Organised Crime, Development and the Potential Unintended Consequences of Interventions: Lessons from Research & Practice

This paper reviews existing evidence on the scale and nature of the impact of serious and organised crime on development. It builds on existing work, most notably by the Global Initiative against Transnational Organised Crime, to map the negative impact of serious and organised crime (SOC) on development goals. It builds on and strengthens our understanding of this existing evidence base by updating, consolidating and where possible quantifying the impact of serious and organised crime on key developmental outcomes, to strengthen the case for the consideration of SOC in development activities and inform prioritisation of effort. It also expands the scope to consider the potential positive and stabilising impacts of SOC in development contexts, in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of these relationships and better understand and manage potential second order effects/unintended consequences of efforts to tackle SOC. The paper goes on to present a case study of organised crime in Ghana to illuminate the importance of gaps in our knowledge of these potential unintended consequences. The paper looks at the web of political, business and criminal interests, including both licit and illicit activities, that embed corrupt actors within both formal and informal networks, often creating much needed jobs while simultaneously feeding ongoing instability. It considers cases where a lack of clear public/private and licit/illicit splits mean that effectively fighting organized crime could have important negative unintended consequences. This includes in more challenging environments than Ghana where serious and organized crime can, at least in some ways, have a stabilizing effect in the short term. By better understanding these complex relationships and the ways that licit and illicit markets are connected, the paper suggests new areas for research that may help us move away from unhelpful law enforcement and criminal justice responses, with their negative consequences on both stability and development, in order to develop more pragmatic, politically informed ways of tackling these challenges in a way that are more likely to ‘do no harm’.