Systemic approaches and collaborative action for realizing community safety experiences from South Africa

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This is the ambitious vision for safer communities in South Africa in 2030, as laid out in the country’s recently released National Development Plan. The plan “recognizes that achieving long-term, sustainable safety requires an integrated approach focused on tackling the fundamental causes of criminality. This requires mobilizing a wider range of state and non-state capacities and resources at all levels and active citizen’s involvement and co-responsibility.”

This article looks at some of the challenges and opportunities regarding integrated approaches to community safety in South Africa and provides snapshots of three existing initiatives3 that attempt to give expression to the more systemic, multi-stakeholder and collaborative approaches called for in the National Development Plan. These examples were presented by a South African delegation to the German Congress on Crime Prevention Annual International Forum in Munich in April 2012, which formed part of a study tour led by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ). Although they are not intended to present a collective approach the case studies give a glimpse into what is being done at different levels. The article also offers some perspectives on the potential for the concept of integrated approaches and demands that such promising practices are more widely disseminated and replicated, which is one of the primary goals of the Inclusive Violence Prevention Programme implemented by GIZ on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).