Over the past decade, several European countries have established multi-agency work (MAW) structures and working processes for early and effective identification of individuals at-risk of radicalisation. MAW breaks down historical silos between agencies, and establishes new cooperation between different cities. Although practitioners and academics endorse the added value of MAW, they also pinpoint some prerequisites for building an effective collaboration, such as building trust, awareness, ethical and legislative guidance.
Three main challenges have been identified, namely:
- the lack of established policies and procedures for MAW in preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE);
- thorough evaluation research of MAW approaches, and;
- the barriers of information sharing.
When a project call appeared in 2019 from the European Union’s Internal Security Fund — Police (ISF-P), our consortium of four organisations felt it was the right time to pause and look at what local governments structurally needed, but lack the time and budget to work on.
The consortium was triggered by an evaluation of the Danish approach to radicalisation. In that report Dr. Ann-Sophie Hemmingsen indicates that “As long as there are no evaluations to inform the debate, it will remain open to assumptions, gut feelings and opinions that are not necessarily conducive to the development of an effective approach”. It became clear for our consortium that there was a need to look for methods to objectify that “gut feeling” and look at ways to monitor multi-agency approaches.
The idea gave rise to a project called ‘Evaluation and Mentoring of the multi-agency approach to violent radicalisation in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany’, otherwise known as ‘EMMA’. The project developed a combination of scientific and practice-based methods to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of MAW. The evaluation addresses the question “how” something might work, rather than whether something works. By understanding how MAW try to achieve their objectives and which processes are set in motion, the project explored what works under what condition.
During the research 18 MAW’s in three countries were observed, 45 qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with MAW participants and in each country a focus group was organised to further discuss the results in detail. In the mentoring strand of the project, a network of MAW coordinators was formed for each country. This network gradually build towards their ideal local MAW scenario.
By combining scientific evidence and practical knowhow, the project developed a self-evaluation tool for local multi-agency structures (EMMASCAN) and an e-publication. This tool can be freely used by all MAW professionals and is available on the EMMASCAN website. The tool is currently available in English, Dutch, French, and German. It consists of 7 modules and results in a report with several recommendations for the local approach.
Separate versions are provided for the participating countries. As a result, you can choose for a separate Belgian (Dutch/French), Dutch or German version of the tool. But even if you are not based in one of the participating countries, you can still complete the tool. An additional and neutral English version was added into the system, so anyone can make use of the tool when evaluating their multi-agency work in tackling violent radicalisation.
If you are interested in this project or want to know more about the EMMA project, please do not hesitate to contact maarten [dot] dewaele
vvsg [dot] be (maarten[dot]dewaele[at]vvsg[dot]be)