Publications

School books and learning materials only help students if they arrive on time and in good condition. With support from the Swiss SECO-funded Subnational Public Finance Management programme, regional governments in Peru are modernising how educational materials are stored and delivered.

Regional governments in Peru are strengthening how they respond to Amazon deforestation. With support from the Swiss SECO-funded Subnational Public Finance Management programme, they are using satellite data and early warning systems to monitor vulnerable areas and make better-informed surveillance and control decisions.

Regional Conservation Areas help protect Peru’s Amazon forests, support sustainable local development and mitigate climate change. With support from the Swiss SECO-funded Subnational Public Finance Management programme, authorities are making these agreements more practical, measurable and aligned with conservation priorities.

Peru’s Integrity Model – its framework for preventing corruption in government operations – is a powerful tool to strengthen integrity and protect public resources. This report shares lessons learned from supporting six Peruvian regional and local governments in embedding these standards into everyday operations.

Property tax is an important source of revenue for local governments in Peru. This report provides lessons learned from supporting five provincial municipalities to to diagnose, reform and strengthen their revenue mobilisation – for the benefit of their communities.

Corruption is a complex issue that resists simple definition. It takes many forms, is embedded in wider systems, is sustained through informal networks and adapts constantly. This Quick Guide explores corruption from different angles and sets out what this means for understanding and responding to it.

The 6th International Collective Action Conference (ICAC 2026) took place on 9–10 June 2026 in Basel, Switzerland. The conference brought together participants across sectors to explore how Collective Action can help address complex business integrity challenges in an increasingly uncertain global environment. The conference report presents the highlights.

This Policy Brief compares findings of research on corruption at the port of Rotterdam and at the Kapitan Andreevo border checkpoint between Bulgaria and Türkiye. It examines how corruption and cross-border crime interact in border spaces and what this means for enforcement efforts.

This Working Paper explores how insights from foresight and anticipatory governance can inform anti-corruption efforts that are more forward-looking and adaptive.

The Basel Institute on Governance's Annual Report 2025 brings together the results, stories and figures behind our work in 2025 – from asset recovery and financial investigations to corruption prevention, environmental crime and business integrity.

Non-conviction based asset forfeiture has become a key tool for recovering illicit assets and supporting contemporary criminal policy against organised crime, corruption and transnational financial crime. Across seven chapters, this publication (in Spanish) connects international standards with Peruvian practice.

Corruption sanctions allow governments to impose restrictions on people suspected of serious corruption even without a criminal conviction. This Quick Guide introduces corruption sanctions, explains how they work and highlights both their potential and the concerns they raise.

How can governments respond to corruption when those responsible are beyond the reach of the law? Some governments have turned to corruption sanctions to address this issue. This Working Paper examines how corruption sanctions have evolved and offers recommendations for their more effective and legitimate use.

Published in the Journal of Illicit Trade, Financial Crime, and Compliance, this article examines how Bulgaria’s 2007 accession to the European Union transformed illegal activities and corruption at the Kapitan Andreevo border checkpoint.

Border corruption as a complex system of actors, events and illicit exchanges is difficult to detect and investigate. Drawing on research from the Horizon Europe FALCON project, the report explores how leveraging innovative technological tools can support more effective investigations.

Corruption in the timber value chain is a major challenge for environmental sustainability and governance in Latin America. This report presents the application of a corruption risk management approach by environmental authorities in Bolivia, Ecuador and Peru.

This Case Study analyses how Colombian authorities recovered assets linked to drug trafficking and held in a trust in Guernsey. It sets out the legal tools and procedures in Colombia and in Guernsey that enabled Colombia’s first international recovery under its non-conviction based forfeiture model Extinción de dominio.

This Policy Brief analyses emerging international standards aimed at addressing recurring challenges in judicial practice with regard to the enforcement of non-conviction based forfeiture orders issued by foreign states.

This Case Study demonstrates how international cooperation and the follow-the-money approach revealed a transnational criminal network trafficking endangered species and led to Madagascar’s first money laundering conviction related to wildlife trafficking.

Corruption at borders poses a significant threat to the integrity of the European Union’s external borders, undermining security, trust, and governance. And border corruption is not static — it evolves in response to new controls, technologies and enforcement strategies. This means that even well-designed measures may lose effectiveness over time.

