Work Within Your Sector

Abstract

This chapter explains why focusing on sectors as a locus for reform makes good sense, provides a definition of sectors and also various examples of international initiatives that offer anti-corruption support at sector level.

Working with a sector focus responds to a major shift in the structure of modern economic society. There is no longer a clear or easily characterised separation between a government-owned public sector and a privately owned corporate sector. Today, almost every sector of national life is a complex hybrid, including government elements, private elements, and regulatory elements and varieties of public-private cooperation. Working on corruption issues within a sector connects better with the many and various entities that must be engaged.

Some sectors may still be more public than private, such as taxation and policing, whilst others may still be more private than public, such as fisheries or tourism, but the increasing inseparability of public and private via all sorts of mechanisms, such as outsourcing, the dictates of national strategy and the acceptance of executives having multiple roles, has become a core characteristic of most sectors of national life today.

At the same time, the transnational characteristics of each sector have become more pronounced—the major companies are international, the money flows are international, the sector standards are often global—and this offers both scope for solutions and scope for developing international anti-corruption expertise.

Why Sectors Are a Good Locus for Reform

The best way to locate knowledgeable champions and to identify real solutions is to work within your individual sector (health, education, telecoms, etc.). At this level you find professional pride, deep domain knowledge plus a shared use of language and jargon that everyone works through.

You might be a doctor or hospital administrator, telecoms engineer, transport minister or a divisional head in an energy company. Within your sector—elsewhere within your own group, in other organisations, within the professional bodies—you will find documentation and examples of similar problems that others have found. You will find people who will be only too happy to help you address the problem that you are grappling with, usually without charge—they are almost always pleased to find others working on similar problems. Increasingly, there are specialist groups developing within each sector with deep anti-corruption knowledge that you can access.

Working within the sector brings significant benefit for corruption reformers. When they operate inside a given sector (such as in health, construction or telecoms), the reformers understand the economic incentives that drive the sector, the language of their sector, the social norms that govern peoples’ behaviour and the political specificities in that sector. Greater focus comes from these deeper insights (see Pyman 2020; Pyman and Heywood 2020).

Thus, for reformers working in, say, the electricity and power sector, they would be familiar with corruption issues associated with the power regulatory agencies, the state-owned power entities, the immense leverage of power pricing that are accessible to only a few, the leverage of favourable financial investment terms, the political dimensions of public access to cheap, safe power and so forth. By contrast, a reformer working in health will be attuned to the political power of doctors and of medical device companies, to the immense scale of private payments for health services in poorer countries and its abuse, to the benefits and threats of generic drugs and so on. What we see, as exemplified by these two sectors, is that many of the openings for corruption and therefore the nature of the possible reforms is quite distinct in different sectors. One prescient publication by the World Bank (Campos and Pradhan 2007) did recognise the advantages of disaggregation at this sort of sector level, but the approach did not at the time feed through into the Bank’s broader anti-corruption programming.

Even in the toughest corruption environments, where progress may only be possible in tiny steps, there are many improvement measures that can help, and which can form the basis of a much larger improvement when circumstances change.

What Is a Sector?

There is no universally agreed upon definition of a sector. In economics, besides the generic terms public sector and private sector, sector tends to mean industry sectors, usually as defined in various national and multilateral classifications such as NACE (Nomenclature Statistique des Activités Économiques 2008) and relating almost exclusively to the private sector. In the humanitarian and development world, sector tends to denote the public sector, with reference to those areas of the government expenditure most relevant to humanitarian and development agencies, such as agriculture, construction, education, health, power and water. We use the following definition of sector (adapted and updated from Heywood and Pyman 2020):

Sectors are the individual structures and functions through which national life operates. Structures include the legislature, the judiciary, and the civil service. Functions include public functions, such as health, education, policing, and public financial management; economic functions, such as agriculture, telecommunications, mining, construction, and shipping; and the multiple public-private functions that span both public and private, such as sport, infrastructure projects, tourism, and land management. A sector comprises some or all the following: one or more professions, a government ministry, multiple government organisations and agencies, multiple commercial organisations, and the relevant industry associations; one or more multilateral organisations concerned with international application; and a functional or market regulatory authority.

There is no definitive list of sectors, but the list in Fig. 4.1 covers most of the range.

Fig. 4.1

A working list of sectors. From Pyman 2020 ‘Redefining sectors: a more focussed approach to tackling corruption.’ In Adam Graycar (ed.) Handbook on Corruption, Ethics and Integrity in Public Administration, Edward Elgar

International Sector Resources

A number of sector-specific transnational initiatives have emerged in recent years. To give an idea of what is nowadays available by sector, below is international material from three diverse sectors: construction, health and shipping. More details are available at Curbingcorruption.com under the relevant sector headings. Multi-sectoral and multilateral international organisations—like the World Economic Forum (WEF), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP)—also now have a strong focus on public integrity and anti-corruption and can assist specific sectors and initiatives.

Construction Sector

Global Infrastructure Anti-corruption Centre (GIACC): GIACC is a long-established UK-based centre founded and led by two construction lawyers. They have a huge database of supportive material and templates. ‘They publish a set of 15 detailed a-c standards for construction projects (see list in text box below)’.

