Security Partnerships in France

Since the 1980s, France has adopted a range of institutional arrangements and policy tools to promote the development of security partnerships. Despite the many successive national programs to structure and facilitate horizontal collaboration at local level, local security partnerships are struggling due to a series of obstacles that hinder cooperation and coordination within current frameworks for implementation. Nevertheless, there are some French localities – particularly in large urban areas – in which local security partnerships are becoming stronger, more deeply rooted, and more diverse, even though significant local variation persists. We explain how such partnerships have been able to emerge, organize, and institutionalize themselves, as well as how they transform the police agencies involved. We show that security partnerships are one of the sole drivers which encourages the French police forces to move towards embryonic forms of knowledge-led and problem-oriented policing.