The Local Government in Scotland Act (2003) introduced Community Planning as a statutory responsibility in Scotland. The main aims of community planning are described as “making sure people and communities are genuinely engaged in the decisions made on public services which affect them; allied to a commitment from organisations to work together, not apart, in providing better public services” (Scottish Executive, 2003a). For the police, this implied the need to create ‘local solutions to locally identified concerns’ (Strathclyde Police, 2004, p2) and to adopt a holistic approach to community safety which is problem oriented rather than organisation led (Crawford, 1998, p10). The specific and often local nature of problems put forward by communities, is therefore allocated a dominant role in determining the nature of the solution (Goldstein, 1990). This thesis has explored the implementation of community planning and associated community safety policies within a case study area of the former Strathclyde Police. The processes of partnership working and community engagement were found to be central to this approach. Meta- bureaucracy has been used to describe the partnerships activities and linkage to national outcomes presented in this thesis. That is to say, partnership working in this research does not represent a clear growth of ‘autonomous’ networks and governance arrangements as set out by Rhodes (2000) but rather an extension of bureaucratic controls. State actors such as the police service remain pre-eminent within increasingly formalised systems of partnership. Issues of voice, leadership and pragmatic culture were all important findings for the implementation of community planning in practice. However, an implementation gap was identified between the rhetoric and lived experience of those entrusted to deliver these policy goals. Compared to more recent developments of a national police service, issues of professionalisation, operational autonomy and reduction of effective local accountability – all supported police focus on enforcement led policing as opposed to partnership working and community safety more broadly.

The co-governance of crime and disorder and the involvement of the public within quasi-deliberative consultations of participatory forums to this end has been the subject of significant bodies of research (Clarke et al, 2007, Barnes, Newman and Sullivan: 2007). Such forums were applied to the micro-level of the neighbourhood during New Labour’s tenure in office in an attempt to reduce crime and disorder and to improve the responsiveness of service delivery. This has created situations whereby the governance of communities has been shifted to the micro-level of the neighbourhood (Stoker: 2004). Hughes and Edwards (2005) have proposed examining these micro-climates of crime and disorder co-governance in attempts to understand the importance of contextual factors in structuring of forms of community safety. My research utilises grounded theory to examine the impact of differing aspects of economic redevelopment within the context of the inner City, to both foster particular crime problems, and the typical solution-sets (Jones: 1998) utilised by practitioners in addressing them. In addition, I examine the structural role and impact of economic and cultural forces of urban redevelopment in creating and managing the ‘majorities’ (Stoker: 1998) amongst the public, and their perceptions of crime and disorder patterns. My research is conducted across three separate neighbourhood ‘localities’ within Plymouth City Centre with the intention being to understand how the individual particularisms of these areas contribute to the formation of different forms of community safety, and allied with it, subtly different forms of policing.

Magister Artium - MA / The study explored and examined new forms of social relations at the interpersonal, community and institutional levels that have emerged in the social organisation of Neighbourhood Watch Organisations in Parow West, Parow East, Ravensmead and Cravenby, in the Western Cape. The objective of the research was to understand how social solidarities generated through participation in neighbourhood watch organisations, institutional partnerships and working principles influenced and fostered the development of social solidarity, social integration and social cohesion of local communities and a new sense of nationhood. Towards the above end the study made use of a Functionalist perspective based on Durkheim’s concepts of mechanical and organic social solidarity. These functionalist concepts were used to identify and to examine the new forms of social cooperation and associations that emerged in the context of local neighbourhoods, and formally in neighbourhood watch organisations and partnerships engaged in residential property crime preventive measures. The study design which was employed to probe social solidarities in neighbourhoods and local communities made use of qualitative research methodologies. The empirical data was collected from in-depth, semi-structured interviews, as well as focus group discussions with all respondents belonging either to the neighbourhood watch organisations. Alternatively respondents were also drawn from related institutions involved in residential property crime prevention, such as the SAPS. And finally, the data was interpreted within a Durkheimean framework of social solidarity in order to reflect on the extent to which Neighbourhood Watch Organisations have played a significant role in building social solidarity, integration and cohesion in Parow West, Parow East, Ravensmead and Cravenby. This was ultimately done in order to establish an empirical basis to consider the extent to which South African society has moved from apartheid to liberal democratic values and practices from the ground up in Neighbourhood Watch Organisations.

The public service ethos (PSE) has spent thirty years - since the advent of New Public Management - in flux. In the late 1990s, partnership working appeared to offer an alternative to NPM, as part of a perceived shift to network governance. What impact has partnership and network governance had on the PSE? This study looked at two case studies of Community Safety Partnerships (CSPs) operating under different local governance conditions. It interviewed public servants within these CSPs on their experiences of partnership working, and perceptions around public service itself. What emerged is a picture of partial network governance, with each case study taking a different approach and yielding different structures and outcomes. While the public servants were professional and committed, they were loyal to their field of work and individual clients. In the recent decades, public interest and consideration of wider societal impact has been removed from everyday working; what remains is a vacuum. The neo-liberal view – that satisfying individual client need creates societal benefit when aggregated – has taken root. PSE is now a partial concept: it remains altruistic but without the core of wider, deeper thinking required. While network governance could ameliorate this trend, the partial and limited implementation of the concept by government means that it hinders PSE as much as it fosters it.

