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Current Practices Present Opportunities for Improvement

• Many security and justice stakeholders support improving U.S. Government coordination, and some have achieved success in designing effective performance benchmarks with foreign partners. There are also opportunities — often underexploited — for improving coordination among other actors in the region, such as the United Kingdom.
• Many partners are interested in building more effective and professional security and justice sectors. While this does not equate to allowing imposition of U.S. standards on partner forces, it indicates that opportunities exist to help partners professionalize their own forces in their own ways.

These Opportunities Do Have Some Obstacles

• Ongoing U.S. security interests frequently threaten to constrain reform initiatives.
• Despite many efforts to improve these partnerships, there often exists a temptation to continue "business as usual" approaches, rather than rock the boat.
• Given the variation in these relationships and the challenges in predicting partner nation reactions to change, U.S. efforts to exert leverage on partners in a heavy-handed way could be politically dangerous.
• There is sometimes a lack of incentives to improve the integration of U.S. Government activities or to improve coordination with other actors in a region.
• Congressional interests and expectations can lead to a siege mentality among policy-makers and planners, thus reinforcing a natural aversion to risk.

The United States faces a unique set of challenges and opportunities in strengthening security and justice sector partnerships in the Middle East and North Africa. Against the backdrop of the Arab uprisings, the U.S. government has issued policy guidance relating to foreign assistance more broadly and security sector assistance in particular. RAND researchers analyzed potential new partnership models that could help implement this guidance, simultaneously strengthening security and justice sector cooperation and promoting reform across the Arab world and beyond. They devised the Enhanced Partnership Planning Model, which focuses on improving collaborative planning, rather than on using assistance as leverage to require partner nations to do what the United States wants. The model serves as a flexible framework that could support tailored, rigorous SJS planning by U.S. and partner nation stakeholders. This framework can support both policy-makers and program managers as they seek to implement new policy guidelines that integrate elements of accountability and reform while continuing to advance core U.S. interests and equities in a rapidly evolving regional context.

• Chapter One

  Introduction

• Chapter Two

  What We Know About U.S. Partnerships and Partner Characteristics

• Chapter Three

  Applying New Partnership Models

• Chapter Four

  Recommendations for Implementing the SJSP Approach