Remediation: Detailed Improvement Measures

Abstract

This chapter outlines eight categories of detailed remediation measures, to show how to go about generating plausible possibilities for taking action. The chapter provides a wide range of concrete examples that offer additional guidance.

This is not yet ‘decision time’; rather, it is about generating plausible possibilities. Later, in the ‘A’ (Action) stage of SFRA, we will review the merits and disadvantages of the different measures and how they are narrowed down to final choices.

This is the longest and most detailed chapter in the book, outlining 8 categories of detailed remediation measures, with 64 sub-categories and 65 examples. The purpose of putting together so much material is not to bombard you, nor to present these cases as examples of ‘best practice’, but to show you that there are many more options for action than you were probably aware of, and to provide inspiration from what others have done.

Do start with an open mind on what constitutes an improvement measure. Most people make two mistakes about anti-corruption measures right at the beginning.

• They think that anti-corruption is about the consequences of corruption—catching and punishing wrongdoing—whereas more effective reforms are about prevention, either by avoiding the problem in the first place or by monitoring to flag up possible problems early.

• They default to thinking that solutions lie with ‘the authorities’—external bodies like the police or the judiciary, or internal bodies like the auditors or the finance people. Occasionally, this is the case, but more often you make better progress using your own operational capabilities and knowledge.

We define the following eight improvement measure categories:

• 1. Functional measures: Improving processes, systems and controls. This is where the largest number of the measures are focused on operations.

• 2. People-centred measures: Building support for change, building coalitions, working directly with affected communities.

• 3. Monitoring measures: Increasing the availability of control data to third parties, creating or strengthening oversight groups, whistleblowing.

• 4. Justice and rule of law measures: Prosecuting, raising confidence, improving laws, legalising payments where it makes sense.

• 5. Transparency measures: Making visible what others might wish to keep hidden.

• 6. Integrity-related measures: Harnessing the power of integrity to motivate people, instilling pride and commitment.

• 7. Civil society measures: Creating space for external voices to press against corruption and to help drive change.

• 8. Incentives-based measures: Aligning stakeholders, based on behavioural economics, and ‘nudge’ improvements.

These categories are of course not mutually exclusive. Anti-corruption is strengthened and more deeply institutionalised by leveraging measures which have several effects and/or are cross cutting.

Functional Improvement Measures

Technical, administrative, financial, systems and institutional reforms tend to be the largest set of measures and to get the most attention; they are often—beneficially—mainstreamed within broader reform initiatives. Functional reforms make sense, especially when they involve systematising or digitising something that previously relied on many human-to-human interactions. However, exclusive attention to technical measures alone is a high-risk strategy: technical solutions often fail, they can be slow, they can be deliberately slowed down and sometimes they are used by political leaders as an impressive-sounding excuse for making little real change—more form over function. So, use functional reforms, but in combination with other approaches, and with sufficient prior analysis. Here are some examples.

Improve the Administrative Processes Closest to Service Delivery

Reforms could include simplification, reducing procedural complexities, automating cumbersome procedures, improving controls, reducing waiting times. Such reforms will rarely address the most severe corruption issues, but improving such processes can be the quickest way to gaining public support, which in turn allows further reform.

Improve Financial Management

This entails improving all the processes around financial management, including accounting and auditing, for instance by making treasury operations clearer and more controlled and making budgets, and the spending against them, transparent. For example, strengthening Public Financial Management (PFM) is an effective anti-corruption measure available to officials (Johnsøn et al. 2012).

Improve Financial Management Processes

Whereas improving PFM is a high-level activity, there are other more modest reforms to improve the integrity and transparency of basic financial management processes that will also make corruption harder. These include proper budgeting processes, making annual budgets public, tracking the spending against those budgets, etc. These small changes can be powerful.

Improve Management Information Systems (MIS)

Improving an organisation’s management information system is core to better institutional control of corruption. It is astonishing how many government entities have terrible MIS, preventing effective management and enabling extensive corruption. MIS reform has been shown to be effective in constraining corruption in many cases, but it is best if done through small projects, as the success rate of large-scale IT reform is very poor. Sometimes, if the problems are acute, a simple parallel system is the best, quickest and most motivating way forward.

Example

EU country health sector: With a decades old MIS system and no prospect of funding for improvement, corruption routinely went undetected and unreported. No comparisons between hospitals and services were possible. Decent MIS data are essential, not only for efficiency but also for reducing corruption risks, as it allows comparisons between hospitals, pharmacies, specific units, etc., to identify which are working well or badly and why. This ministry made the bold decision to stop the antiquated system and to develop an alternative. Staff reported on how very much better it was, especially in giving comparative data between medical facilities for the first time (Pyman 2017a).

Consider Radical Organisational Reform, For Example, of a Particular Ministry

Government ministries can become corrupted in whole or in part, or, at the least, tolerant of questionable behaviour. Sometimes, improvements can best be made through organisational reform, such as the removal of a division, or splitting the ministry into separate parts, or conversely, amalgamating overlapping agencies. This process needs a serious organisational analysis, but there are plenty of experts who can do this. Usually, it is better to do change in smaller steps, but sometimes such wholesale reform is the only way to eliminate structural corruption problems.

Consider How New Technology Might Help

There are more opportunities than ever before to reduce corruption by the introduction of new technologies. Among the now many well-known examples are e-procurement, web-based portals and trackers, various open data initiatives and mobile phone-based reporting apps. It is worthwhile scanning equivalent sectors in other countries to see how they are using these technologies.

Mainstream the Functional Reforms Within Broader Ministry or Organisation Reform Efforts

It is nearly always a mistake to treat anti-corruption as a stand-alone effort. More progress will be made by introducing anti-corruption efforts within broader mainstream sector reform programmes.

People-Centred Improvement Measures

In the words usually attributed to Margaret Mead, ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.’

Networks and coalitions come in all shapes and sizes and creating one could be as simple as building up a team of committed people around you in your area of responsibility. Or it could be on a larger scale, collaborating with groups across the sector, whether private or public, and with professional associations in the sector, such as doctors or engineers. Or it could be working with civil society organisations (CSOs) or in collaboration with relevant international initiatives. Or it could be from particular groups of people returning to work in the organisation/ministry from elsewhere, enthused by the prospect of positive change. For an example in Oman, involving returnees from Zanzibar, see Hunt and Phillips (2017: 6).

Build Your Initiative Around the People That Live in the Affected Area or Are Involved in the Relevant Sector

Anti-corruption initiatives that are developed together with the affected communities can expect a better success rate than those devised by a small group working alone within government or within an organisation’s senior management. You will not just raise awareness and develop community ownership of the plans that way but also prepare the ground for community oversight.

Build a Critical Mass of Committed Supporters Inside Your Ministry or Organisation

Most people in most organisations hate corruption but feel trapped and disempowered by it. Being clear that your team is genuinely committed to making a difference can change the organisation’s culture to one with a much lower tolerance of misbehaviour. It can inspire people to work with you and to put in much more than ‘normal’ efforts. If you are in a leadership position, then your potential to influence others and to reach a wide audience is large.