PS 1: Anti-corruption management of the Project

PS 2: Project selection, design and land acquisition

PS 3: Procurement

PS 4: Contract provisions

PS 5: Contract management

PS 6: Financial management

PS 7: Controls for Major Suppliers and Major Sub-suppliers

PS 8: Raising awareness

PS 9: Training

PS 10: Government permits

PS 11: Independent monitoring

PS 12: Independent auditing

PS 13: Reporting and investigation

PS 14: Enforcement

PS 15: Transparency

They also provide free online information, advice and tools, for both governments and companies.

CoST Infrastructure Transparency Initiative: CoST is a multi-stakeholder sector-specific initiative, currently with 19 participating nations across four continents. Launched in 2012 with support from the World Bank, ‘CoST grew out of the lessons learnt from a three-year pilot programme which tested the viability of a new transparency and accountability process in eight countries. CoST promotes transparency by disclosing data from public infrastructure investment’ (CoST Factsheet; see also the review by Basel Institute of Governance 2020)

Open Contracting Partnership: The Open Contracting Partnership (OCP) has a well-practiced methodology for implementing a policy of cleaner public contracting, engaging stakeholders across government, business and civil society. The technical basis for the guidance is a standard for open data so that all parties can see the key data related to any contract.

U4 anti-corruption resource centre, Norway: U4 has guidance on how to oversee and/or monitor corruption risks in large infrastructure projects: ‘Corruption in the construction of public infrastructure. Critical issues in project preparation.’ (U4 2015).

Health Sector

World Health Organisation (WHO): WHO takes the lead on many good governance initiatives, such as Good Governance for Medicines programme (launched in 2004) and the Medicines Transparency Alliance (MeTA), funded by the then UK Department for International Development (DFID). WHO has also done specific corruption analyses, for example ‘An innovative approach to prevent corruption in the pharmaceutical sector’ (WHO 2021).

Global Network for Anti-corruption, Transparency and Accountability in Health (GNACTA): This Norad-funded initiative is supported by WHO along with a host of other bodies including UNODC, the World Bank, USAID, Transparency International. It seeks to forge strategic alliances and build capacity to tackle corruption in health.

United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has long worked on anti-corruption in health. See, for example, ‘Fighting corruption in the health sector’ (UNDP 2015), ‘Anti-corruption, Transparency and Accountability: Case Study of Healthcare in the Arab Countries’ (Hunter et al. 2020), ‘A case study of risk-based anti-corruption in the health sector of Tunisia’ (UNDP 2021) and ‘Strengthening Integrity of the Health Sector During the Covid-19 Pandemic and Beyond in Europe and Central Asia Region’ (UNDP 2022).

Development agencies: Development agencies produce analyses of corruption in health, such as ‘How-to Note; addressing corruption in the Health sector’ from DFID (2010). USAID has recently published the Global Health Anti-Corruption Handbook (USAID 2022), which follows on from earlier work on anti-corruption programming with health projects (USAID 2014).

Global Fund: The Global Fund, established in 2002 to tackle HIV/AIDS, TB and malaria, is one organisation that has been at the forefront of efforts to eliminate corruption related to its own disbursements (Usher 2016).

Transparency International Global Health Programme: TI’s Global Health anti-corruption programme is a global initiative dedicated to tackling corruption in pharmaceuticals and healthcare worldwide.

European Healthcare Fraud and Corruption Network (EHFCN): Founded in 2005, EHFCN is a not-for-profit organisation comprising healthcare and counter fraud organisations in Europe. It published a book (EHFCN 2017) to provide guidance on healthcare fraud and corruption and an overview of policies in place across the continent.

Shipping Sector

Marine Anticorruption Network (MACN): Established in 2011, MACN is a global business network, promoting collective action to eradicate all forms of maritime corruption.

TRACE: A non-profit business association founded in 2001, TRACE is active in shipping anti-corruption. TRACE partners with leading shipping and freight forwarding organisations to raise anti-bribery compliance standards in the industry, conduct specialised training and host industry webinars for global shipping and freight forwarding companies.

World Customs Organisation (WCO): The WCO cooperates with the International Chamber of Shipping and works with the World Shipping Council to support their collaboration with the Container Control Programme to step up the fight against narcotics trafficking. WCO ‘has played an active and key role in addressing the complex problem of corruption in […] Customs’ (WCO 2019). WCO offers an online ‘Integrity Development Guide’, a comprehensive tool designed to provide advice and best practice.

BIMCO: There are many member-based shipping industry organisations, such as Intercargo, Intertanko and shipowners’ associations. One that does work on anti-corruption is BIMCO, a large shipping industry membership organisation comprising shipowners, operators, managers, brokers and agents.

Maritime Fairtrade: Set up to tackle corruption in the maritime industry throughout Asia, the organisation uses independent journalism to highlight progress and issues—for example correspondent Lee Kok Leong’s interview ‘Winning the war against maritime corruption’ (see Pyman 2019).