Over the past few decades, there has been a shift in crime control discourses, from an almost exclusive focus on traditional criminal justice objectives and practices, to attention to ‘community’ and a range of strategies that seek to prevent crime and increase safety. Overall, evaluations of the community mobilization approach to crime prevention and safety conclude that these initiatives have generally demonstrated limited long-term impacts on ‘crime’ and safety at the local level. Through the ‘what works’ lens, the limits of the approach have typically been attributed to implementation challenges related to outreach and mobilization, and inadequate resourcing. Through a more critical lens, using studies on governmentality as a starting point, this study examines the mechanisms through which crime prevention and community safety became thinkable as sites of governance in Canada, and more specifically within the Community Development Framework (CDF) in Ottawa (ON). To this end, I conducted an ethnography using a triangulation of data collection methods, including extensive fieldwork and direct participant observation within the CDF. The findings of this ethnography describe in detail how the CDF emerged and unfolded (from 2008 to 2010) from a variety of perspectives. These findings show that the CDF encountered a number of common challenges associated with program implementation and community-based evaluation. However, the lack of progress made towards adhering to CDF principles and reaching CDF goals cannot be reduced to these failures alone. The CDF highlights the importance of locating the community approach to crime prevention within its wider socio-political context, and of paying attention to its numerous ‘messy actualities’. These include the dynamics and repercussions of: governing at a distance and of the dispersal of social control; the neoliberal creation and responsibilization of choice-makers; relations of power, knowledge and the nature of expertise; the messiness of the notion of ‘community’; bureaucratic imperatives and professional interests; the words versus deeds of community policing; and processes relevant to resistance within current arrangements.

Over the past few decades, there has been a shift in crime control discourses, from an almost exclusive focus on traditional criminal justice objectives and practices, to attention to ‘community’ and a range of strategies that seek to prevent crime and increase safety. Overall, evaluations of the community mobilization approach to crime prevention and safety conclude that these initiatives have generally demonstrated limited long-term impacts on ‘crime’ and safety at the local level. Through the ‘what works’ lens, the limits of the approach have typically been attributed to implementation challenges related to outreach and mobilization, and inadequate resourcing. Through a more critical lens, using studies on governmentality as a starting point, this study examines the mechanisms through which crime prevention and community safety became thinkable as sites of governance in Canada, and more specifically within the Community Development Framework (CDF) in Ottawa (ON). To this end, I conducted an ethnography using a triangulation of data collection methods, including extensive fieldwork and direct participant observation within the CDF. The findings of this ethnography describe in detail how the CDF emerged and unfolded (from 2008 to 2010) from a variety of perspectives. These findings show that the CDF encountered a number of common challenges associated with program implementation and community-based evaluation. However, the lack of progress made towards adhering to CDF principles and reaching CDF goals cannot be reduced to these failures alone. The CDF highlights the importance of locating the community approach to crime prevention within its wider socio-political context, and of paying attention to its numerous ‘messy actualities’. These include the dynamics and repercussions of: governing at a distance and of the dispersal of social control; the neoliberal creation and responsibilization of choice-makers; relations of power, knowledge and the nature of expertise; the messiness of the notion of ‘community’; bureaucratic imperatives and professional interests; the words versus deeds of community policing; and processes relevant to resistance within current arrangements.

This thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach to the study of the impact that constructions of meaning and personal identity have upon the processes of professional decision-making, in the delivery of community safety services. The research draws upon the previous work undertaken in the fields of psychology, sociology, social anthropology, criminology and community safety. The research was composed of five separate studies. Study one was a Delphi exercise to determine consensus of meaning for different community terms in common usage for policy makers, practitioners and academics. The research was able to define consensual meanings for ten of the thirteen terms presented, including crime prevention, crime reduction and community safety. Consensus was not achieved for the terms community engagement, respect and quality of life and suggestions are made which may account for this result. Study two utilised repertory grids to investigate the ways that community safety professionals might construe the decisions that they have to make as part of their duties. Studies three and four utilised bespoke ISA/lpseus instruments, whose structures were informed by the results from Study Two. These instruments were used to further explore the construals and worldviews of a variety of community safety professionals through six process postulates. It was found that whilst an individual's initial job role or gender did not have significant impact upon their professional decision-making, the training that they had received in community safety and the time that they had spent working in the field did have a significant impact upon their professional decision-making. It was also found that the groups of community safety professionals differed in their attitudes towards those members of society who are the target of community safety activity. Study five involved the generation and piloting of a survey instrument whose various sections were designed to validate the findings generated from the previous studies, as well as providing further data on the decision-making processes of those working within community safety. The final chapter presents the Warren Person Process Priority (WaPPP) layered model of decision-making that was derived from the data collected to inform the current thesis. The outer Person layer is defined by the four-way typology derived from the Procedural / Free-form and Cautious / Adventurous bi-polar constructs of identity types that were identified from the ISA/lpseus studies. The middle layer of the model describes a number of different decision-making processes that professionals may follow when making a judgement or coming to a conclusion. The order of the processes was given by the results of the survey pilot. The central portion of the model presents a number of factors that may impact upon professional decision-making, determined from the ethnographic work that informed the ISA/lpseus studies. The order of these factors was determined from the preparatory data collection instrument that was used with the ISA/lpseus studies and confirmed by the results of the survey pilot. Suggestions are made for further research that may expand upon the results presented in this thesis. These include a larger version of the Delphi, with an international panel of experts; correlation of the ISA/lpseus instruments with other validated instruments for the measurement of personality, identity and decision-making and an expansion of the survey pilot.

