Corruption risk assessments in a law enforcement context seek to map what and how corruption risks could undermine investigations and prosecutions of serious crimes like illegal wildlife trade. But how do you answer why those corruption risks arise in the first place?
Understanding this is key to developing corruption risk mitigation measures that are not just technically sound but politically feasible.
As part of a collaboration with the Targeting Natural Resource Corruption (TNRC) project, the Basel Institute on Governance undertook political economy analyses in three countries in Latin America and Africa.
A delegation from the Basel Institute will attend the International Anti-Corruption Conference (#IACC2022) in Washington DC on 6–10 December 2022.
We will be distributing some of our recent publications and are looking forward to meeting our friends, partners and hopefully future partners in anti-corruption.
Please see this summary of plenary sessions and panels we are leading or involved in, plus details of how to meet us there.
A new paper by our Public Governance team explores the evidence behind behavioural anti-corruption interventions.
The Basel Institute's Public Governance team has published a new Working Paper that provides guidance on developing anti-corruption interventions based on a Social Norms and Behaviour Change (SNBC) approach.
Still a relatively nascent field, SNBC interventions typically address social norms that make corruption acceptable or expected, and attempt to influence behaviours away from corrupt practices.
Published in the peer-reviewed journal Governance, this paper interprets informal networks as investments made by citizens and business people to cope with the public sphere. Informal networks often orchestrate corruption, connecting public and private actors. The paper aims to understand their key characteristics, scopes, and functional roles.
Donors, governments and anti-corruption practitioners seeking alternative tools to address systemic corruption are increasingly turning to behavioural science. Behavioural anti-corruption approaches appear promising because they respond to a growing body of descriptive evidence on how certain social norms and mental models drive corruption, particularly in fragile contexts. Interventions that target social norms and seek to shift people’s behaviours away from corrupt practices could be more effective and long-lasting than ones that, for example, simply add more regulations and controls.
This report relates to the research project Addressing bribery in the Tanzanian health sector: A behavioural approach. As part of the project, a pilot behavioural intervention was implemented at a Tanzanian hospital that aimed to shift hospital users’ and health providers’ attitudes and perceived social norms around gift-giving. It also aimed to reduce actual exchanges of gifts.
This Working Paper provides guidance on developing anti-corruption interventions based on a Social Norms and Behaviour Change (SNBC) approach. Still a relatively nascent field, SNBC interventions typically address social norms that make corruption acceptable or expected, and attempt to influence behaviours away from corrupt practices.
Can social norm and behaviour change approaches help to reduce corruption related to illegal wildlife trade (IWT)?
Very possibly. SNBC initiatives have been shown to help combat diverse corruption problems, although for those related to IWT and other areas of conservation and natural resource management, the evidence for doing so is sparse.