Who gets to decide what? The field of community safety in England and Wales, France, and Italy.
This paper is part of a wider project that understands security as a governmental strategy and adopts a comparative perspective in order to analyse how its deployment has opened up new spaces for governing in three different countries: England and Wales, France, and Italy.
Itis based on an analysis of the legislative and administrative acts regulating the field of community safety in each country, specifically for England and Wales: Crime and Disorder Act 1998; County-wide community safety agreements (for county councils), Community safety partnership plans and strategic assessments (for unitary authorities and metropolitan boroughs), Police and Crime Plans (for 41 police areas in England and Wales plus Greater London); for France: National and departmental plans for the prevention of crime and delinquency, national legislation on local security contracts; for Italy: Security package,regional laws for the promotion of integrated systems of security, security pacts.
The analysis will focus on two dimensions. First, it will look at what the rules of engagement are as dictated by national authorities and on how strategic priorities, rules for funding and for assessment are laid out by relevant authorities in each country. Second, it will map the networks that these provisions also establish to produce and govern security. Bringing together these two strands of analysis will make it possible to identify participants to these networks, to highlight who gets to decide what at which level of government and, finally, to see how priorities are established and then change over time.
These results will deepen our understanding of the field of community safety in three ways. First, they will contribute to an empirically based understanding of what community safety means in different constituencies, and how this definition is the result of negotiations going on between distinct actors at different spatial and political levels. Second, they will shed light on how community safety networks are shaped, with particular attention to the direction and strength of ties. Third, and of particular relevance in a comparative perspective, they will provide evidence as to how, if at all, specific institutional configurations, solutions and discourses have spread and adapted to other contexts, either within or across nations.
Francesca Menichelli
British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow
Centre for Criminology
University of Oxford
Two keywords:
- comparative research
- community safety partnerships