Some Heretical Thoughts on Security Governance

'Governance' is a word that is easy to use, fits today’s fashion for inclusive categories and is less loaded with assumptions than the traditional categories of politics, government, administration and law. In the development context, talking about good governance rather than government has certainly been useful for the same reasons that people have needed to learn how elections are not the full definition of democracy. But often, 'governance' is used too vaguely, in contexts where one should distinguish more precisely between, for example, elected and non-elected actors and between principles, policies and rules.

It is best, however, not to be too vague when criticizing vagueness. The presumably authoritative definition of 'governance' stems from a 1997 United Nations Development Program (UNDP) policy paper on sustainable human development:

Governance is "the exercise of economic, political and administrative authority to manage a country’s affairs at all levels. It comprises mechanisms, processes and institutions through which citizens and groups articulate their interests, exercise their legal rights, meet their obligations and mediate their differences."

This definition recognizes social groups and ordinary people as active players rather than mere objects or observers of governance, and it underlines that fairness and balance, not just efficiency, are part of the aims in view. It could quite easily be applied to regional or global, rather than national, affairs.

Nevertheless, while this definition of 'governance' does mention the economic duties of the governing authority, the language it uses corresponds to political process and does not fully take into account the powers and responsibilities of autonomous economic actors. This, of course, is an issue that could hardly seem more central to global security after the financial shocks of 2008.

Security governance needs a more penetrating and subtle approach that considers the linkage between economics and security and the role of private business actors in both. Before last autumn, one might have been forgiven for thinking that the issue of the private sector’s role in security was all about private military companies. But the global arms trade has caused more deaths than Blackwater could ever manage, and it has become apparent that non-state-controlled economic forces can have immensely deep impacts on security even without straying anywhere near the traditional military sphere.

There are many other ways in which economic crises impact security. Thus, a financial crash directly causes unemployment, social damage and resentment. These can lead not only to rapid political reversals but to new class and ethnic tensions, xenophobia, public disorder and even conflict. In the poorest countries the disruption of trade, tourism, energy and food flows can literally cost lives. There are also implications for environmental security: The crash may ease global warming through slower growth, but it might also fatally undermine the pressure to take corrective measures.

Similarly, the financial crisis has influenced strategic relations, from the cuts in Western arms budgets while China still has growth money to spend on its navy, to the role of the crash in ensuring the victory of a multilateralist and pro-disarmament US President. Prospects of widespread economic recession have reinforced a cautious, inward-looking approach to EU and NATO enlargement. Finally, there are obvious impacts on governance as such, with the sudden rise of the G20 and increasing calls for the UN to develop an Economic Council. The latter suggestion may be the first shot in a growing debate over the viability of the post-World War II division of global authority between the UN as a security arbiter and separate monetary and trade institutions.

How, then, can security policymakers be brought in touch and into synergy with their economic equivalents? In recent years, Western policymakers have woken-up to the need to build economic and trade factors into peacebuilding and reconstruction strategies for weak states, not least to avoid the evils of aid dependence. Logically, this also gives the same factors a role in conflict prevention. Even before the crash there was a consensus that the IMF and World Bank needed to be more aware of security consequences in their prescriptions for fragile economies.

However, the security sector reform (SSR) and disarmament, demobilization and reintegration (DDR) communities have not yet gone far towards integrating the macroeconomic, financial and commercial angles in their own work, even where the topics are so obviously linked as in the cases of military budget design and the arms industry. More than this, the developed West needs to cast aside double standards and re-import some of the same lessons into the understanding of its own security predicament. Questions of relative costs and returns, comparative advantages and added value, perceived equity and consumer confidence are crucial not just for the banking business but for comprehensive security planning, risk management and optimal response to emergencies in a modern society. Looked at from those viewpoints, much of what happened after 9/11 in the self-proclaimed war on terrorism serves as an excellent example of how things should not be done.

The financial crash has also dented confidence in the judgment and honesty of private business actors. It has led to tangible increases in government ownership and control of key financial enterprises, as well as to a wide consensus in favor of stronger market regulation. An interesting effect has been to remind people of the difference between productive industry and services and the financial superstructure built upon them, and to create more respect and concern for the so-called ‘real’ economy.

This is a timely recognition in itself, but only if it does not lead to anti-competitive behavior and the vindication of Putin-style economic nationalism. In Europe at least, whole sectors of the ‘real’ economy are now built and run on a transnational basis and should be guarded and stimulated at the EU level, if at all. One does not have to be a super-federalist to point out that national policies aimed at breaking up the single market, or (even worse) sabotaging a common EU front toward the crisis, are no healthy basis for the common foreign, security and defense policies that the EU has struggled to achieve.

Will today’s distrust of bankers lead to closer inspection of the role played by private actors in other fields essential for our security, such as energy, food, transport, communications, infrastructure and health (including the manufacture of drugs for pandemics)? Civil protection experts have long been aware of how dependent Western governments have become on private sector efficiency, crisis preparedness and cooperation in all these fields, let alone in the export control, knowledge transfer and safety aspects of WMD policy.

Yet few European governments have built systems of security governance designed to work in real time with the full range of responsible business actors, both for peacetime and emergency handling, at the local and national levels and in the diplomatic sphere for handling transnational emergencies. Typically, some government-business contacts, common standards and plans exist on a sector-by-sector basis, but without a real effort to check for consistency and synergy across sectors or to tackle the complexity of a multi-dimensional disaster engaging several branches at once. The same is true of the worthy efforts for Europe-wide internal security and civil protection being undertaken in various parts of the European Commission.

This is not to advocate the equivalent of state bailouts and takeovers in other fields of security-related business activity, even if any state could afford it. If the UNDP defines good governance as being about groups interacting in pursuit of their interests and the peaceful management of differences, it is a fair challenge for security governance to find the mixtures of regulation and self-regulation, of government monopoly, delegation and outsourcing, and of policy consultation and emergency collaboration that will optimize public-private collaboration for public safety.