It is time to shift the primary reform focus from nations to sectors. At sector level, like in  health, construction or water, you can be specific about the detailed types of corruption. You can integrate both public and private sector action, and you can address the political context more realistically. There is more ownership and pride from those working in the sector. Sector-level initiatives are more feasible, whether small, such as within a department, or large, such as across the Ministry or an agency. Even in the toughest corruption environments, where progress may only be possible in tiny steps, there are many sector improvement measures that can help, and which can form the basis of a much larger improvement when circumstances change.

“What is a sector and how is this better?”

Sectors are the structures and functions through which national life operates. Most of them are organised at national level as Ministries. All of them are areas of activity where the government has policy goals. These include service delivery sectors like education, health, police and prisons; economic sectors like construction, fisheries, shipping, telecommunications and tourism; structural sectors like the legislature, the judiciary and the civil service.

Disaggregation; Whilst corruption is a general term. the detailed types of corruption are sector-specific. For example, the various pharmaceutical-related corruption types within health, or the ways that telecom licenses are corruptly granted. Even when a corruption type is common across sectors, such as the corrupt diversion of salaries from the ministry to the worker, the ways that this happens and the ways that it can be stopped are different from one sector to another. You can only disaggregate corruption at sector level.

CurbingCorruption’s Sector Focus and Reformulation Approach

We research every sector to identify the detailed corruption types and to collect reform experiences what is known about tackling each of the corruption reform types in that sector. The likelihood and impact of each detailed sector corruption type of course varies a lot from country to country. But the power of this knowledge is that the list of corruption types (typically 20-40) in the sector is common across countries. This can be hard, not because they don’t exist but  because reforms are rarely written up. Why not? Because reforms are usual partial, combining both positive progress and failure. Because reforms are often fragile, easily undone by opponents until they are embedded so reformers don’t want to tempt fate by claiming success about them. Because corruption is about injustice and the injustice is almost never fully removed, so people feel hesitant to sound positive.

Eleven sectors have been covered so far and we will put many of the other sectors out on CurbingCorruption in the coming months.  We are open to people wishing to be co-authors who can help us to research and write the reviews that are not yet written.

Seven reasons why the sector approach is good:

1. A sector typology gets us away from binary types – Grand/petty, need/greed, political/ bureaucratic, institutional/individual all vanish: all types are in the one typology
2. The sector approach integrates pubic sector reform and private sector reform. In every sector, the public sector and the private sector are deeply intertwined; whether as integration of contractors, outsourcing of support roles, complete privatisation of previously government tasks.
3. The Political context  is usually not nationally homogenous; it differs markedly between sectors.
4. Understanding and changing the ‘rules of the game’ happens within sectors
5. You will always find professionally credible champions within each sector to articulate/drive change
6. The corruption differences between individual sectors within any one country are large and often bigger than the differences in corruption between countries.  Sector knowledge also transcends national boundaries: medical staff in one country may well have knowledge that is helpful in another; and transnational initiatives to solve sector-specific corruption problems now exist, such as in education, in mineral extraction, in defence and in shipping.
7. Sector-specific reform plans have more ownership than national plans. We recognise that national-level reforms have their place, but we are convinced that more success will be achieved against corruption by working sector by sector. There are, of course, important anti-corruption tasks not only at sector level but also at the whole-of-government level. Examples include national anti-corruption strategies, the criminal prosecution system and ethics in the cvil service. Strategies such as establishing integrity frameworks more naturally operate at this level. Equally, there are other international types of non-sector corruption, such as beneficial ownership transparency and the recovery of stolen assets. You can follow up these important initiatives elsewhere.

Focus and Disaggregating

You and your team first disaggregate the general concerns about corruption into the specific issues. You do this at two levels. Some will be unique to the sector you work in. In health, for example, this may be the problem of fake medicines, or doctors specifying unnecessary interventions. Some will be embedded in the structure of your sector, like economic incentives that reward corrupt behaviour. Other problems will be more generic – like corruption in recruitment and promotion, or in procurement. You use this list that you create to build a shared understanding of what corruption is, and how exactly it damages your organisation. CurbingCorruption provides templates to help you do this. You and your team can then prioritise the issues, based on feasibility and impact.

Reformulating your objectives

This will also lead you to reformulate your objectives. Your objective here is only indirectly to lower corruption. Your direct objectives are likely to be different. They may be to discipline rule-breaking, or to prevent specific problems, or to show a sense of justice, or to give hope that things might change. Most commonly, your objective is to achieve better results from your organisation by removing the barriers that the corruption problems represent. This prevention and reduction approach is different from most peoples’ view of corruption reform, which tends to focus on punishment of the corrupt. There are many other techniques you can use. At CurbingCorruption, we have made this easier by setting out Templates of possible Techniques, and  documenting practical reform experience from different sectors.

Laying out Reform Options

Now you move away from individual corruption reforms to the bigger picture. You lay out options for the overall actionable reform approach you might use, and for the different specific reform measures you could use, because there will be different ways you could proceed. A narrow, low-impact strategy may be best in hostile political environments, just maintaining hopes for future reform. Where there is a strong sense of pride in the workforce, a motivational staff-led strategy is an option. CurbingCorruption provides Strategy Templates to help you set out the options.

Gaining internationally from the Sector

You should also look to gain from your sector internationally Every sector, from defence to health, now has anti-corruption initiatives; they have many examples of anti-corruption reform that you can learn from. CurbingCorruption has documented these for many sectors. Finally, check realism, by outlining the projects & plans, by thinking politically, by consultation.

