CurbingCorruption was founded in 2018 by Mark Pyman and Paul Heywood, long-time practitioner and academic respectively in anti-corruption. They were repeatedly encountering front-line people who were already taking some action to limit the problems that corruption was causing, but who wanted to be able to tackle it better. Yet they felt ill-equipped to do so.

• Politicians, whether in government or in opposition, needing to propose and implement anti-corruption initiatives within their sphere of responsibility
• Public officials within government or related agencies where corruption was constraining the quality of their outcomes, wondering how they could be effective, and with lower political risk
• Professional bodies and associations, knowing the problems their members face and wanting their profession to be pro-active on corruption
• Private sector executives, seeing multiple ways in which corruption was hurting their operations
• Civic groups and civil society organisations looking for actions to solve specific issues, alongside protest actions

CurbingCorruption was developed to respond to this need. The website went live in October 2018.

DEVELOPING BETTER STRATEGIES, WITH MORE SUBSTANCE

We are convinced that reformers can develop better substance to anti-corruption strategies. The core – the substance – of a strategy is the insight or diagnosis involved that allows choices to be made and options discarded. This is distinct from the process to be followed in developing a strategy or the other components such as governance, management, coordination and reporting. We consider the substance of any strategy to comprise three distinct but interlinked activities:

• making an insightful diagnosis,
• clarifying and reformulating the purpose and the objective
• formulating an actionable reform approach that guides the reformers, including choosing which specific reform measures will be preferred.

Our understanding about strategy formulation rests on three pillars: knowledge from other domains (military, business, politics); insights from the research literature on corruption and corruption reform; and personal experience of corruption reform in a wide range of countries and sectors.

For more on better strategies, click here

FOUNDERS – Mark Pyman & Paul Heywood

CurbingCorruption was conceived in 2016 by Mark Pyman. His experience of working in three tough high-corruption environments – in the military and Defence Ministries worldwide;  in Afghanistan, as one of the three international Anti-Corruption Commissioners; and as the Chief Financial Officer in a large corporation based in several endemically corrupt countries – he  realised that much more progress against corruption was possible by those leading such organisations; whether as politicians, leaders or managers. More on Mark Pyman here.

Professor Paul Heywood is Mark Pyman’s close collaborator, bringing academic rigour to the innovative ideas behind CurbingCorruption. Paul Heywood  holds the Sir Francis Hill Chair of European Politics at the University of Nottingham, UK.  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. He is leader of the $7m Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence programme (GI-ACE), funded by DFID, which follows an earlier British Academy/DFID programme that he also led.  He is a Trustee of Transparency International UK, where he chairs the Advocacy and Research Committee. More on Paul Heywood here.

AUTHORS & CONTRIBUTORS

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You can contact us anytime at editor@curbingcorruption.com