Example

Building Up a Strong Justice -->Ministry, Taiwan, 1998–2010. The continued efforts of successive Ministers of Justice and senior staff had a large impact on the development of Taiwan’s anti-corruption policies. One component was socialisation in elite universities, in this case National Taiwan University (NTU), where national-level lawyers, prosecutors and judges are groomed, thereby contributing to the diffusion of meritocratic values. A second component was the establishment in 1998 of the Prosecutor’s Reform Association (PRA) by reform-minded prosecutors—this was a milestone in Taiwan’s transition to ethical universalism. The creation of the PRA wasmotivated by news reports of politicians trying to interfere with several prosecutorial investigations. A third component was the replacement of key persons in the judicial system to inspire a ‘change in bureaucratic culture’. One Minister commented, ‘If I influence a couple of hundred, out of 1000 prosecutors, then the atmosphere will change completely.’ Finally, after several years of campaign-style crackdowns on corruption, the Minister shifted the focus from persecution to prevention and initiated a risk assessment system that rated risk according to how likely a particular line of work was to provide incentives for corruption. Arguably, the professionalisation and independence of Taiwan’s judicial system has been the single most important achievement in Taiwan’s anti-corruption reforms (see Goebel 2015).

There is a deeper rationale at work here. In general, corruption is a subject that is intentionally not discussed among professional groups. There is the fear that you might be showing yourself to be naïve, or that you will show yourself not to care about the topic, or that your colleagues may be involved, or that you may be outcast for raising such a sensitive issue.

Do take ‘building commitment’ seriously. Ask someone to open these discussions across the organisation. Our experience of such discussions in numerous professional leadership groups, from global companies to health leadership teams, from clean Scandinavian countries to conflict-affected countries, indicates that initial reluctance to engage in open discussion about corruption can change quickly once you make it clear that this is not a taboo subject and that your purpose in tackling it is constructive not punitive, because it will actively improve the public’s access to quality services.

Set Up One or More Forums Where People Can Discuss Tackling Corruption Issues and Demonstrate Their Commitment

Sometimes people—public officials, citizens, whoever—are ready to help but don’t have a forum around which to congregate. Such forums also show participants from across an organisation or across government that they are not alone with their corruption problems. It is easy to set up informal or advisory discussions forums, and you can advance from there. In some societies, relevant forums already exist, such as education or health shuras in Islamic countries, or think tanks within professional sectors, such as the International Bar Association’s anti-corruption committee. It’s easy to organise your own.

Bring National Civic Groups on Board and Collaborate with Civil Society Organisations

It has become much more common in the last 20 years for government officials to engage professionally with NGOs, even in sensitive areas like police and national security. There is more acceptance of enlisting citizens for change, as well as responding to citizens who are determined to achieve change. Engaging with external groups can feel risky if it is not currently common in your country/organisation, but their commitment can make a major difference in building support and credibility for the changes you want to bring about.

Bring in Experts from Transnational Initiatives Specific to the Sector or Corruption Problem

There is a trend now in anti-corruption for transnational centres of anti-corruption expertise to be developing sector-by-sector. As already discussed in Chap. 4 such centres exist in construction, in health, in shipping and elsewhere such as in defence (TI-DS), education (IIEP-UNESCO) and police (DCAF). Several are very good, and they can be used to influence and improve national norms. They are easily contacted via their websites for advice.

Bring in Anti-Corruption Experts from Industry Bodies and Associations

Today, in part driven by Environment, Sustainability and Governance (ESG) criteria, many companies are actively looking for ways to improve their image and reputation by working with government to reduce corruption. This is true both nationally and internationally. They may be doing it for the wrong reasons—wanting to make themselves look good without doing anything much—but there is now a lot of experience of positive examples, as the examples in this book show.

An easy way to initiate contact is to reach out to the industry association relevant to your sector (for instance, Chambers of Commerce and Industry, the Chemical Industries Association, the Medical Devices Manufacturers Association and so on).

Similarly, companies in the G20 countries have a formal anti-corruption group, called the B20 Integrity and Compliance Task Force coordinated by the Basel Institute on Governance, which actively supports anti-corruption initiatives such as open registries of the beneficial ownership of companies.

Actively Search Out Possible Coalitions

For each corruption issue, it is useful to ask what combination of people and/or organisations need to come together to solve the issue? Which government agencies should be involved? At what level? Which companies or industries? Which local authorities? Bring them together and you will likely find more dimensions to the corruption issue than you were previously aware of, but also more ideas on how small, diverse measures from different groups can help address the corruption problems.

Enlist International Development People

In countries where funding is provided by partners from other nations, multilateral partners (like the World Bank, OECD or UNDP, or bilateral donor partners such as FCDO, USAID or the EU) have considerable power that you may be able to leverage against corruption. Contact the relevant people in the local office of the agency or the local embassy.

Monitoring Improvement Measures

Monitoring and oversight mechanisms are important for controlling corruption in a lasting, sustainable way, such as through auditors, regulatory agencies or independent organisations within civil society. But these reforms have a disappointing history, often quickly becoming ineffective. The reasons are all well-known: lack of budget, staffed by people unchanged from predecessor organisations, institutional neglect, deliberate marginalisation, being subverted in the political environment, denied access to key people and records, bribed or threatened. Finding ways to get multiple forms of independent scrutiny into action should therefore be a core part of any anti-corruption strategy.

Review and Strengthen Core Operational and Financial Controls

Within an organisation, the accepted way of making sure it works within its mandate and in a well-controlled manner is for controls to be established at three levels:

• (i) Operational management control. The managers are responsible for the day-to-day controls on all the processes within an organisation: both their own management controls and procedural internal controls.

• (ii) Risk management control, compliance controls and overall financial controls. These are supervised outside of the line of management.

• (iii) Internal audit.

It is important to ensure that such an oversight structure (or a functional equivalent) is in operation in your organisation to ensure it is pursuing its purposes properly. The process elements of such an oversight structure are exemplified by the ‘Three lines of defence’ model in Fig. 7.1 from the Institute of Internal Auditors (2020).

Fig. 7.1

The three lines of defence model. Institute of Internal Auditors 2020. From Position Paper: The three lines of defence. https://www.iia.org.uk/resources/corporate-governance-basic-overview/application-of-the-three-lines-model/

Demand More from Your Internal Audit Function

Organisations and governments worldwide often under-resource and marginalise internal audit departments. This may be due to cost cutting but can also be a deliberate action to remove one of the semi-independent sources of scrutiny. Strengthen internal audit processes and/or show publicly that you are investing them with much greater authority. For example, prior to the current war, the audit department in Ukraine’s Defence Ministry has led the anti-corruption drive, and the ministry has been public in publishing its audit result (Barynina and Pyman 2012). Conversely, in endemic corruption environments, the internal audit department can become an epicentre of corruption, precisely because of its semi-independent function, and can be hard to remove. In such circumstances, you need to restructure the department and most likely bring in new people.

Commission-Focused Audits and Reviews

Internal audits are not usually focused on corruption, but focused audits, regular intrusive review and/or active follow up of corruption risks can make problems visible. They also signal a change in the culture and show that certain areas of the system are being targeted. There are lots of examples where such reviews have been a catalyst for change. A good example is the Global Fund in the Health sector, and their reports are made public—see their Audits and Investigations reports via their website (Global Fund 2023).

