Marking milestones in understanding the presence of corruption and the role of integrity among South African and Zambian urban planning professionals

One year further into its GI ACE-supported research concerning the role of integrity and corruption within the planning profession in Zambia and South Africa, the African Centre for Cities’ “Cities of Integrity” (COI) research team has hit new milestones and made progress in achieving its research objectives. Since publishing its first working paper, covered in…

ACE: Exploring New Ways to develop effective anti-corruption interventions

The Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) program, funded with UK aid from the UK government in a £15 million investment from 2015–2021, is designed to produce new, relevant research evidence on tackling corruption. Despite decades of global anti-corruption initiatives, the track record of such efforts has been disappointing. It is now widely accepted that technocratic, ‘one-size-fits-all’ approaches…

Making records open does not always make them useful

Originally published on GI-ACE  On 12 May 2016, Prime Minister David Cameron hosted a ‘landmark’ international anti-corruption summit in London at which invited countries made pledges about future anti-corruption efforts. Nigeria made many such commitments, including eight on increasing the transparency of beneficial ownership (BO).  Of these, perhaps the most publicised was its commitment to establishing a…

What we have learnt from the UK’s unexplained Wealth Order legal cases

Originally published on GI-ACE Many research projects have fallen foul of the ongoing coronavirus crisis, while others have been adapted, with video conferencing replacing face-to-face meetings. Luckily for our project – examining the ‘enablers’ of money laundering in banking and real-estate transactions – a large part of it involves desk-based research. The focus for us…

The flipside of corruption: State comparisons in India using public service delivery measures

Originally published on GI-ACE Understanding where corruption is high and why is a difficult task mainly because of the difficulties in measuring corruption. Given the well-documented problems with perceptions of corruption, recent literature has focused on objective measures of corruption. Focusing on the delivery of public services, a reliable measure could be the irregularities detected…