Publications

This report summarises discussions among supervisors, FIUs, financial institutions and cryptoasset service providers on the practical challenges of cryptorelated suspicious transaction and activity reporting (STR/SAR), highlighting eight recurring considerations for improving its effectiveness.

This Policy Brief outlines eight practical lessons for jurisdictions to consider when establishing a system for managing seized cryptoassets. Asset management practitioners, prosecutors, police and private-sector specialists from 17 countries contributed to these lessons at a roundtable in September 2026.

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.

This report tracks the emergence of anti-corruption Collective Action as a norm with a specific focus on the ASEAN region and South Africa. The report finds a clear shift towards greater recognition of and government engagement in Collective Action.

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.