Demand More from the External Auditors

Look at how effective external audit is in pointing out corruption problems in your country. Sometimes a national Supreme Audit Institution (SAI) can be excellent (Dye and Stapenhurst 2020; Jeppesen 2019) and can bring a useful external focus to particular sectors and problems; however, more often it is slow and ineffective and can itself become a vehicle for extortion, threatening organisations with high penalties unless bribes are paid. Decide whether your SAI might be used constructively, or shamed into action, or is just too much effort. In more economically developed countries, external commercial audit is usually reasonably effective, though it suffers from the oligopoly that controls the audit profession. In some countries, the external commercial auditors can also be part of the corruption problem.

Consider Pressing for a Formal Commission of Inquiry

Sometimes, if you are in a position to do so, it makes sense to establish a public Commission of Inquiry about a specific corruption issue, to address known but unexplored problems. For example, this has been one way to publicise and address corruption in police forces around the world and has also been common in health sector corruption.

A detailed analysis of the rationale and potential benefits of choosing such a reform measure in Uganda has been made by Kirya (2011). Although this review is at a national level, her conclusions are also useful for inquiries at sector level. Here is her overview: ‘The findings suggest that the global anti-corruption framework signified by the good governance agenda is hindered by various factors such as the self-interest of donors, the moral hazard inherent in aid and the illegitimacy of conditionality […]. This in turn causes aid-recipient countries such as Uganda to do only the minimum necessary to keep up appearances in implementing governance reforms. They also served to appease a public that was appalled by the various corruption scandals perpetrated by a regime that had claimed to introduce a fundamental change. Nevertheless […] they also constituted significant democratic moments in Ugandan history by allowing the public—acting through judges and the media—to participate in holding their leaders accountable for their actions in a manner hitherto unseen.’

Encourage Monitoring by Citizen Groups and NGOs

Some countries, notably in Latin America, have a very active tradition of citizen engagement, and they are likely to be already active on anti-corruption scrutiny (see Balan 2018). In other places, you may need to encourage them or find ways to support them. It also helps to seek to build up a conversation across the public and civil society so that they better understand your intent.

There are good examples of community monitoring in the education sector, such as in Uganda, where most success was achieved when the communities had some say in the choice of the monitoring criteria, and in the Philippines with textbook counting initiatives (Transparency International 2017; U4 2019).

Citizen Report Cards

Pioneered by the Public Affairs Centre in India, report cards are a specific citizen-driven method used to generate information on the quality and efficiency of a public service as perceived by users. See, for example, the use of Scorecards in the education sector in Ghana (Transparency International 2017). There are many other examples of their use, such as the World Bank’s Water and Sanitation Project Karachi (2010), or the Forest Transparency Project organised by Global Witness (2010), as well as several online toolkits on how to use them.

Strengthen the Regulators and the Relevant Professional Agencies

There is usually a wide variety of regulators and nominally independent agencies involved in governance, for example examination boards in the education sector or police complaints commissions in policing. Such independent agencies may be effective but usually need boosting. Sometimes, a professional elite gains control of them, and such monopoly control can easily veer towards corruption, so this is something to watch for before engaging with them.

Actively Exploit the International Peer Review Mechanisms

The international community has set up peer review mechanisms through UNCAC (UNODC 2015), through the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention and through Group of States against Corruption (GRECO) for EU countries (GRECO 2016). Usually these are relatively narrow in scope and proceed in a slow, bureaucratic fashion out of the public eye. If you or your organisation is able to exert influence on these bodies, consider pressing them harder, for example to do a really energetic review of the sector.

Actively Exploit Sectoral Country—Comparison Mechanisms and Indexes

There are examples of anti-corruption comparisons within individual sectors, and some of these have detailed methodologies for comparing the sectors across countries. Transparency International Defence and Security’s Government Defence Integrity Index (GDI) offers a good example, assessing defence corruption vulnerabilities in detail across 130 countries. This can be an effective way of monitoring your national sector, by comparing it with their peer organisations in other countries.

Whistleblowing Measures

Finding safe ways for people to speak up is vital, and whistleblowing is now recognised as an important mechanism to support integrity in organisations. However, whistleblowing mechanisms are usually weak or may exist on paper only, and the whistleblowers most often end up suffering. Yet they are vital in identifying and calling out corruption: the challenge is to find a way in your context to make them effective and to publicise this.

Possible actions include examining if there is a part of your organisation/directorate/ministry that is already doing something good and building on it, and considering contracting a civil society whistleblowing group to operate an independent sector-specific whistleblowing system.

In a few countries (for instance, Australia, Ireland, South Africa, South Korea, the UK and the USA), whistleblowing laws are generally seen to work well. National legislation on whistleblowing laws/systems has become more widespread, with some of the new ones are being energetically implemented, such as in Italy, Slovakia, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia.

More information is available at CurbingCorruption.com, as well as from the National Whistleblower Centre (in the USA), Protect (in the UK), Whistling While They Work (in Australia) and the Whistleblowing International Network (WIN, a global network established in 2018). See also Brown et al. (2022) and Worth (2018).

Example

The Netherlands has had a ‘House of Whistle-blowers’ within the government since 2016 for complaints by both employees and non-employees (Denklaw 2016), though it has experienced some problems. An increasing number of companies, such as Lockheed Martin Corporation (the USA) and Maersk (Denmark), have also set up whistleblowing/complaints systems that are seen to be working well.

Justice and Rule of Law measures

Routine prosecution of corruption cases, reflecting judicial independence, is one of the hallmarks of a jurisdiction that has control of corruption and is a key element of achieving success against corruption: ‘Reducing corruption to the status of exception in a sustainable way thus defines a successful evolution’ (Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston 2017: 9). In general, there is a close link between the rule of law and lower levels of corruption (Mortera-Martinez 2021). However, prosecutions are also high risk: they can be very slow, often taking many years to come to court, and they can be unpredictable, as powerful individuals often find ways to escape prosecution or conviction or else bounce back after receiving nominal punishment. Worse, in countries where the judiciary is corrupt, this tends to mean that corruption reform will take decades (World Bank Development Report 2011: 109).

Demanding that corruption be prosecuted more vigorously may be a tactical response to public pressure, but it is unlikely to be a major part of your approach. Prevention and avoidance are easier and lower risk. In addition, prosecuting corrupt individuals as a strategy, on its own, does not address root causes of corruption. Nonetheless, below we list various Rule of Law-type measures that can be explored.

Exert Pressure Via Discipline, Sanctions and Penalties

Civil and administrative penalties sometimes hold out more hope of impact than prosecution. It is worthwhile examining in detail what disciplining and sanctioning options you have, whether they are being used to the maximum extent, how they might be strengthened and how they can be adapted to prioritise corruption cases. The priority may be to move a corrupt person from their job—to allow that directorate to improve—and to sanction the individual so that s/he is not simply placed somewhere else in the organisation.

Call Out Corruption

Do not underestimate the effect that can be had just by speaking openly and publicly about corruption problems. The most famous example is probably when the then head of the World Bank, James Wolfensohn, spoke about corruption in 1996, after decades of silence: the effect was transformative, with the Bank then becoming a lead player in global anti-corruption efforts. Countries such as Georgia and Estonia have had great success, partly by government-wide emphasis that curbing corruption was their top mission of the government, but then implementing reforms sector by sector, such as in land, education and police, in the case of Georgia. Colombia has been following a similar path, with defence sector reform a major part of this.

