Research Team
Project Overview
The Crime and Justice Policy Lab and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) share a common priority: finding effective and socially productive ways to reduce crime and violence—particularly among young people.
Over the last eight years of working with government and community-based organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean, CJP has found there is often a mismatch between researcher incentives and the needs of our local partners. To address this gap, CJP developed the Community Collaborative Action-Research Model, which it then employed on a United States Agency for International Development (USAID) project working with over 240 organizations in the Eastern and Southern Caribbean (ESC). The model is based on the insight that to effectively promote evidence-based prevention policies and programs, it is essential to build local capacity to use and generate new evidence. Rather than simply looking for existing extraordinary opportunities to conduct research, the research community needs to actively work with community partners to get them to the point where such research is possible.
This project applies a collaborative research approach to build the capacity of regional ESC bodies and national partners in Barbados, Grenada, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. Our activities align with CariSECURE’s overall goal of strengthening evidence-based decision making for citizen security and are guided by the following key objectives:
- Assess organizational capacities, management practices, and readiness to change of CariSECURE 2.0 partners responsible for reducing and responding to youth crime.
- Strengthen the data collection, management, and analysis practices of target agencies in Barbados, Grenada, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines.
- Support the launch of national crime observatories to promote community-led and evidence-based crime prevention and reduction efforts.
