Global Facilitation Network for Security Sector Reform (GFN-SSR)

Security Sector Reform and Intergovernmental Organisations

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In virtually all security sector reform (SSR) programming and delivery, intergovernmental organisations (IGOs) have either led international community efforts or supported the lead provided by other actors. This background paper, published by the Geneva Centre for the Democratic Control of Armed Forces, summarises IGO functions, norms and obstacles to their effectiveness. Underdeveloped IGO oversight mechanisms to ensure that activities are conducted in a transparent and accountable manner reduce IGOs’ ability to contribute to long-term SSR sustainability.    

IGOs have the capacity to channel resources to reduce SSR transaction costs and can project legitimacy that individual states cannot. They can furnish a policy framework in which all member states have a seat at the table. They operate in a policy environment with checks and balances to restrain inappropriate member behaviour and provide continuity through member states’ electoral cycles.

Key norms guiding IGOs in SSR include the recognition that security forces are capable of delivering security and that the security sector represents a country’s various communities. IGOs include the United Nations, European Union, Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund.

The following are obstacles to cooperation among IGOs that call for coordination, shared cooperation modalities and an improved sense among personnel of the importance of working together:

• Many IGOs have limited experience working with each other.
• IGOs differ in organisational composition. There is a wide variation in terms of size and make-up of organisations’ memberships and their core mandates.
• IGOs tend to create similar programmes. Institutional mandates and programmes may overlap, which can lead to competition among IGOs.
• There are significant contrasts in principles and techniques of cooperation that IGOs have adopted, especially with regard to SSR.
• IGOs in general do not form informal SSR policy networks to increase their awareness of one another’s approaches and activities. They have yet to establish a dialogue on the way they work together in order to develop their inter-institutional links.

Given that SSR as a concept and IGO involvement in SSR are relatively new, the following policy implications for IGO involvement in SSR mark the IGO/SSR landscape:

• IGO approaches to SSR are very diverse. Differences of opinion of the presence of justice in SSR result in different definitions of SSR.
• IGOs often see themselves as being apart from the security sector. There is unevenness and fragmentation in IGO/SSR programme design and delivery. IGOs tend to focus on some but not all security services.
• IGOs lack necessary policy tools for effective SSR implementation and often exhibit a lack of administrative and personnel capacity for SSR.
• Available IGO resources are not always organised in such a way as to give effective SSR support in the field.

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