As the Norwegian Prime Minister commented at the annual OECD Integrity Forum in March 2018, ‘Naming and shaming is good’ (Solberg 2018). Sometimes, everybody knows that what is going on is corrupt, but no one dares to be the first to say so: speaking out or putting a senior individual under investigation can be dangerous, but it can also change the culture. Sometimes the dynamics of large organisations can be changed if it becomes clear that sanctions or disciplinary action will be taken.

Carry Out a Legal and Constitutional Review

In the 1990s, calling for new laws or new regulations against corruption was a first port of call for reformers and now most countries have comprehensive laws relating to corruption and the other relevant subjects such as access to information, whistleblowing and conflict of interest. Nonetheless, there are still multiple areas where reform of law is vital and where gaps, overlaps and ambiguities allow the corrupt to escape justice.

Within sectors—health, education, telecoms, etc.—there are also always weaknesses in primary laws, secondary regulation and local regulation. There will also be new forms of corruption, some of which may start off being legal, and new ways in which the corrupt are bending the current laws in their favour, which will need additional regulation.

Suggestions from officials on how the laws can be improved need critical review. It is normally unwise to plan on making lots of regulatory changes, as these can get bogged down and thereby seen to be making no progress, so changes need to be carefully prioritised for effectiveness. It can be helpful to involve outsiders in the review: civil society or non-government legal experts as well with knowledge of anti-corruption impacts.

Encourage Relevant Research by Academics

In difficult environments, where there is no encouragement for open analysis, an alternative can be to encourage academic research on specific corruption issues within the rule of law. Such research may build the foundations of a proper understanding of where the weaknesses are and how they can be better addressed. There have been a number of academic programmes in recent years looking at how to tackle corruption more effectively, notably ANTICORRP and the FCDO-funded Anti-corruption Evidence (ACE) Programme, some of which has a rule of law focus.

Researchers recently examined data on police-related bribery in South Africa. In one province, Limpopo, bribery fell by almost 15% between 2011 and 2015, while the rate in the rest of the country fell by on average less than 4% (Peiffer et al. 2018). This bribery reduction in Limpopo’s police took place during the time that the national government led an unprecedented high-level anti-corruption intervention in several provinces, but a specific intervention in Limpopo, unrelated to the police, affected bribery levels dramatically and quite quickly. The research suggests the police in Limpopo may have been especially reluctant to engage in bribery because of uncertainty as to whether they were also under investigation and because of the heightened anti-corruption action. The bribery reduction in the police was likely an unanticipated ‘benign side effect’ of a separate intervention.

Encourage More Transparency in Policy Making

It is just a fact of life that those with power or access to power will seek to influence the law and official policy for their own benefit and that in many cases they will succeed. Be alert for this in each corruption issue you are taking on.

The OECD (2017c) has produced a report on addressing policy capture. Although they don’t have any magic solution to prevent it, the report is detailed and wide-ranging and may be helpful to you in arguing for change. For example, the report provides clear evidence that increased transparency of policy making relates to increased trust in politicians—see Fig. 7.2.

Fig. 7.2

Correlation between public trust in politicians, level of perceived undue influence and transparency in government policy making 2014–2015. (Source: OECD (2017c) Preventing policy capture. Integrity in public decision making. https://read.oecd-ilibrary.org/governance/preventing-policy-capture_9789264065239-en#page4)

‘Corruption-proofing’ Statutes and Regulations

According to Wijesinha (2018), ‘So-called corruption proofing is an ex-ante preventive measure that entails review of the form and substance of legal acts (principally statutes or regulations) to minimize the risk of future corruption. It is a new strategy in the anti-corruption toolkit. As of 2015, 13 countries had enacted some form of corruption proofing: Armenia, Albania, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, South Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan.’

However, this measure and the next one below are only likely to be available to you if you are a justice organisation or similar.

Investigation and Prosecution

The best example of a focus on these measures is the reforms by the Taiwan justice officials (see Section above on ‘Build a Critical Mass of Committed Supporters Inside Your Ministry or Organisation’). This exemplifies the importance of improved performance of justice organisations.

On a larger scale, there is some evidence of an increase in the number of prosecutions for corruption of top politicians, notably ex-presidents and prime ministers—from Latin America (where sitting or former presidents have been prosecuted for corruption in Colombia, Costa Rica, Brazil, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and Peru) to Europe (where two former French presidents have been convicted of corruption, an Austrian ex-chancellor was convicted, leading Spanish politicians were sent to prison and a former Bulgarian prime minister was detained), Israel (where a sitting prime minister was indicted and put on trial), South Africa (where a former president was sentenced for corruption), South Korea (where former presidents were given lengthy jail terms for corruption).

However, caution is needed: many convicted politicians are subsequently able to resume their career and then act against judicial independence (Menaldo et al. 2021)—as happened, for instance, with the International Commission against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG).

Transparency Improvement Measures

Along with independent review and monitoring, transparency is one of the core tools in reducing corruption. Corruption problems naturally thrive when relevant data is not made public. Amongst the measures to consider are the following:

Identify Service Data That Needs to Be Transparent

This can be very simple such as publishing hospital waiting lists for surgery or publishing how much of the primary school education budget is received by each school. This reform type is both context- and sector-specific, so you need to brainstorm with colleagues on what data would most show up corruption or improper influence.

Advocate for Engagements with Public Officials and Public Bodies to Be Made Public

If public money is being used, then there should be a presumption that the interactions should be public. Examples include senior public officials having their engagements calendar online (e.g. European Commissioners) or new contracting and procurement procedures that require all contracts, progress reports, tender submissions and so forth to be available online (see Open Contracting Partnership, for example).

This reform approach has been recognised through an international collaboration, the Open Government Partnership (OGP). OGP provides an international platform for domestic reformers committed to making their governments more open, accountable and responsive to citizens. It now has about 100 countries as members. However, though transparency is a valuable tool, it also has its limits and some counter-productive implications. It has been easy for many countries and sectors to seem to comply, putting a lot of data online, whilst continuing to obstruct—so much so that some people have referred to open government as ‘political theatre for the corrupt’ (Matioc 2015). So, there is more to this than just transparency, or open data, alone (for a detailed analysis of the limitations of transparency, see Alloa and Thomä 2018). Also, even if relevant data is publicly available, it may not be widely accessed or understood and therefore efforts towards raising awareness and educating the public in making sense of data will complement data transparency initiatives—this is discussed further below.

Advocate for National, Regional and Project Budgets, and the Spending against Those Budgets, to Be Public and Transparent

This is not yet the case in many countries or sectors. The Open Budget Survey—an NGO that seeks to ensure public budget systems work for people rather than special interests—showed that in 2021, just 31% of the 120 countries they work with provided sufficiently detailed information to understand how their budgets address poverty.

Consider Making Internal and External Audit Reports Public

External audit reports ought to be public, though many are not.

Internal audit reports are more commonly not public. There is some good justification for this—making them public could lead to problems being kept under wraps rather than reported, or to the internal auditor not being trusted by the persons responsible for the activity (owners of the processes) being audited. Equally, the managers of the organisation may pressure the internal auditors so that nothing significant is noted in the reports. But the opposite problem is equally real: if reports are not public, they can be buried and marginalised. The Internal Audit Standards body (IPPF) and the ‘Three lines of defence’ model, both provide for reporting exclusively to the management body.

