Introduction

Abstract

This chapter outlines the aims of the book, explains the reform concept that underpins our thinking and provides an overview of the Sector Focus Remediation Action (SFRA) approach. It also explains how we came to write the book and sets out its structure.

This book is for professional people working in organisations and institutions who need to acquire competence in recognising, analysing and dealing with corruption issues. It is action-oriented, enabling the reader to know better how to limit the effects of such corruption on their organisation’s functioning and outputs, thereby improving performance, and to build their confidence that many corruption-related problems can indeed be addressed.

They—you—may be engineers, administrators, politicians, heads of marketing or sales or supplies, finance managers, department heads or division management teams. They may work in either the public sector or the private sector, or one of the many hybrids of the two, like joint ventures or public-private partnerships. They may be employees, directors, board members, external consultants, or representatives of organisations or communities. What they all have in common is that their primary responsibility is to deliver results. Those results might be tangible, like sales or units of production, or they may be less tangible, like policies or new laws from a ministry, or the safe monitoring of processes and progress, or overseeing strategy implementation in the organisation or division. These people are all in a position of some responsibility within their institution or sector, a responsibility that may be on a large scale—regional, national or international—or on a small scale, such as leadership of a department within a single organisation.

Such professional people may well have signed up to ethical obligations, to act with integrity, such as codes of conduct within the working environment, or clauses in employment contracts, or in major contracts with customers and partners, or the ethical requirements that come with belonging to a particular profession. These codes may have included implicit or even explicit obligations to act against corruption. But these obligations usually sit in the background, rarely seen as forming a core part of the job.

Almost all such people feel uncomfortable with corruption issues. Whilst they know the moral opprobrium associated with corruption and probably share it themselves, they know also that corruption is a subject with tricky, hidden depths, like the proverbial iceberg. They may even feel fear about the consequences of taking action against it. Professionally, they probably feel unprepared for working on such issues, because tackling corruption has never been part of their education or professional training.

They may also have an instinctive response that preventing or tackling corruption is not part of their job and question the limits of their personal responsibilities.

On the other hand, there is now a growing category of professionals—usually referred to as ethics and compliance officers—who are not line managers responsible for performance but who do share responsibility for ethics, integrity issues and corruption risks. In some companies they are already represented at leadership level by Chief Integrity or Ethics Officers (World Economic Forum 2021). In a few sectors, such as defence, they have well-established roles and structures, with a sizeable cadre of ethics officers, sometimes numbering in the hundreds across the organisation.¹ However, their impact on tackling corruption has generally been modest, in large part precisely because they are often seen as somewhat separate from core business and operations.

Through reading this book and following its guidance, you should be able to improve the performance of your organisation or institution. First, it shows how to analyse where and how corruption is affecting performance, something that is not always obvious or may be ‘hiding in plain sight’. The book contains guidance on disaggregating the problems. Second, it gives you a framework through which you can examine what remediation measures are available for avoiding, preventing or minimising the effect of the corruption on your organisation. Finally, it guides you on how to decide what kinds of action are most likely to be effective.

The Reform Concept: Move Molehills Not Mountains

Karl Weick, the eminent American thinker on how organisations work, describes how making a problem out to be a big one diminishes the chance of addressing it: ‘The massive scale on which social problems are conceived often precludes innovation, because the limits of bounded rationality are exceeded, and arousal is raised to dysfunctionally high levels. People often define social problems in ways that overwhelm their ability to do anything about them’ (Weick 1984: 40).² The English language has an apt idiom: ‘making a mountain out of a molehill.’ In the context of the guidance in this book, where we propose ways in which you can take useful action against corruption, we think there is a case to be made for doing the opposite. We should focus on the molehills rather than the mountains. Molehills may look small, but the activities of moles can cause damage and disruption on a wide scale. Yet it is feasible, if not entirely straightforward, to mitigate their activities, encourage them to move elsewhere or control them.

We are in no way suggesting that corruption problems are small ones; of course, they are not. However, we are saying that when you and your organisation need to tackle corruption issues, you can make progress by managing the problem down to ones of a more viable scale, by prioritising those issues where you have a chance of making progress and by examining actions that are realistic in the circumstances in which your organisation is operating. This book offers encouragement and guidance, with dozens of examples, that modest-scale changes can have significant beneficial effects in limiting the impact of corruption on your operations.

The Reform Approach: SFRA

Our approach is fourfold. First, we argue you should tackle problems at the level of the specific sector (like health, or policing, or agriculture). At this level you and many others have deep knowledge, extensive operational experience, expertise which can be put to use to solve, minimise or avoid corruption problems. With this sector-based approach, we can address the more manageable manifestations of corruption that becomes impossibly complex at country level. Second, we advise you should focus on specific corruption issues, not on generalities. We provide sector-specific typologies of the issues, show you how to use them and show you how to build understanding across your teams of which ones matter most and why. Third, we set out a two-track approach as to what the matrix of remedial options looks like, using a high-level framing to encapsulate the more political options alongside a wide range of detailed measures that you can consider. Finally, using a range of different ‘lenses’, we take you through how to decide which combinations of broad framings and detailed measures represent the best action to take in your context.

