Philippine E-Journals

This article aims to provide an initial response to the question as to how states address the growing concern of transnational crime in a globalized environment. Recognizing this alongside other contemporary security concerns, policy makers and security planners reconceptualize their approach not only by enhancing law-enforcement strategies, but likewise expanding the role of the State and its government institutions and by going beyond the top-down approach of governance and shifting more to transnational cooperation. In Southeast Asia, initiatives to combat the threat of transnational organized crime and terrorism became an impetus for member countries to come up with an ASEAN Plan of Action to Combat Transnational Crime and for the Philippines to establish the Philippine Center for Transnational Crime under Executive Order No. 62 (1999). As these initiatives are commendable but somehow insufficient to address the problems of transnational crime, this paper argues that to address capacity gaps, states should consider the mixed public-private response as a policy prescription for managing transnational problems such as transnational organized crime. Supplementary to this, would be the enhancement of “transnational advocacy networks”1 to influence the interests and practices of the government. This would mean bringing together a diversity of nonstate actors such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and calls for the combined capabilities and resources by government institutions and the private sector. The paper likewise explores the possibilities of NGO and citizen group capabilities as partners to develop a new paradigm that will further increase international cooperation.