Watch Out for When Transparency Does Not Work as Intended

Transparency may be good, but it is not a panacea. Often data and reports are made transparent, but the underlying corrupt behaviour still does not change, especially if the public and NGOs are uninterested in examining and acting on the data or lack experience in interpreting and utilising such data. Look especially where your organisation already has transparency, and it is not having much effect: what more do you need to do? For example, the answer may be to encourage third parties to make more use of the newly transparent information. Some countries in Latin America are a long way down this path. They have extensive transparency of government data, but the volume has vastly exceeded the capacity of third parties or the public to review it. Brazil is one such example (see Power and Taylor 2011 and Aranha 2018). Transparency can thus backfire. An empirical study by Bauhr and Grimes (2014), exploring the effectiveness of transparency measures to enhance accountability and curb corruption, concluded that ‘an increase in transparency in highly corrupt countries tends to breed resignation rather than indignation’.

Integrity Improvement Measures

Integrity is a magical word. Coming from Latin (integritas) and then French (integrité) in the Middle Ages, its meaning combines good moral character of the individual and wholeness of a larger entity in one single word. Strengthening integrity is a positive action and one that strikes a strong chord of pride in people.

Traditional approaches to tackling corruption—based on the creation of more rules, stricter compliance and tougher enforcement—have been of limited effectiveness (Heywood and Rose 2016). Increasingly, attention has been focused on fostering public integrity as a strategic and sustainable response to corruption: ‘Integrity is one of the key pillars of political, economic, and social structures and thus essential to the economic and social well-being and prosperity of individuals and societies as a whole’ (OECD 2018).

However, the word ‘integrity’ is too often taken to mean just an absence of corruption; in practice, there are many ways to behave without integrity whilst not being corrupt. Instead, it is important to explore what it means to have integrity and where to focus efforts in promoting it: should it operate just at the level of individual officers or within broader units (departments, ministries, whole governments)? Increasingly, anti-corruption reforms are pitched in terms of ‘integrity’, but without exploring the real implications of the term and its organisational requirements (see Heywood et al. 2017; Heywood and Kirby, 2020). The military is one sector in which there has been much emphasis on ‘integrity’ as an anti-corruption approach, as explored by Wong and Gerras (2015) in a critical analysis of the decline of US army integrity. The Defence Integrity Framework of the Canadian military approach (Government of Canada 2021) or NATO’s ‘Building Integrity’ initiative and the NATO publication (Pyman and Wegener 2010, NATO 2020) offer examples of constructive approaches. For recent overviews, see two reports from the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre (Jenkins 2022; U4 2023).

Amongst specific measures to consider are the following:

Improve the Quality of Your Management Cadre

There are many things that can be done to improve staff integrity within your sector or in your area of responsibility. You may have significant control over recruitment, over promotions, over sanctions and over discipline of your officials. You may be able to make larger changes, such as ensuring that the exams used to control entry are properly reviewed and marked. Recent evidence underlines the importance of strong control of the exam system (see Oliveros and Schuster 2018). Ensuring fairness in these areas within your responsibility is a prime example of integrity management. Staff respond positively and are then less ready to engage in corrupt practices. Distrust, disaffection and apathy are likely to flourish in institutional environments which lack clearly meritocratic processes.

Integrity approaches in government and large organisations are seen to have developed from the Scandinavian civil service and the UK Civil Service in the nineteenth century, as they moved towards meritocracy-based recruitment and developed norms of professional service (see Mungiu-Pippidi 2015 or Johnston 2008). Since then, most national public servants receive training and guidance in good ethical behaviour, and Colleges of Government teach the values—although recent research by Schuster et al. (2020) and by Meyer-Sahling and Mikkelson (2019) suggests that such ethical training often has only limited real-world impact and that ‘best practice’ management techniques can have paradoxical impacts.

In similar vein, companies have developed their management systems to control corruption and comply with anti-corruption laws, many of them simultaneously embracing a values approach with their workforce. They too recognise that compliance-only approaches are limited and insufficient. There is plenty of guidance on developing programmes on both compliance and ethics approaches in companies, and how to develop the two in tandem.

Consider How the National Religious Authorities Can Have a Useful Impact

The norms of most societies and of all major religions include acting with integrity; religious leaders and their institutions, of whatever faith, exert the principal force in promoting and maintaining good personal conduct in many countries. Religious authorities may already be deeply engaged on integrity and anti-corruption in their countries, but often are not. There may well be scope to bring them in. This may be true sector by sector, as well as nationally.

Example

In the defence sector in Norway, it is the Lutheran military pastors who are responsible for ethics and integrity in the Norwegian military.

Establish a Small Integrity Unit or Transparency Unit Within Your Organisation/Ministry

Having people in place full time to advocate and/or coordinate change can make a real difference. Think how you can do this in your organisation/ministry. Such units, even if comprising only a few people, can have significant impact.

Example

One such unit, an innovation in the Ministry of Defence of Poland, was established in 2007 and is still in place. It started as an anti-corruption task force analysing weak/corrupt areas of the MOD. The group whittled the eight priority areas down to just three: high value procurement, high rank officers, and abuse of power. On procurement, they proceeded to make a whole series of reforms, including more transparency, less single source procurement, better operational testing, more electronic auctions, as illustrated in Fig. 7.3.

This sounds straightforward, but was not, and did not happen easily. For example, suspicious orders kept being re-submitted to the full-time anti-corruption methods task. The task force was then established as a permanent ‘Procedures’ unit. It comprised only four staff, and the team was headed by a man who had previously been a civil society activist working for Transparency International Poland. They were committed and had the support of the Minister of Defence (Wnuk 2008: 29–30; Wnuk 2011; Pyman 2017b: 520)

Fig. 7.3

Poland defence procurement reform. From Wnuk 2011 Building Integrity in defence; the Polish experience. See https://curbingcorruption.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Wnuk-2011-Building-integrity-in-defence-the-Polish-experience.pdf

Set Up an Ad-hoc ‘Integrity Committee’ or ‘Integrity Advisory Group’ in Your Organisation

This would be a way of marking the importance you place on ‘integrity’ in your organisation. It might not work, or it might just become a talking shop—in which case, abolish it again. On the other hand, you might be able to use such a group to change peoples’ perceptions of the importance of building integrity and of using pride in these values to tackle corruption. There is no prescription as to what such a function may look like and what it should do. The OECD, for example, has reviewed the pros and cons of ethics committees versus dedicated integrity/ethics units or advisors and the various reasons why they may not succeed, such as lack of continuity, diffusion of responsibility or lack of know-how (see OECD 2019, 2021). Nonetheless, a dedicated integrity function such as in the Polish defence experience presented above (a unit/person in the second line of assurance) can definitely contribute both to showing credible commitment and to promoting work on strengthening the internal organisational culture.

Set Out an ‘Integrity Framework’ for the Organisation

You could gather a group to design a specific integrity strategy and call it an ‘integrity framework’ for your ministry/organisation. Heywood and Kirby (2020) discuss what it means to develop a robust commitment to organisational integrity and why this goes beyond just instituting anti-corruption measures.

