The article reports on a study of an intelligence management capacity building programme involving former Police Service of Northern Ireland officers mentoring members of the Afghan National Police. The study contributes to the formative evaluation of a policy transfer based on principles and practices developed in Northern Ireland. A short discussion of Afghanistan, policing, intelligence management and policy transfer is provided, before attention is given to the capacity building programme. The study is context rich drawing on qualitative data. Analysis draws on face to face interviews conducted with mentors working with the ANP during 2010-2012. Interview questions were broad in nature encouraging respondents to discuss implementation in their own terms. Respondents generally concluded policy transfer was viable but were in a position to provide a great deal of information on the Afghan context and how specific problems occurred during implementation of the capacity building programme. Cultural issues, corruption and resource constraints presented obstacles to the transfer as did the general absence of a bureaucratic basis for managing the ANP. Violence and physical geography presented rather less of a problem than was anticipated. The need to learn more about appropriate inter-personal skills in capacity building emerged as a significant finding. Such knowledge is currently undervalued in policy transfer within the policing sector.

This article compares of legal harmonisation with a view to facilitating police cooperation in the EU and Australia. It addresses the main processes of harmonisation and the parallel strategies of mutual recognition and the creation broad legal frameworks in relation to both systems. The legal analysis is complemented by interviews with practitioners in the field to assess the impact of legal initiatives on actual police cooperation practice. It is argued that both systems have developed distinctive strategies to promote police cooperation through legal harmonisation, but that Australia, due to its federal political structure, has more potential to achieve harmonised and even uniform legislation within its states. However, the strategies developed in the EU to promote cooperation without legal harmonisation and in particular broad legal frameworks have created a high level of regional practitioner initiative promoting bilateral and multilateral formalisation of cooperation strategies that cannot be observed in Australia. Both entities have hence developed distinct structures that might be relevant to the respective other system. This study is the first to compare the Australian federal system of cooperation with the EU.

In February 2008, the European Union (EU) launched its largest civilian crisis management operation under its Common Security and Defence Policy: the EU Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo (EULEX). It was to take over UNMIK’s rule of law functions and help pave the way for Kosovo’s European integration. Based on field research conducted in Kosovo from November 2010 until February 2011 and interviews with members of EULEX, this article examines one distinctive element of EULEX’s approach towards police reform: the programmatic approach. Although promising and based on principles of sound project management, this approach is faced with a number of challenges that are inextricably bound with international police missions and relate to the cumbersome process of recruiting a sufficient number of qualified personnel. However, the article contends that because of its distinctive character, EULEX’s programmatic approach may provide an alternative to the conventional manner in which international police reform is being conceived and especially composed.

Due to the complexity of crime phenomena and crime control, the extent and importance of collaboration and strategic partnership between security actors has notably increased during the last decades. These changes pose challenges to the police organization and management. This joint paper of three individual research projects discusses collaboration between the police and other authorities in Finland within these contemporary type of inter-organizational networks. The data was in each case collected via thematic interviews of the police and various other authorities. The focus is on information exchange. We analyse factors that promote information sharing, as well as factors that hinder it. We also consider the communication practices from the viewpoint of more profound collaboration and knowledge creation. Our research shows that police officers consider inter-organizational collaboration as a substantial part of today’s crime prevention, but the change in policing is still on-going. The collaboration between the police and other authorities is still largely based on concrete actions and specific cases. Deeper collaboration and knowledge creation on larger issues mostly takes place at the managerial level. In the future, a challenge is to bring knowledge creation practices into local collaboration and planning of concrete actions. Three individual studies enable a wide examination of inter-organizational collaboration in crime control. Focus on information exchange from the police point of view sheds light on the practices of everyday policing. The examples are from the Finnish police, but the results on mechanisms of collaboration can be applied to police work in other countries as well.