Learning from Design in Mali: A Critical Review and M&E Framework for the CSO-led Human Security Strategy 2014-2015 | Dr D. Connolly  - The Hague Institute for Global Justice  – The Netherlands. Human Security (HS) adopts a people-centered approach to protect individuals by promoting peace and a holistic understanding of security, including legal, economic, personal, environmental and health dimensions. This project will address the main drivers and considerations for the HS strategy, and how the effects of this strategy can be measured on policy and practice? The project will employ a critical review as well as designing a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework for the HS strategy.