The OECD is now actively pushing an integrity-based approach to tackling corruption. In their view, a public integrity system, as recognised by the OECD Recommendation on Public Integrity, is the foundation of trust in governments, institutions and the whole of society. Although the OECD is working with a national-level perspective, their 13 recommendations can easily be translated or applied to a specific sector or even to a specific organisation. Do use the related volumes: OECD Public Integrity Handbook (OECD 2017a, 2020) and the OECD Public Integrity Indicators (OECD 2023a) on what an integrity approach to tackling corruption means in practice.

Figure 7.4 shows OECD’s model of the pillars of a public integrity system—accountability, culture and system.

Fig. 7.4

The three pillars of public integrity according to OECD. OECD Public Integrity Handbook, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/ac8ed8e8-en

Train Your Leadership Team in Integrity and Anti-Corruption

People in senior positions and leadership roles often need help in how to communicate values. You could set up periodic round tables with your senior colleagues to discuss integrity issues and communicating values. If you think training would help, there are many people and consultancies that can provide this sort of training. This approach doesn’t work so easily if the senior leaders are all either corrupt or insincere. But, even then, such training nonetheless can make a difference, as was seen with military and security officers in Ukraine before the Maidan revolution of 2013 (Pyman 2017b: 523–524).

Extend Integrity/Anti-Corruption Awareness Raising and Training More Widely

You can consider general anti-corruption education for officials; anti-corruption education for young people in schools and universities and building the capability of locally accountable community oversight bodies. Such development programmes can be a useful measure, especially if they reach a critical mass of people or officials, and in environments where it is hard or dangerous to pursue more direct impacts. This is one way to show that at least something is happening, however modest, especially in highly corrupt environments.

But be careful how you do this: research suggests that awareness raising can also unintentionally backfire, reducing confidence, even in settings where the messages are mainly positive in stressing successes against corruption (see Peiffer 2017a, 2017b; Cheeseman and Peiffer 2021, 2022).

Conduct Ethics/Integrity Surveys of Staff and Use the Results

Many governments nowadays conduct annual surveys of their public officials. They can be an excellent way to add ethics/integrity questions (if not already there), to give feedback to staff on the results and the changes you will be making. You may already have a sectoral survey of staff, in which case you can add questions. Even traditionally closed organisations like Defence Ministries have started doing this: for instance, the US Department of Defense contracted a 2010 survey and follow-up study to assess ethical culture and design and implement a values-based ethics programme (US Government Accounting Office 2015). In several European countries, staff assessments are used as a way of monitoring integrity among their public officials (Lamboo et al. 2016).

Consider Radical Change to Personnel to Raise Integrity

Sometimes the better solution has been to dismiss a whole cadre of corrupt officials and to hire new officials, such as happened in Georgia and Estonia. Or to dramatically restrict the mandate of the whole organisation, such as happened with the High Office of Oversight and Anti-Corruption in Afghanistan, and to start anew.

Introduce Integrity into Your Community Via Media

The NGO Accountability Lab supports change-makers to develop and implement positive ideas for integrity in their communities, unleashing positive social and economic change. They have developed many ideas, such as the global campaign ‘Integrity Icon’ (previously ‘Idol’) that uses TV, radio and social media to ‘name and fame’ public officials who demonstrate integrity. The initiative is just a few years old, but is now active in 15 countries (DRC, Liberia, Mali, Mexico, Morocco, Nepal, Niger, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Somaliland, Sri Lanka, Ukraine, the USA and Zimbabwe). Alongside more traditional forms of media, social media is an increasingly viable way of promoting integrity and related initiatives.

Advocate for Longer-Term Societal Change Through Education

There is evidence showing that one of the most important factors in reducing corruption for Western democracies was universal education (Uslaner 2017; Uslaner and Rothstein 2012). The impact of universal school education, it has also been argued, was one of the drivers of the more recent reductions in corruption in South Korea (see Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston 2017: 218). Other relevant elements of education in the progress against corruption include the education of elites abroad (as in cases such as Botswana, Chile, Georgia, South Korea) and the role of universities as islands of resistance to corruption (as in Estonia and Georgia—see Mungiu-Pippidi and Johnston 2017: 238). However, the research shows that universal education is effective only if in concert with other approaches; of itself it is not sufficient, as seen in the less positive experiences of Greece and Italy (see OECD 2017b).

Review the Effectiveness of Integrity Standards and Codes of Conduct and Improve Them

Codes of conduct and standards may exist in your organisation, but in too many cases they are not enforced, and this laxity has become accepted. You could commission an objective report into how such codes are operating. It will most probably be highly critical, but that’s the point: it gives you ammunition to push for improvement, a change that is likely to be supported by staff. Spectacularly critical reports can have an impact, such as Lying to Ourselves: The Demise of Military Integrity by Wong and Gerras (2015) about falling standards in the US army.

Review and Call Out Conflicts of Interest

Conflict of interest is an important but difficult aspect of integrity. Many people do not recognise what constitute conflicts of interest or try to rationalise them away. Making them explicit can help to make real to your staff what these conflicts are, how they can merge into corruption and how they may evidence a lack of integrity in your organisation. An example would be in relation to improving recruitment and promotion practices, where such conflicts are often responsible for non-meritocratic decisions by line managers.

Ask Stakeholders About ‘Fairness’ as a Basis for Solving a Corruption Issue

Fairness is one of the elements of integrity, and this can be a more useful lens for ‘reducing corruption’. For example, where you have citizens paying for small services or stuck in waitlists, and both are subject to corruption by the responsible bureaucrats of officials, it can be helpful to explore solutions that are accepted as ‘fairer’ even if there is still some residual corruption.

Make Building Integrity a Key Part of Your Strategy, Alongside Fighting Corruption

Building integrity can be more motivating than the more negative-sounding aim of reducing corruption, though this varies from society to society. There are pros and cons to this. In some cultures, it really is counter-productive to speak directly about corruption, but this approach can also be used by officials to justify working on ‘easier’ issues, such as training and capacity development, rather than tackling the tougher elements of the problems.

Civil Society Measures

Civil society organisations (CSOs) are widely seen as playing a crucial role in tackling corruption, and it is worth exploring how to bring them on board as collaborators where possible. We mentioned in Chap. 4 some examples of international sectoral networks that support anti-corruption initiatives. Indeed, many civil society organisations have deep experience in working collaboratively with other organisations. Examples include Transparency International’s close cooperation with Siemens on the latter’s Integrity Initiative (TI 2016); the UN Global Compact that works with CSOs to promote anti-corruption within companies; Business Action Against Corruption (BAAC), which seeks to use collective action against corruption in Nigeria as part of the Convention on Business Integrity; the Partnering Initiative that seeks to facilitate cooperation between CSOs and businesses to tackle corruption and improve transparency in supply chains; Fair Trade CSOs that seek to ensure producers in developing countries receive fair compensation free of corruption; various social auditing organisations that work with companies in manufacturing, agriculture and other sectors to conduct audits of ethical and environmental practices that can uncover corruption.

Collaborative working can be highly effective, helping to raise awareness of key issues, develop policy proposals, engage in monitoring and reporting, protect whistleblowers, support capacity-building, provide oversight and watchdog functions, as well as research and data collections, and even initiate legal action. In some cases, formal collaborative agreements are set up to promote anti-corruption initiatives. For instance, the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition brings together leading anti-corruption organisations, including CSOs, INGOs, academic institutions and media organisations.