A new Policy Brief by the FALCON (Fight Against Large-scale Corruption and Organised Crime Networks) project outlines actionable recommendations for EU policymakers and officials involved preventing and combatting border corruption.

The brief identifies four priority areas:

• reducing discretionary face-to-face interactions at border crossing points through digitalisation;
• developing harmonised, risk-based digital infrastructures that can detect corruption-prone patterns;
• limiting manual data handling to close opportunities for manipulation; and
• strengthening the conceptual alignment between anti-trafficking and anti-corruption strategies.

It argues that effective reform requires corruption-sensitive implementation frameworks, enhanced inter-agency coordination and a shift toward anticipatory governance.

The Basel Institute on Governance is an associated partner of the FALCON project. Jacopo Costa contributed to the Policy Brief and related research.

FALCON is funded under the Horizon Europe Framework Program Grant Agreement ID 101121281. The Basel Institute on Governance receives funding from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).

This U4 Issue analyses Indonesia’s ambitious energy transition and highlights how political finance, weak regulations and a “revolving door” of personnel between public office and the private sector create vulnerabilities. The publication was produced by U4 and the Basel Institute on Governance through its Green Corruption programme.

About the paper

Conflicts of interest and corruption in Indonesia’s political economy pose significant risks to its energy transition, including the Just Energy Transition Partnership. Existing legal and institutional frameworks are fragmented, inconsistently applied, and often fail to address the risk of state capture by powerful political and economic actors, especially in the extractive and energy sectors.

The reliance on fossil fuel industries for political financing and the monopolistic nature of state-owned entities further complicate the shift to a low- or no-carbon system, despite the country’s ambitious renewable energy targets.

Potential pathways to greater anti-corruption resilience lie in improvements to beneficial ownership transparency and strengthening regulation, monitoring and sanctioning of conflict of interest violations.

In a new peer-reviewed journal article, Jacopo Costa and Claudia Baez Camargo look into why and how corruption evolves over time, drawing on an empirical analysis from Italy. The article was published in Trends in Organized Crime.

Abstract

Corruption evolves over time. This paper investigates why and how this evolution happens. The analysis has employed a combination of qualitative network and document analysis to explore the configuration of corruption in two moments in Italy and the changes that have happened in between them.

The findings have disclosed that a higher efficiency of the activities of the criminal-justice chain, the transformation of the critical actors and the reform of legal frameworks and governance systems have been critical in determining the evolution of corruption.

The added value of the research lies in its ability to examine these transformative mechanisms within a conceptual framework that keeps together the fact that corruption is networked and that networks evolve over time.

In this joint paper with Adam Smith International, authors Claudia Baez Camargo and Renee Kantelberg show how anti-corruption efforts require more than mere technical fixes, such as capacity building for civil society alone, to drive lasting change.

Anti-corruption work is often embedded in complex, politically charged environments. This requires thinking and working politically. Engaging with complex social and economic systems also means recognising that change is not linear or even predictable. What to do then?

Our years of anti-corruption research have demonstrated the centrality of having local stakeholders be in the driver’s seat for identifying priorities and finding solutions. This is how we have worked in Malawi in the Malawi Anti-Corruption Civil Society Support (MACCSS) project, funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office and implemented with Adam Smith International.

This publication shares practical lessons and successes in applying this approach in the MACCSS project. It illustrates our joint efforts to navigate uncertainty and ground anti-corruption efforts in trust, resilience and local leadership. The key takeaways for practitioners who design or implement anti-corruption programmes (paraphrased) are:

• Embrace complexity. Change is adaption and pivoting to reality, which is not linear. In governance programmes, unexpected developments and temporary reversals are signs that systems are shifting.
• Local ownership matters. When partners are in the driver’s seat, impact and sustainability improve. This is true even if the route diverges from initial plans.
• Facilitation over funding. Hands-on mentoring and relationship brokering build deeper capabilities than unidirectional training, grants and results frameworks.
• Learning by doing. Regular reflection converts experience into strategy; failures become data for adaptation.
• Build trust and coalitions. Reform depends on a collective effort with credible institutions and sister anti-corruption programmes. It also requires nurturing emergent anti-corruption networks, rather than merely building the capacity of individual actors.
• Resilience grows from below. Sustainable accountability takes root when communities see anti-corruption as linked to livelihoods and services, not as an abstract governance agenda.
• Gender and inclusion strengthen legitimacy. Integrating gender and social inclusion (GESI) principles by addressing corruption in mining, infrastructure and agriculture – sectors critical for women and marginalised groups – broadens both the reach and credibility of anti-corruption efforts.

