ABSTRACT
Implementing sustainable community safety and security sector reform (SSR) in highly unstable and conflict-affected contexts is a significant and growing challenge. This chapter uses the experience of a form of SSR undertaken in the Jenin Governorate in the Occupied Palestinian Territories to highlight the range of shortcomings to be found in traditional top-down SSR approaches. It contrasts these with an alternative, bottom-up, community-based approach that uses outcome-based local crime prevention planning processes to build effective ‘partnerships’ for crime prevention with both formal security providers (e.g. security forces, executive authorities, parliamentarians, and governors’ offices) and informal security providers (e.g. civil society, media, and tribal and business leaders). The chapter highlights how such processes constitute a viable mechanism through which to create a safer community with stronger local leadership.