On the other hand, there is some evidence that stand-alone civil society projects may be less effective. An analysis by Mungiu-Pippidi (2015) of some 471 civil society projects in Eastern Europe in the period 2000–2010 showed that only about a third had any traceable impact. These projects were the ones that targeted corruption directly and concretely, that were done in collaboration with journalists, and set up by grass roots organisations rather than by donors. An analysis by the Partnership for Transparency Fund of 200 civil society projects that they sponsored came to similar conclusions. Successful projects needed to: (i) focus on a single set of problems and not be over-ambitious, (ii) start only when the problem is well understood, (iii) be non-confrontational and patient, (iv) work with key champions of reform within the power structure and (v) seek to reform the official accountability system with the evidence gained from the project (Landell-Mills 2013: 230–231). However, this section does not attempt to discuss in depth how civil society organisations can effect change and improvement, because this book is targeted at options for other types of organisations.

Nonetheless, it makes sense to explore possibilities for engagement and collaboration with civil society actors where appropriate. This will involve identifying the right CSOs with an appropriate track record in anti-corruption work, establishing a clear purpose for the engagement, initiating genuine two-way dialogue rather than a list of requirements, offering financial support where appropriate, sharing information openly, and establishing systems to monitor the effectiveness and progress of the collaboration. By working together, CSOs and other organisations and institutions can leverage their respective strengths and resources to promote transparency, integrity and ethical practices, contributing to a more accountable and corruption-free environment. For more information on CSOs, see U4 (n.d.), UNODC (n.d.), Grimes (2008).

Where possible, it also makes sense to work with media outlets and journalists who specialise in anti-corruption reporting to advocate for specific measures or to expose particular issues. Indeed, media reports on corruption have taken centre stage in recent years at the global level, especially in relation to a series of data leaks such as the Panama, Paradise and Pandora Papers, the Lux Leaks and Credit Suisse Leaks, the FinCEN files and so forth. Bodies such as the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) and the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) have played a major role in exposing transnational networks of corrupt activity, involving money laundering and illicit financial flows. Whilst it is not especially practical for individual organisations and companies to work directly with such international networks, it can be useful to explore how judicious collaboration with relevant media outlets can support your anti-corruption efforts. This, of course, assumes you are operating in an environment where there is a mainly free and independent media, something that cannot always be taken for granted and is under increasing threat even in democratic jurisdictions from malign forces seeking to exploit social media tools to promote ‘fake news’.

Incentive and Nudge Improvement Measures

Economists have long argued that successful implementation of any policy requires that the preferences of all those involved be appropriately aligned with achieving the goals of that scheme. There is a raft of economic measures that have a place in reducing corruption. Examples include more competition, more consumer choice, better information, fewer layers, firm incentives, better banking rules, the role for technology, spill-over and demonstration effects and so on. These measures can all have significant impact on corruption. For example, criminal law measures can act as incentives not to be corrupt, such as legalising payments where criminalisation makes no sense and is driving perverse behaviour. For a broader discussion, see Rose-Ackerman and Palifka (2016).

However, in its application to tackling corruption, the incentives approach has had a mixed reception, as it is often unclear who is the agent and who is the principal. Furthermore, monitoring agent behaviour and holding agents accountable are particularly difficult in the public sector. This has led to some arguing that corruption represents a ‘collective action’ problem, in which individual interests and incentives may not align with those of the wider group, leading to a lack of cooperation even when all would benefit. The debate between Principal-Agent and Collective Action approaches is well worn and not always very helpful (Heywood 2017), but at sector level it is arguably easier to see how specific incentives can help to re-align policies to promote less corruption.

One example of the application of incentives to reduce corruption in particular sectors is from the work of Khan et al. (2016) and Khan (2017) through the SOAS-ACE (School of Oriental and African Studies) programme funded by the FCDO. They have examined in detail mechanisms for reducing corruption in the Bangladesh energy sector, the Bangladesh garments sector and the Nigerian power sector. Another example is from corruption reduction efforts in the forestry sector, for example in Ecuador, where they combined a new government decree with the ability to monitor logging activities based on verifiable indicators (see Kishor and Damania 2007). In these cases, the objective of the incentives is not directly to ‘reduce corruption’ but to make the sector more productive.

Nudge Measures

Of great interest to organisations are the possibilities of using ‘nudges’ as a tool for changing behaviour. Instead of controlling how people behave by taking away their freedom to choose, they are changing the decision-making context in a way that leads people to make different choices, thereby ‘nudging’ them towards a desired behaviour.

A ‘nudge’ is a means of encouraging or guiding behaviour, but without mandating or instructing, and ideally without the need for heavy financial incentives or sanctions. We know what it means in everyday life: it’s a gentle hint; a suggestion; a conspicuous glance at a heap of clothes that we’re hoping our kids might clear away. Research in social and cognitive psychology has led to new thinking on how people make decisions. We are not rational choice individuals, as mainstream economists would have it. Rather, we are influenced by our context and our emotions, and our decision-making ability is prone to errors in remembering, predicting and deciding between options. Further, research has shown that these errors are often not random but predictable.

This in turn has led to a rapid growth of so-called ‘behavioural science’, based on the idea that we operate in conditions of ‘bounded rationality’ (Simon 1982). Amongst its insights are ways in which small changes in people’s decision-making context can have large impacts on behaviour.

In the UK, for example, to increase savings for retirement, the government has instituted a policy where employers automatically enrol their employees in pension schemes. Employees can opt out of the scheme if they want to—that is, they are under no obligation to remain enrolled. However, simply by making enrolment in a pension scheme the ‘default’ option, employers have increased uptake of pension schemes significantly.

Nudging is appealing for several reasons. First, nudges are often relatively cheap as compared to other policy tools. Changing the default option, for example, may simply entail changing one sentence and one tick box on a form. Relatedly, nudges can be easy to implement. Implementing them often does not require legislative changes or multiple approvals. In contexts where the bureaucratic processes and inefficient governance slow down change, this can be particularly beneficial. Third, nudges may work in contexts where increasing the level of control over people’s behaviour can actually backfire. Higher levels of regulation and monitoring do not necessarily lead to reduced corruption. In fact, restricting people further may signal to them that they are not trustworthy or work to make them feel resentful, driving them to behave more unethically. Control and punishment may also reduce people’s internal motivation to act ethically.

Finally, the design of nudges is based on an understanding of human psychology. As a result, nudges may be more effective than policies that forget to take the ‘human’ element into consideration. Nudge theory recognises that people are not always rational and that they won’t necessarily act logically, and that information or awareness alone won’t necessarily change behaviour. People do not always carefully weigh up the costs and benefits of acting unethically, factoring in the risk of getting caught and the potential punishment.

The theory also accepts that multiple drivers—the physical context, individual psychology and those around us, to name a few—impact on behaviour. For example, there are many reasons why people may be dishonest or corrupt, such as feeling social pressure to conform, losing self-control due to exhaustion, or a sense that they deserve the spoils of a corrupt behaviour because they are being treated unfairly. Even well-meaning individuals who are informed about corruption and its consequences may fail to make the right ethical choices sometimes. A nudge-based approach acknowledges these aspects of human psychology and responds to them.

Below are examples of nudges that can be used to reduce corruption—either on their own or as applied alongside other more traditional methods. While based on behavioural science research, nudges by their very nature are highly context-specific and should be tested when used in new environments and situations.

