Thinking Critically about Implementation and Context through the Accumulated Urban Security Knowledge Base

• In Event: POL Panel 26. Police interventions and their impact on crime and vulnerable groups.

Abstract

The central finding from an international review of crime prevention and urban security over the last 30 years is that the knowledge base that has been accumulated is not being implemented or applied in practice. Compiled as part of the pan-European IcARUS research project, the review highlights that policing and urban security interventions are too often poorly informed by research evidence, frequently suffer from implementation failure and rarely involve rigorous evaluations that allow suitable practice and policy lessons to be learnt. Here, it is argued that this disjuncture is not only a result of political preferences, short-termism, a reluctance on behalf of policy-makers to engage with the research evidence and a stranglehold of a punitive criminal justice orthodoxy, but also – crucially – a failure on behalf of the research community adequately to conceptualise, analyse and communicate the role of implementation and context in shaping the outcomes of specified interventions. Much of the research literature has prioritised the value of methodological rigour and a rigid hierarchy of evidence in its quest to understand ‘what works’, paying insufficient regard to the relational and process-based mechanisms that foster change. These have often come at the expense of our understanding of wider contextual factors and processes of human action in implementation, precisely those issues that are of great interest and value to policy-makers, practitioners and citizens. Context is often defined as a source of obduracy and interference in the smooth delivery of an intervention. Implementation, by contrast, tends to be seen as clearly defined, linear and finite. I will argue for a reformed conception of what constitutes knowledge and how it is best mobilised and deployed, as well as a refined understanding of what context means and how contexts shape and foster the conditions for interventions to generate successful outcomes for vulnerable groups.

Author

• Adam Crawford, University of York