Partnerships for safe cities: Community-safety initiatives in cities in the Netherlands and Belgium

Abstract

Local governments and the police collaborate for decades with citizens and civil society organizations in order to keep cities safe and livable. This chapter focuses specifically on the growing number of partnerships in the Netherlands and Belgium. On the one hand, the development towards more active participation of citizens and civil society organizations is driven by urgency: local governments and the police are not able to address the major challenges they are confronted with on their own, without citizens/organizations taking responsibility as well. On the other hand, the development is also driven by more ideological reasons: in both the political and societal debates emphasis is put upon ‘active citizenship’, with citizens having not only the right to consume public services but also the (moral) obligation to actively contribute to the service delivery process. However, do these partnerships actually contribute to safety and as such livability? This chapter presents the wide variety of partnerships that exists within the Netherlands and Belgium, and reviews the positive and negative implications mentioned in the literature.