If you want to read more generally about this topic, we recommend the field-defining book on the theory by Thaler and Sunstein (2008) and a book about its application in political practice in the UK by Halpern (2015). The application to tackling corruption is also well covered in a publication by the OECD (2018). The OECD is currently extending its work in this area, in response to ever more countries becoming interested in a behavioural perspective on addressing corruption. Since the 2018 report, the OECD has worked on applying this perspective in Chile (OECD 2022), in Romania (OECD 2023b) and on leadership in Brazil (OECD 2023c). The OECD is also exploring the relevance of behavioural theory for improving the management of conflicts of interest.

On a related tack, new research on the potential pitfalls of awareness-raising about corruption is also worth exploring: see, for example, Peiffer and Cheeseman (2023).

Nudge Mechanisms

Pre-Commit to Integrity

People are more likely to be ethical when doing an activity if they ‘pre-commit’ to behaving ethically before starting that activity. For instance, documents that ask people to sign an ethical statement committing themselves to truthfulness usually have that statement at their end—the individual only signs it after having filled out the rest of the document. People are more likely to be honest in filling out forms if they sign such statement at the beginning of the document, before filling in the rest of the form.

Use Public Commitments

Public commitments have been shown to be very powerful in driving behaviour. One way to increase honesty is to have individuals commit to integrity verbally or in writing (and ideally both) in front of colleagues and the public.

Such commitments work through at least two mechanisms. First, people tend to want to act consistently for their own sake, to promote a clear narrative of who they are: if they say they are honest, then they are more likely to want to act like an honest person. Second, people want to act consistently in front of others due to social pressure: if they say they are going to act with integrity in front of their colleagues, they may be embarrassed to then not act with integrity in front of those colleagues.

Example

When new employees first join your organisation, as part of their induction, in an all-staff meeting you can ask that when they introduce themselves to everyone in a staff meeting, then they also make a verbal commitment to acting with integrity.

Make Being Dishonest an Active Choice

People are more likely to be dishonest by omission rather than commission. That is, they are more likely to leave out information that results in them being dishonest than to actively provide false information; it is simply easier to feel like an ethical person when omitting to admit to something.

Use Timely Reminders to Promote Integrity

Sometimes people simply need to be reminded to act ethically. This is in part because everyone has a limited amount of self-control (or willpower). During stressful periods, when time and resources are short, self-control is diminished, and people are much more likely to succumb to temptation. Sending people reminders about ethics during at-risk procedures can lead them to act more ethically.

Example

Send out simple text messages or written notes saying things such as ‘Thank you for your honesty’.

Have People Create a Clear Plan on How to Tackle a High-Risk Activity

Having a step-by-step plan, even for an ‘easy’ activity, significantly increases the chances of the activity getting done. For example, people have been shown to be more likely to vote in person if they think through a specific plan as to how they will get to the polling station on the day—they may decide on what time they will leave work, what mode of transportation they will take and whether they will take their children with them.

Example

If the objective is to manage a fair, ethical procurement process for a government contract, an official may make a plan that includes ‘being offered a bribe by a bidder’ as an obstacle. The plan could then include a formal signed requirement such as ‘If I am offered a bribe by a bidder, then I will refuse it and report the incident to my supervisor.’ While this may seem simple, it can be a highly effective way to ensure that in a stressful moment, or when willpower is depleted, the official does not cave in to temptation.

Inform People That the Desired Behaviour Is the Norm

We are social creatures, and those around us have a huge impact on how we behave. What others do gives us information about what might be best for us, and peer pressure leads us to want to conform to what we believe others think we should be doing. Social norms are the common and expected ways of behaving within a particular social group, and most people try to conform to such norms.

Example

When there is a high, but imperfect, adherence to a desired social norm, advertising this high level of adherence can lead those who are non-compliant to change their behaviour. For instance, if you know that 92% of staff in a particular ministry truthfully declared X in the previous year, you can send a letter or email to all staff informing them that 92% of ministry officials did X. The desired behaviour can be reinforced by rewarding commitment to the norm through public recognition. For example, every month you can email all staff in the ministry a list of all the individuals who did X.

What is clear in any context, however, is that you need to be very careful about highlighting high levels of corruption, because doing so may be promoting a negative norm—making people feel it is common and thus acceptable to act corruptly. Recent work by Cheeseman and Peiffer (2021, 2022) has shown that anti-corruption awareness-raising efforts may be backfiring, as instead of encouraging citizens to resist corruption, they may be nudging them instead to ‘go with the corruption grain’ and undermining their commitment to the social contract (notably, a willingness to pay tax).

Enforce the Rules That Are Easier to Enforce First

When people see that their peers have violated one social norm, they are more likely to violate another. To encourage pro-social behaviour in one area, therefore, it is important to demonstrate it in others. And this can be done by ensuring correct behaviour in more observable spheres.

Example

To reduce the theft of office supplies or stamp out other forms of petty corruption in an office, it might be useful to ensure that pro-social norms within the office are followed. For example, you might want to make sure that offices are clean and tidy, making it clear that leaving a mess is not accepted. Enforcing rules that are easier to ‘see’ and enforce than many forms of anti-corruption can lead to a reduction in corruption itself.

Use to Your Advantage the Fact That People Overweight Small Probabilities

People tend to overweight small probabilities. That is, they perceive a small probability of something happening as being much greater than it is.

Example

When resources to carry out audits are very limited, you can alert people that anyone could be audited, but that only randomly selected individuals or organisations will be. The chance of being monitored, even if very small, may act as a large deterrent.

Use Images to Prompt Honesty

Being watched makes people more honest. Simply placing pictures of two eyes over ‘honesty jars’ that people put money into to pay for a snack, tea or other items increases the amount of money people pay.

Test Different Types of Messages to Increase Compliance

It is possible to experiment with various types of letters or emails to elicit compliance with diverse regulations, not only tax compliance. A nearly identical letter can have small variations to test which type of framing is most effective. One letter can simply ask for compliance. The second can use a social norms nudge, informing people that a high percentage of their fellow citizens have complied. A third can threaten sanctions and a fourth can remind the individual of the ethical reasons for compliance.

Personalised Messages

Personalised messages are more effective in eliciting action than non-personalised messages. This is why marketers use recipients’ names in emails whenever they can. Despite people knowing that they are receiving a mass-generated email that has gone out to thousands of people, personalisation makes us pause slightly longer when we see the message, increasing the chances of us reading the rest of the email and paying more attention to the content.

Change the Timings of Major Decisions

Scarcity of time and money leads to reduced self-control. For individuals who only rarely act unethically, these moments may be when they are most likely to succumb to temptation and make a decision that is self-serving at the expense of integrity. As a result, major decisions where corruption is possible should be made when decision-makers are least likely to have reduced self-control.

Example

In contexts where civil servants are paid little, they might start having financial worries in the days before getting their monthly wage. This is a period of scarcity and risk to their self-control. As such, you should schedule the times for final evaluations of bids and the announcement of tender outcomes for when the decision-makers involved are most likely to have more money—such as a few days after they get paid. This may reduce the decision-makers’ inclination to change the bid scores in a way that results in the winning bidder being chosen based on bribes or other improper influence instead of on merit.