The UN Sustainable Development Goals address a number of criminological issues. This article accounts for why criminologists should contribute to this agenda in a way that might benefit the international development community. We acknowledge a heightened risk of crime in parts of the Global South but argue criminologists should cautiously embrace this agenda as a platform for achieving human and sustainable development outcomes. Supporting this agenda means assisting with the design, implementation and evaluation of projects that contribute to safe, just and sustainable societies. From a critical standpoint, it also means challenging harmful or inappropriate initiatives and resisting attempts to capitalize on this agenda for political gain. Both modes of engagement are informed by the values of ‘caution’, ‘scepticism’ and southern epistemologies. The article then proceeds to examine three areas where criminological research can make important contributions: building safe and just societies, eliminating gender-based violence and promoting environmental justice.

The aim of this article is to stimulate a critical dialogue about the implications of northern criminologists working to promote their research abroad. It accounts for why attempts to generate impact on an international scale may prove problematic and illustrates potential pitfalls by analysing the content and discourses featured in a toolkit for evidence-based crime prevention developed for the Inter-American Development Bank in 2012. The example prompts important and timely questions about the practical and discursive implications of northern attempts to influence policy and practice in the South. The article concludes by accounting for the importance of reflexivity as a strategy for limiting this harm-generating potential and for fostering discursively representative policy deliberations.

This article presents a historical analysis of the intellectual and institutional origins of the international community’s interest in the link between crime and development leading up to the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals in 2000. Drawing on a combination of documentary sources and interviews with long-time international crime policy insiders, it traces this interest back to the United Nations’ social defence agenda which emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War. We situate this agenda in relation to the Western aspiration to advance the Modernization project and reflect on how its shortcomings together with ideological, economic and geopolitical shifts at the international level contributed to the diversification of the United Nations’ crime policy agenda during the 1970s. These conditions collectively influenced the international community’s growing concern with crime as an existential threat to economic development during the 1980s. Our analysis highlights how this framing was reinforced by the rise of transnational organized crime as a threat to global capitalism following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was against this historical backdrop that the United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention was established to lead the international community’s fight against ‘uncivil society’. We conclude by reflecting on United Nations Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention’s tumultuous early years along with the omission of ‘crime’ from the Millennium Development Goals and suggest that these conditions, along with the adoption of the United Nations Conventions Against Transnational Organized Crime and Corruption, set the stage for the organization’s future advocacy for the inclusion of crime in the Sustainable Development Goals.

Development has long featured on the United Nations (UN) crime policy agenda; however, crime was only officially recognized by the international community as a global development priority following the adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. Adopting a sociological institutionalist perspective, this article sets out to account for how this recognition was achieved. We draw on interviews with senior UN crime policy insiders and documentary sources to analyse the efforts of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) to amplify awareness of the crime-development link following the omission of this issue from the Millenium Development Goals and amidst significant institutional and material pressures to strengthen its ties to the wider UN system. The article accounts for the political construction of the crime-development nexus and the important role that UNODC has historically played in facilitating global governance in this emergent and increasingly expansive sphere of policy and practice.

The empirical study of ‘policy transfer’ and related topics remains a relatively rare enterprise in criminology. Comparative studies of crime control policy tend to focus on broader structural explanations on the one hand, or more specific socio-cultural analyses on the other. By contrast, scholars from other disciplinary traditions – including political science, public administration, comparative social policy and human geography – have developed a vibrant body of empirical research into the dynamics and impacts of cross-jurisdictional flows of policy ideas, programmes and practices. This research provides helpful methodological pointers to criminologists interested in carrying out such work within the field of crime control. This article argues that the relative lack of empirical research on cross-national crime policy movement arises from two main factors: first, a generalised sense that the topic is of rather minor importance and second, a lack of methodological clarity about how such research might proceed. Such methodological barriers have arguably been further strengthened by major critiques of the political science frameworks of ‘policy transfer’ that have been influential in the field. We view cross-national policy movement as an important subject for empirical criminological inquiry, and consider extant methodological approaches and potential future directions, drawing in particular on wider work within political science and human geography. There is significant potential for criminologists to learn from, and contribute to, the methodological approaches deployed by researchers from other disciplines and thus enhance knowledge about the concept of policy mobilities.