Ultimately, the MACCSS experience reinforces a simple but profound insight: anti-corruption work is not about perfect plans but about adaptive partnerships. Change happens through relationships, experimentation and persistence. The task is not to eliminate uncertainty, but to navigate it with integrity and learning at the core.

At the 8th session of the Conference of the States Parties to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), in December 2019, States Parties adopted a resolution recognising the relationship between corruption and environmental crimes.

Resolution 8/12 – Preventing and combating corruption as it relates to crimes that have an impact on the environment – is a landmark Resolution. With its 23 operative paragraphs (OPs), it underlies the importance of addressing corruption linked to crimes that have an impact on the environment. It urges States Parties to prevent, investigate and prosecute corruption offences where they may be linked to crimes that have an impact on the environment.

Saplings of hope presents an updated overview of emerging and promising prevention and enforcement actions, initiatives and measures implemented by UNCAC States Parties to combat corruption as it pertains to crimes that have an impact on the environment. It focuses specifically on initiatives from 2024 and 2025.

The Working Paper also underscores the valuable contributions made by non-state actors, in particular civil society, academia and the media, in this collective endeavour.

Finally, it makes the case for a paradigm shift, moving from “corruption as it relates to crimes that have an impact on the environment” to “corruption that has an impact on the environment”. The shift is necessary, because corruption can harm the environment without being linked to a crime that has an impact on the environment. Section 5 thus explores two interconnected issues which have a devastating impact on the environment: corruption linked to climate finance and renewable energy as well as corruption tied to the exploitation of critical minerals.

About this Working Paper

This report is part of the Green Corruption programme at the Basel Institute on Governance and was prepared in the context of the 11th Conference of the States Parties to the UN Convention against Corruption in Doha, Qatar, from 14–19 December 2025.

It provides an update to Working Paper 50, 'Seedlings of hope: Addressing corruption linked to crimes that impact the environment in line with UNCAC Resolution 8/12’, which was prepared in the context of CoSP10 in Atlanta, Georgia, US in 2023.

The report is part of the Basel Institute on Governance Working Paper Series, ISSN: 2624-9650. It is a Diamond Open Access publication, also hosted on the Basel University Library’s open publishing platform eterna as part of our Basel Institute on Governance Working Paper Journal, with DOI: 10.12685/bigwp.2025.61.1-65.

You may share or republish the report under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence.

It was made possible by the generous support of the Principality of Liechtenstein.

The contents are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Basel Institute on Governance, its donors and partners, or the University of Basel.

This is the 14th annual Public Edition report of the Basel AML Index, an independent, data-based ranking and risk assessment tool for money laundering and related financial crime risks around the world.

The Basel AML Index provides risk scores for jurisdictions based on data from 17 publicly accessible sources such as the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), Transparency International and the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime. The risk scores cover five domains considered to contribute to a high money laundering risk:

• Quality of AML/CFT/CPF framework
• Corruption and fraud risks
• Financial transparency and standards
• Public transparency and accountability
• Political and legal risks

Key messages and trends in 2025

1. The 2025 Public Edition includes 177 countries and jurisdictions. Myanmar, Haiti and the Democratic Republic of the Congo receive the highest risk scores, while Finland, Iceland and San Marino have the lowest.

2. The global average risk score decreased marginally from 5.30 to 5.28, a statistically insignificant change. More than half of jurisdictions improved their scores, while 43 percent worsened. Overall, results indicate a levelling-out of global money laundering risk, with improvements in some higher-risk jurisdictions offset by declines among traditionally lower-risk countries.

3. Results across risk domains are mixed. There are modest improvements in the quality of AML/CFT/CPF frameworks and small reductions in corruption risks, alongside weaker financial transparency, growing concerns over public accountability and continued regional variation in political and legal risks.

4. The report also examines emerging challenges, including approaches to identifying lower-risk jurisdictions and assessing structural vulnerabilities related to virtual assets. It highlights the continued importance of addressing underlying weaknesses – such as corruption, weak supervision and poor enforcement – that enable financial crime across both traditional and virtual asset sectors.

The Basel AML Index is developed and maintained by the Basel Institute on Governance through its International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR).