Corruption is not one phenomenon, but many different issues aggregated together. To make progress, start by focusing on what the specific issues are, their scale, and the problems they are causing in your context.  Doing this also helps build shared understanding, because everyone has a different idea about corruption. Here’s how:

• Disaggregating the corruption into specific issues.
• Typologies – Organising those issues in an easily comprehensible way – a typology
• Analysing them: their scale, importance, their context, their avoidability and solubility
• Building shared understanding of their impact across colleagues/partners & others

Disaggregating into 20-40 specific issues

An ‘issue’ is a specific problem. It is not a broad category like grand/petty, need/greed, political/ bureaucratic, institutional/individual.We try to be specific about the corruption type, so that you can start to direct remedial actions against it. So, ‘corruption due to a non-meritocratic civil service’ would not be a corruption type because it is so broad. Instead, we break it down into several more detailed and therefore more manageable corruption types. Similarly, ‘collusion’ is not a corruption type because it is so general.

First, we separate corruption issues that are different from one sector to another by treating each sector differently – this is the basis of CurbingCorruption. For example, in policing, there will be various forms of corruption at a high political level, such as allowing organised crime in specific areas or ensuring that independent oversight is permanently weak; corruption in the management of the police service, such as improperly promoting some officers or permitting officers to stay in lucrative positions; corruption and lack of integrity in personal behaviour, such as evidence tampering or demanding illegal fines; and so on. Similar differentiation exists in every sector: e.g. the corrupt police behaviour examples above are quite different from pharmaceutical-related corruption types within the health sector, which again are very different phenomena from the corruption in relation to passing school exams within the education sector.

Second, whilst some of the corruption issues are clearly sector-specific, as discussed above, others that seem to be generic also have significant differences from one sector to another. For example, the corrupt diversion of salaries en-route from the ministry to the worker or promotions that are driven by corrupt payments not by merit. Whist these look to be similar phenomena, the modalities by which the corruption takes place and is facilitated are usually very different in one sector from another. The reforms are similarly likely to be different from one sector to another. Our experience is that this is true for all the ‘generic’ types of corruption, whether it be corruptly influencing policy, favouritism in appointments and promotions, small-scale facilitation payments, and so forth.

Organising the issues – Typologies

Too much complexity renders a problem much harder to solve. Our experience is that 20-40 different issues is enough to provide granularity, and not so much as to overwhelm with complexity. The, grouping the issues according to who the reforming organisation is helpful. So, we categorise the issues into 5 or 6 groups, such as ‘leadership level’, ‘finance’, ‘procurement’, ‘personnel’ and ‘operations’. Sometimes these can be made more specific, such as ‘corruption at school level’ to distinguish it from ‘corruption at Education Ministry level’.

Examples from seven sectors

 Construction project typology (from U4) 

Analysing the issues

Doing this analysis can be a two-hour exercise or it can be a six month one. The quick way is always attractive. Your own staff are usually well aware of the corruption issues, often with extensive experience of working in large, complex, bureaucratic environments. Hence, they are likely to be the best informed about what the corruption problems are, which ones can be tackled, and which ones need to be left for later. You might give them the list of corruption from the relevant sector review in CurbingCorruption and ask a group of them to analyse which are the more relevant ones and their relative importance. This simple approach has the advantage that you can quickly capture the ‘top of mind’ knowledge of your senior professionals. It has some disadvantages, notably that it is likely to focus on the more immediate issues.

In the mid-range, you may have specialist groups with extra knowledge, like internal audit groups, regulatory agencies and professional fraud groups. Together with external groups like community groups, private sector associations and civil society, you can get a more inclusive analysis done, still quite quickly. It has the same disadvantages as above.

At the most thorough end of the spectrum, you can get a detailed analysis done by groups with professional anti-corruption knowledge, if possible combined with sector expertise. These groups might sit within universities, or civil society, or think tanks. Such analyses are likely to take from two months to six months. In large initiatives, there are several analytical techniques you can consider, as mentioned below. There is also an obvious and often sizeable political advantage to having a thorough, independent analysis done of the corruption issues and risks. If you have time and funds, we recommend that you do a thorough analysis.

Defence sector example – Poland

At a time when it was recognised that there was considerable corruption within the Polish military and defence forces, the Polish MoD team identified eight high-risk corruption areas: defence procurement, R&D projects, development projects , disposal of surplus property, conscript procedures, lack of meriticracy in appointments and promotions, and defence investments. The mInistry decided to focus on just one aspect of one problem: bribery involving top officials in high-value defence procurements. The chosen solution was a preventive monitoring reform measure, in which the minister established a small but full-time task force of four people inside the Defence Minsitry with the remit to review and reject tenders and technical specifications where there was a suspicion of bias. This was a low profile reform, but with a chance of success because the Defence Minister was supportive of greater integrity as one way of improving the reputation of Polish defence forces in NATO. The reform was largely successful and the task force has been an established feature of the MoD for ten years now.

Formal analysis methodologies

There are lots of different methodologies and names for corruption analysis tools, but they all do much the same thing. They aim to develop concrete insights regarding forms of corruption, the extent of each, and the vulnerabilities in the particular sector or agencies or functions. The purpose is to focus the application of practical prevention measures. They use a simple methodology. First, they identify the underlying laws, regulations, and guidelines governing the target agency or function.

Then, they identify the main processes; Identify key steps (both formal and informal) for each business process; Assess strengths and vulnerabilities to corruption of each step (based on weaknesses in the formal system and weaknesses in the capacity/ incentives to implement the formal system).

Then they make some estimation of the scale of each one, usually through survey information. They might be able to access existing surveys that provide information on the perceived scale of the corruption types, or they may commission a survey, or they may do their own. These can be small – a ‘straw poll’ of 50 people – or they can be large. One analysis that I have been involved in, of Education corruption in Afghanistan, developed its own survey data from 550 interviews.

Here are three such analysis techniques: Vulnerability to Corruption Analysis (VCA), Public expenditure tracking surveys (PETS) and Quantitative Service Delivery Surveys (QSDS).  There are others that are more community based, such as citizen report cards.

Three formal corruption analysis techniques – Read more

Doing a Political Economy analysis

Regarding the factors driving the corruption in each sector, you and your colleagues are likely to know the political and power context. It is valuable to consider this more formally. Who is gaining from each corruption type and why?  Who might gain, who might lose from reducing corruption in this specific area? For each corruption type, who are your supporters are and who are the possible spoilers.

Doing such a ‘Political Economy Analysis’ means that these issues are laid out in a structured way and can help decide which corruption types you should address. Here are three simple guides to doing a political economy analysis. You can commission someone to do the analysis formally, or you can follow the steps yourself for an informal analysis.

• Hudson et al 2016 Everyday Political Analysis (EPA);  
• Effective States and Inclusive Development Research Centre (ESID) 2015 Making political analysis useful: adjusting and scaling.
• Whaites 2017  The Beginners guide to Political Economy Analysis (PEA)

If you want to go into more detail, look at the following:

•  OECD 2015 A governance practitioner’s notebook: alternative ideas and approaches (on politics, public sector reform and stakeholder engagement); Tools for political economy analysis from the EU(2008).
• Hudson and Leftwich 2014 From political economy to political analysis; and 
• World Bank 2008 The political economy of policy reform: Issues and implications for policy dialogue and development operations.

Khan et al (2016) Anti-corruption in adverse contexts: a strategic approach.

Building shared understanding

The team can now pause at the point where the preparatory work has been done – disaggregation and analysis of the corrruption problems – to have a substantive, informed discussion of what corruption means in their context.One of the eternal difficulties of anti-corrruption efforts is that the term corruption is so easily recognised, yet people have quite different personal models of what it means. The simple tool of the one-page typology presented above is an extremely helpful entry into it. Comprehensible and relevant for anyone working in the sector, it legitimises the reality that corruption is a common problem without the need for euphemisms or skirting round the subject.

The underlying concept here is ‘sense-making’, the process by which people develop a shared understanding of their collective experiences. The concept was introduced in the 1970s by Weick (2001), among others, as part of a movement that shifted thinking about organisations away from decision-making and towards how peoples’ understanding drives organisation behaviour.

One specific technique for advancing this discussion is for groups of those involved to rank the specific issues, then to compare and discuss the reasons for differences in ranking. This is a powerful mechanism for bringing out how the different people round the table view the importance of each individual corruption issue. Depending on the culture and the context, such ranking can be done publicly across a group, or privately, with each participant submitting their list their rankings of the issues for anonymised aggregation. Pyman has led or participated in such exercises in many countries, with groups ranging from just the leadership teams up to conference rooms of 100 and more participants (Pyman 2017).

Here is an example from Botswana, widely regarded as one of the success stories in national level corruption reform. Botswana instituted changes decades ago on land reform, good governance, and institutional design (Mungiu-Pippidi 2015, p.144, Sarraf and Jiwanji 2001).

The military, reviewed corruption issues in defence in a day-long discussion in 2014 facilitated  by Transparency International Defence & Security. By ‘voting’ on all the typology corruption issues, the military leadership concluded that the top three concerns were corruption in corrupt use/control of military intelligence, corruption in payroll and promotions, and corruption in contracting. The full voting results, where each leader could cast three votes for their most critical issues, was as follows;

This allowed the Bostwana military authorities to discuss why the particular issues were important and to agree to focus on particular corruption issues in order to frame their anti-corruption reform efforts in the defence sector.

Similar approaches have been used in developing a common approach to corruption reform in the Philippines (see, for example, Johnston 2010). Klitgaard, also advising in the Philippines, uses the term ‘convening’ in place of sense-making (Klitgaard 2019). Sense-making has also come up in the corruption reform literature in the guise of complexity thinking, such as the analysis and understanding of anti-corruption experience in Malawi by Bridges and Woolcock (2017).

Reformulating the Objective

This step is not usually found in handbooks on strategy making or corruption reform. But it forms a core part of SFRA because progress is made by reducing the corruption barriers to the achievement of other mainstream objectives, rather than tackling corruption as a generic problem

For any leader or manager, the primary objective relates to delivering the policies, services or products for which they are responsible. Even when there are significant corrruption issues, the primary delivery objectives are usually unchanged.

The objective of the corrruption-related efforts is to improve delivery by avoiding, preventing, limiting or eliminating the negative impacts of corruption. Many of these impacts directly damage the organisation. Examples include siphoning off funds, over-pricing, illicit sale of products, operation of patronage networks inside the organisation, reducing effectiveness through absenteesim or restrictive practices or corrupt recruitment. The impacts may also be indirect, notably the damage caused by perceived tolerance of corruption: to reputation, to internal morale, to international standing.

Reducing corruption is usually not the main objective

Many would assume this to be the core objective of an anti-corruption strategy. But, reducing corruption is more usually a means towards more widely desired policy objectives, rather than the desired end result in itself. At the ambitious end of the spectrum, the objective might be to raise the trust of the public in the system, or to improve access for all to services, or to ensure that all professionals and officials operate to high ethical standards, or to reduce costs. This is a really important point.

A recent analysis of national-level anti-corruption strategies from 41 countries ranked from 21^stto 130^thin TI’s Corruption Perception Index reinforces this point. The authors identified the following objectives stated in their strategies: To improve service delivery; to improve national reputation, to improve the nation’s ranking in the CPI, to strengthen democracy/transparency/integrity, to improve economic prosperity, to improve economic competitiveness, to strengthen national security, to be aligned with international anti-corruption standards, and to gain accession to the EU. Taken from Pyman et al (2017).

What you actually do

The practical answer is that the team convenes people in intensive discussion of the situation, first on the problems and then on the objectives. The people involved may be co-workers, officials, stakeholders, a wider leadership group, or citizens, where appropriate:

Discuss which problems are causing the most underperformance. Which problems can be most easily addressed? Which problems are the most serious in preventing the organisation from delivering the services it is supposed to? Which ones are most important for public confidence? Which ones are costing the most money? Which of these problems are we best placed to address because of any advantages and/or leverage that we have, be that political, technical, motivational or social?

Discuss how many objectives there are? Are we being realistic about the objections we will face, about the time scale, about the level of ambition? What it is that we really want to achieve? Would we be better served by having some form of intermediate objective? Would we be better served by having a proximate objective, that might be more easily articulated? Which of these objectives are we best placed to achieve because of any advantages and/or leverage that we have, be that political, technical, motivational or social? If the situation is complex, is there a hierarchy of objectives (small ones being addressed by small projects, etc).

Example: Education in Afghanistan

Whilst the Minister of Education was not keen on reform, several of his senior leadership were keen to see corruption reforms underway and supported a deeper analysis. That analysis, carried out by MEC, consisted of 542 interviews in the ministry and in schools across the country. It led to a significant reformulation of the corruption challenge. Instead of corrupt construction of schools as the expected key challenge, what emerged from the analysis and the discussions as the issue seen as most damaging for Afghanistan’s future was the nepotistic appointment of teachers across the country. It was also an issue that was possible to address (MEC 2019, Pyman 2018).

Example: Reducing deforestation in Indonesia

A current example of reformulation of the mainstream objective, is the effort by Indonesia, supported by Norway, to reduce greenhouse gases from deforestation. It is clear that many of the barriers to achieving this outcome are corruption-related ones, but it would seem to be more prospective to retain the objective of a quantified reduction in greenhouse gases, rather than to set an objective of reduced corruption. Indonesia has in the time of the partnership introduced three types of moratoria – against logging, against peat exploitation and against the expansion of palm oil concessions – whilst at the same time having various initiatives that strengthen police action against illegal loggers (Norad 2020). The case study can be found here (as a stand alone document) or here on the NORAD website, bundled with the other Case Studies.

Example: UK National Anti-Corruption Strategy

A good example of high level vision and strategy objectives comes from the UK government’s national anti-corruption strategy 2017-2022. They see the Anti-Corruption strategy as critical to help ensure national security against insiders, to help build the prosperity of the UK, through building up the UK’s reputation as a partner for overseas trade, and to strengthen the confidence of British citizens in UK institutions. As you see in this UK example, they then have six priorities, ranging from the key corruption threat (from insiders) to the importance of cooperation with other countries.

However, your objectives don’t have to be ‘grand’ ones like these. You could alternatively have smaller, less tangible objectives. One such would be to ‘Build confidence across the organisation that it is possible to make progress against corruption’. A similar one would be to build a culture where people feel free and empowered to try out many different ways of tackling corruption: you could call this ‘improvisation as strategy’.

Using international experience

Sectors cross national boundaries. The international perspective as it relates to corruption reform may be in one of several forms: knowledge of the corruption issues specific to the sector; experience of addressing those corruption issues in different national and regional environments; specifc initiatives; standards used, aspired to or required in the sector globally; and the sector culture, representing the extent to which sector professionals think alike, tend to work in similar ways, share mental models or have their own language.

There are now several international initiatives for tackling corruption in sectors. Sector organisations include professional sector associations, many of which have an ‘anti-corruption working group’ or similar forums and programmes targeted at integrity measures and transparency measures. Multilateral organisations working in particular sectors, such as the World Health Organisation or the International Customs Organisation, increasingly provide countries with sector-specific support on anti-corrruption. Multi-sectoral international organisations – like the World Economic Forum (WEF), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the World Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) – also now have a strong focus on public integrity and anti-corruption and are able to assist country initiatives. The table below lists some of the main sector-specific anti-corruption bodies.

These international organisations and initiatives are not just sources of knowledge and ideas, but also offer advice on specific reform measures, as well as support and assistance.

Bibliography

Ang, Yuen Yuen (2014) Authoritarian restraints on on-line activism revisited. Why I-paid-a-bribe worked in India but failed in China. Comparative Politics 47(1), 21-40.

Effective States Institute and inclusive Development Research Centre (2015) Making political analysis useful: adjustment and scaling. http://www.effective-states.org/wp-content/uploads/briefing_papers/final-pdfs/esid_bp_12_PEA.pdf

European Commission (2008) Tools for political economy analysis. Annex A. https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=6&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwiPiKnJ9cfcAhUQM8AKHaHXDswQFjAFegQIBhAC&url=https%3A%2F%2Feuropa.eu%2Fcapacity4dev%2Ffile%2F11174%2Fdownload%3Ftoken%3D1N9xFSAp&usg=AOvVaw0Lh07fhvF1zmLIK_pqM3Z0

Hudson, David, Marquette, Heather and Waldock, Sam (2016) Everyday political analysis. Development Leadership Program, January 2016. http://publications.dlprog.org/EPA.pdf

Khan, Mushtaq, Andreoni, Antonio, Roy, Pallavi (2016) Anti-corruption in adverse contexts: a strategic approach. SOAS Research Online. http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/23495/1/Anti-Corruption%20in%20Adverse%20Contexts%20%281%29.pdf

Whaites, Alan (2017) The beginners guide to political economy analysis. National School of Government international. https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=2ahUKEwj-psnT88fcAhXFRMAKHQNEBqwQFjABegQIAxAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.sclr.stabilisationunit.gov.uk%2Fpublications%2Fthe-national-school-of-government-international-series%2F1248-the-beginners-guide-to-pea-1%2Ffile&usg=AOvVaw1PovIUJKNXfPV1dhMKOeG6