We have developed this website to appeal widely to people who want to take action to reduce corruption within their sector of society, and/or within their organisation. This includes Members of Parliament, the private sector, civil society organisations, professional associations, the media and the judiciary. The website is nonetheless oriented towards two groups more than others: public officials within government or related agencies who wish to develop initiatives, or who have been charged with doing this, and are not sure how to proceed; and politicians, whether in government or in opposition, looking how to develop and implement anti-corruption initiatives within their sphere of responsibility. 

Mark Pyman is working with a group of editors led by Prof. Paul Heywood, together with Michell man and Ton Shipley. Besides the editorial team, CurbingCorruption develops its research and knowledge through volunteer collaboration with academics, researchers, grad students, practitioners, public officials, company execs and others. Join us!

Mark Pyman is an experienced anti-corruption professional. From 2015 through 2017, he was one of three International Committee Members on the Afghanistan independent Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee. Established by the President of Afghanistan, the Committee – known as the ‘MEC’ – comprises 6 people, three well-respected Afghans and three internationally known anti-corruption experts, supported by a supporting secretariat of 25 professionals in Kabul. They monitor what is going right and wrong in anti-corruption efforts in the country, carry out detailed analyses of the corruption issues, and press for change. Mark was astonished at how some of the most imaginative anti-corruption solutions – impressive even by developed world standards – were emerging out of this unpromising Afghan soil. But at the same time he was horrified to discover that the world’s anti-corruption knowledge in almost every sector – from education to telecommunications – was poorly organised and, where it even existed, difficult to access. Worse, he found that many international sector specialists avoided the subject of corruption, perhaps because of the risk that they would lose funding.More detail can be found here.

From 2004 to 2015, he founded and then led the global Defence and Security programme at the NGO Transparency International. This large, ground-breaking programme works on tackling the ways that corruption undermines security and military forces in countries. He led the team’s field work in over 30 countries, including Afghanistan, Bulgaria, Burundi, Colombia, Georgia, Kenya, Latvia, Lebanon, Norway, Palestine, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, UK and the USA; and pioneered detailed, comparative analyses of the defence corruption risks of some 130 countries.

His work was instrumental in shaping the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (2013), in influencing NATO policy and operations in respect of counter-corruption, in shaping the military doctrine of several countries, and in policy forums such as the Munich Security Conference.

Working with militaries and Defence Ministries in country after country from 2004 to 2015, Mark was struck how senior officials and senior officers were open about their participation in corrupt or questionable practice. They knew very well the political constraints on what they could do, but many were nonetheless taking small actions to reduce the corruption. They knew how deeply corruption went against the ethos of military leadership, and many were ashamed. Their question – almost every time – was ‘What do you suggest I could best do, and where do I find the necessary knowledge?’ For many, finding that defence-specific anti-corruption knowledge existed was like finding water in the desert.

From 1985 to 2003, he was a senior executive at Shell International. He was Chief Financial Officer of Shell companies in West Africa (Gabon), China, Taiwan and South Korea. Other senior roles included Director of major change programmes for Shell across Europe, leading a transformation team of 700, and manager of Shell’s investor relations with the City of London.Mark developed a detailed understanding of how the corporate community more broadly can do to be more honest and more engaged.

From 1981-1985, he was one of the founders of the market-leading technical risk consultancy ‘Technica’.

He holds a PhD from the University of Western Australia, an MSc from Bath University and a first-class honours degree from Birmingham University. He has authored or supervised many blogs and some seventy publications on tackling corruption.

Paul Heywood

Paul Heywood PhD, FRSA, FAcSS holds the Sir Francis Hill Chair of European Politics in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Nottingham, UK.  Prior to taking up his Chair in 1995, he taught at the University of Glasgow and Queen Mary College, London.  He studied at the University of Edinburgh and did his doctorate at the London School of Economics.

His research focuses on political corruption, institutional design and state capacity, and he is author, co-author or editor of eighteen books and more than eighty journal articles and book chapters. Recent funded research includes an ESRC/Hong Kong project on Integrity Management in the UK, HK and China; an EU FP7 project, ANTICORRP, on anti-corruption policies; and TACOD ,an EU project on tackling corruption through open data.  He served at the EU DG Home Affairs UK expert on corruption (2012-16), contributing to the 2014 EU Anti-Corruption Report.

Professor Heywood is leader of the $7m Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence programme (GI-ACE), funded by DFID (2018-21), which follows an earlier British Academy/DFID programme (2015-18) that he also led.  He is a Trustee of Transparency International UK, where he chairs the Advocacy and Research Committee.  Professor Heywood is an elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (2002), a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences (2012), and a Fellow of Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (2013).

Michelle  Man is a strategy consultant working in the third sector. Her experience spans the public, private and third sectors, and she has specific expertise in international financial crime risk, electoral policy and democratic processes, education policy, and social mobility. She has a master’s degree in international relations and anti-corruption strategies, and previously led Transparency International’s work on corruption in the defence industry.

Tom Shipley is a PhD researcher at the Sussex Centre for the Study of Corruption, where he is undertaking a comparative study of anti-corruption reforms and strategies in four states in Nigeria. He began his career in anti-corruption with the Transparency International defence and security programme. He subsequently held positions focused on anti-corruption in the private sector, at the consultancy Control Risks and then at CDC Group, the UK development finance institute. He is an expert contributor to the Transparency International U4 Helpdesk and the Global Integrity Africa Integrity Index.