Over the past few decades, there has been a shift in crime control discourses, from an almost exclusive focus on traditional criminal justice objectives and practices, to attention to ‘community’ and a range of strategies that seek to prevent crime and increase safety. Overall, evaluations of the community mobilization approach to crime prevention and safety conclude that these initiatives have generally demonstrated limited long-term impacts on ‘crime’ and safety at the local level. Through the ‘what works’ lens, the limits of the approach have typically been attributed to implementation challenges related to outreach and mobilization, and inadequate resourcing. Through a more critical lens, using studies on governmentality as a starting point, this study examines the mechanisms through which crime prevention and community safety became thinkable as sites of governance in Canada, and more specifically within the Community Development Framework (CDF) in Ottawa (ON). To this end, I conducted an ethnography using a triangulation of data collection methods, including extensive fieldwork and direct participant observation within the CDF. The findings of this ethnography describe in detail how the CDF emerged and unfolded (from 2008 to 2010) from a variety of perspectives. These findings show that the CDF encountered a number of common challenges associated with program implementation and community-based evaluation. However, the lack of progress made towards adhering to CDF principles and reaching CDF goals cannot be reduced to these failures alone. The CDF highlights the importance of locating the community approach to crime prevention within its wider socio-political context, and of paying attention to its numerous ‘messy actualities’. These include the dynamics and repercussions of: governing at a distance and of the dispersal of social control; the neoliberal creation and responsibilization of choice-makers; relations of power, knowledge and the nature of expertise; the messiness of the notion of ‘community’; bureaucratic imperatives and professional interests; the words versus deeds of community policing; and processes relevant to resistance within current arrangements.

Over the past few decades, there has been a shift in crime control discourses, from an almost exclusive focus on traditional criminal justice objectives and practices, to attention to ‘community’ and a range of strategies that seek to prevent crime and increase safety. Overall, evaluations of the community mobilization approach to crime prevention and safety conclude that these initiatives have generally demonstrated limited long-term impacts on ‘crime’ and safety at the local level. Through the ‘what works’ lens, the limits of the approach have typically been attributed to implementation challenges related to outreach and mobilization, and inadequate resourcing. Through a more critical lens, using studies on governmentality as a starting point, this study examines the mechanisms through which crime prevention and community safety became thinkable as sites of governance in Canada, and more specifically within the Community Development Framework (CDF) in Ottawa (ON). To this end, I conducted an ethnography using a triangulation of data collection methods, including extensive fieldwork and direct participant observation within the CDF. The findings of this ethnography describe in detail how the CDF emerged and unfolded (from 2008 to 2010) from a variety of perspectives. These findings show that the CDF encountered a number of common challenges associated with program implementation and community-based evaluation. However, the lack of progress made towards adhering to CDF principles and reaching CDF goals cannot be reduced to these failures alone. The CDF highlights the importance of locating the community approach to crime prevention within its wider socio-political context, and of paying attention to its numerous ‘messy actualities’. These include the dynamics and repercussions of: governing at a distance and of the dispersal of social control; the neoliberal creation and responsibilization of choice-makers; relations of power, knowledge and the nature of expertise; the messiness of the notion of ‘community’; bureaucratic imperatives and professional interests; the words versus deeds of community policing; and processes relevant to resistance within current arrangements.

Individuals with intellectual disabilities often lack access to appropriate sexual education, leading to negative impacts on their well-being and safety. Occupational therapists can play a vital role in addressing sexual education, health, behaviors, and community safety for these individuals. The Talk aims to empower school-based occupational therapists to become advocates and educators in the field of sexual health and behaviors, improving overall well-being and safety. This 6-hour presentation celebrates neurodiversity and provides up-to-date information and case studies to enhance understanding and promote strategies for working with young adults with intellectual disabilities. The program seeks to reduce the risk of sexual victimization and promote education and strategies for increased bodily autonomy and a better future. Plans for program implementation, funding, and evaluation of The Talk are included as well as dissemination of program findings to advance the occupational therapy evidence base.