Policing,good-enough governance and development: the evidence from Mogadishu |
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| Authors: | Alice Hills |
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| Affiliation: | Professor of Conflict Studies at Durham University where her research focuses on why police forces evolve as they do, and what explains their interaction with governments, militaries and societies. She is currently writing about Somalia's three regional police forces and their assessment of stabilisation and development |
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| Abstract: | Prompted by Grindle's identification of a next-steps approach to governance, this article uses the experience of Mogadishu's police force to consider the minimal conditions of governance required to address development-related challenges. At one level, the introduction of development-oriented governance is obstructed by the inability of international actors to influence local power brokers or mitigate the distrust and insecurity affecting daily life in a city such as Mogadishu. More fundamentally, the capacity of an approach predicated on contextually-based analytics is limited by its advocates' understanding governance and development in technical terms aligned to liberal goals, rather than as entrepreneurial opportunities reliant on negotiation and trust-based relationships. In practice, minimal governance has more to do with the stability needed for people to go about their everyday business in relative safety than with democracy or poverty reduction. For such reasons, the new diagnostics is a refinement of existing approaches, rather than a significant analytical advance. |
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