This approach goes by the acronym SFRA, where S is for Sector, F is for Focus, R is for Remediation measures and A is for concluding on the best Action in the circumstances. The individual components of the SFRA approach, described in detail in this book, are encapsulated in the following aide-memoire (Fig. 1.1).

Fig. 1.1

The SFRA approach

Important Caveat

This book is NOT for all corruption problems. There are some corruption issues, such as top-level political corruption, transnational corruption, the capture of the state by corrupt oligarchs and kleptocrats, the failure of police and judiciaries to apprehend corruption or indeed corruption throughout those bodies that you probably cannot meaningfully tackle from within an organisation: they require different forms of engagement that will not be addressed in this book. This book is not about resolution of such heavyweight problems, though it does give some guidance on survival in such circumstances. Instead, it is aimed at the level and circumstances where most manifestations of corruption take place and are experienced by citizens, in which thoughtful people with some responsibility can achieve better outcomes by picking off soluble—or avoidable—corruption issues.

In equipping you with knowledge and guidance on better addressing corruption, we are NOT inviting to put yourself or your organisation at risk. Corruption can be dangerous. On the other hand, much progress can be made against corruption, more specifically in preventing it, without any particular risk exposure. This book always assumes that you and your colleagues will avoid personal risk.

How This Book Came About

The two of us have plenty—too much, perhaps—experience of working on corruption and corruption reform.

Mark Pyman has extensive field experience, gained from working in three tough high-corruption environments. First as the Chief Financial Officer for Shell International in several endemically corrupt countries; then founding and leading Transparency International’s global work on corruption in the defence and security sectors; then through being one of the three international Anti-Corruption Commissioners in Afghanistan (MEC). Mark realised that much more progress against corruption was possible by better equipping the people who lead organisations, or who have significant management and operational responsibilities. In his career he has several times had responsibility for organisations where corruption was one of the factors limiting good performance. As Chief Financial Officer he had to make those judgements about which corruption issues could or should be tackled, and on what basis to prioritise limited remedial resources. He has facilitated leadership discussions in Ministries and other public sector institutions in many countries on how best to address corruption issues.

Paul Heywood has been researching corruption and corruption reform for nearly 30 years. The author, co-author, or editor of many books, journal articles and book chapters on corruption, Paul has been a leader since 2015 of a major Department for International Development (DFID)/Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO)-funded research programme Governance and Integrity Anti Corruption Evidence (GI ACE), designed to deliver new research on ‘what works’ to tackle specific corruption issues in developing countries. He has also been closely involved with the work of Transparency International, both as a Trustee of the UK chapter and as a member of its International Council. Paul has argued for many years that we should get away from a fixation on corruption as a problem best analysed, measured and tackled at national level. Instead, we need a more sophisticated understanding of how and why different types of corruption develop in specific contexts, as well as more targeted and politically informed approaches to tackling particular types of corruption rather than generic ‘solutions’ based on cookie-cutter descriptions of ‘best practice’. Paul has been described by a Public Sector Specialist at the World Bank as ‘one of the very few scholars in the field of corruption research who strives to make his research relevant for us working in the policy arena’.

Since 2017, Paul and Mark have been collaborating to turn this field experience into a workable, practical set of constructs and guidance that can be used by others to tackle corruption. They are also the co-founders of the well-known website CurbingCorrruption.com.

The Structure of the Book

After this Introduction (Chap. 1), Chap. 2 provides what we think you need to know on the basics of corruption. Chapter 3 is about the management systems and processes that organisations can put in place to prevent corruption, plus our thoughts on how you can most usefully think about corruption—not in theoretical or political terms but as an issue that you will often meet in practice. We hope to impart a ‘mental model’, a mindset, that performance constraints caused by corruption issues can often be tackled. Building such a mindset and the structures that support it is a big step forward.

Chapter 4 explains our thinking on Sectors; why a sector approach is beneficial, what a sector is and the variety of international anti-corruption expertise that you can now access within many sectors. Chapter 5 goes into detail about how you can focus on specific corruption issues using typologies, how to analyse them, then how to build a shared understanding about which corruption issues should be tackled.

The rest of the book elaborates the remediation approach. Remediation can mean a range of different outcomes, such as managing the issue down to a smaller level, finding a way to avoid the issue entirely, or perhaps even ‘solving’ it. Chapter 6 sets out eight broad approaches for tackling the problems in their political and organisational context, whilst Chap. 7 illustrates the many detailed measures that can be implemented. Chapter 8 provides extensive guidance on how to compare and challenge the merits of the different options, in order to guide your choice of the best action to take in the circumstances. Chapter 9 concludes with Last Words.

We hope you enjoy the book!