Do Urban Security Measures Work? Effectiveness, Policy Functions, and Democratic Accountability

Rationale and aims

Urban security policies are increasingly evaluated through an apparently straightforward question: do they work? Over the past two decades, advances in experimental and quasi-experimental methods have substantially improved our capacity to estimate whether interventions reduce crime, disorder, fear of crime, or other intended outcomes. This evidence-based turn has strengthened criminological research and public policy by providing increasingly credible answers to questions of policy effectiveness.

Yet effectiveness alone does not exhaust the evaluation of public policy. Research on policy success has long distinguished between the achievement of stated objectives, the processes through which policies are designed and implemented, and their wider political consequences. Policies may achieve their formal objectives while producing unequal effects, redistributing authority, generating unintended consequences, or affecting legitimacy and democratic accountability.

Urban security provides a particularly important field in which to reconnect these perspectives. Security measures are simultaneously crime-control instruments, governance arrangements, and political choices. Their consequences may therefore extend considerably beyond the outcomes they were originally designed to produce. This concern also connects to the long-standing debate between experimental and realist approaches to evaluation, particularly regarding the role of context in understanding what works, for whom, and under what conditions, as well as the extent to which findings can be transferred across different settings.

This special issue seeks to bring evidence-based criminology into closer dialogue with political science, public policy, public administration, urban studies, socio-legal scholarship, and related disciplines. Its aim is to develop a more comprehensive empirical understanding of urban security policies by examining not only whether they achieve their stated objectives, but also how they are implemented and governed, whom they benefit or burden, what political functions they perform, and what consequences they have for democratic accountability.

Themes and research questions

Contributions may address one or more dimensions of policy success. We particularly encourage research that connects rigorous evaluation of effectiveness with questions of implementation, governance, institutions, political dynamics, distributional outcomes, or democratic accountability.

a) Program success and policy effectiveness

·       Under what conditions do urban security measures reduce crime, disorder, incivilities, or perceived insecurity?

·       How do effects vary across places, populations, institutional settings, and time?

·       Do interventions prevent harmful behaviour, displace it, or merely make it less visible?

·       What distributional consequences accompany policy effectiveness?

b) Process success, implementation, and governance

·       How are urban security problems defined, what theories of change or other explanatory accounts connect particular policy instruments to their intended outcomes, and how are these accounts empirically examined?

·       How do implementation, organisational capacity, institutional context, and underlying mechanisms shape policy effectiveness, and with what implications for the transferability of findings across settings?

·       How are security policies adapted, transferred, or translated across cities and countries?

c) Political success and democratic accountability

·       What political purposes do urban security measures serve, and how are they connected to electoral competition, crisis management, or claims of governmental responsiveness?

·       How do security policies redistribute authority among elected officials, police organisations, administrative agencies, private providers, and civil society?

·       How do security interventions influence legitimacy, institutional trust, democratic accountability, participation, and subsequent policy preferences?

·       What institutional, political, or policy-design features insulate urban security measures—and the governments or organisations responsible for them—from blame, contestation, or policy reversal?

These questions are indicative rather than exhaustive. We welcome contributions that develop other empirically grounded approaches to understanding the multiple dimensions of urban security policy.

Scope and methodological orientation

The special issue adopts a global comparative perspective on urban security policies. It welcomes research from diverse regions and institutional settings, with particular interest in comparisons that reveal how policing traditions, systems of government, legal frameworks, welfare arrangements, evaluation capacity, and political incentives shape both policy effectiveness and broader policy functions.

We welcome empirically grounded contributions from criminology, political science, public policy, public administration, sociology, urban studies, geography, socio-legal studies, and related disciplines.

Different dimensions of policy success often require different forms of evidence. Questions concerning policy effectiveness may call for experimental or quasi-experimental designs, whereas questions concerning implementation, governance, political consequences, or democratic accountability may be better addressed through qualitative, comparative, interpretive, or mixed-methods approaches. The special issue therefore welcomes methodological pluralism grounded in research designs appropriate to the questions being investigated.

Conceptually oriented contributions may also be considered where they are systematically grounded in empirical evidence, comparative cases, or the development and application of analytical frameworks for evaluating urban security policies.

Approaches may include experimental and quasi-experimental designs, process tracing, interviews and ethnography, survey research, comparative and interpretive policy analysis, systematic reviews, and mixed-methods research.

The special issue

The special issue is expected to comprise approximately ten substantive articles plus an introduction by the guest editors.