Security and justice programming remains a critical part of international aid efforts. However, there are a number of challenges regarding how it can best be deployed.

A number of recent reviews and evaluations have noted deficiencies in current modes of support, including over-ambition, lack of clear objectives, a fallback on established but often ineffective approaches, a focus on quantity rather than quality of results and limited learning or sustainability. The security and justice is also becoming increasingly concerned – for better or worse – with transnational concerns related to people flows, organised crime and terrorism.

This report sets out three trends that are changing the security and justice space internationally, and examines what this might mean for programme implementation – drawing on an one-day workshop hosted by ODI in September 2015 as well as the ODI’s ongoing research on security and justice. The trends that this report identifies are:

• An increasing recourse to political economy analysis
• A heightened focus on problem-driven iterative adaptation approaches to inform programming
• The broadening of security and justice agendas to include transnational problems associated with organised crime, people trafficking and even terrorism as development issues.

Lisa Denney and Pilar Domingo