Ben Cowdock of Transparency International UK (TI-UK) contributes the following guest post:

Earlier this year, UK Prime Minister David Cameron gave a speech in Singapore in which he vowed to take a stand against corruption at home and abroad, and announced that London would host an International Anticorruption Summit in 2016. We at TI-UK are optimistic that this summit will provide an expanded opportunity for civil society to contribute, and indeed we are hopeful that we may be entering a period of unprecedented involvement of the wider anticorruption community in the formulation of national and global policy. This would signify an exciting new direction for policymakers—one which the anticorruption community has long advocated. A more open and inclusive process is beneficial for society as a whole; policy is increasingly built on consensus and shared learning, resulting in choosing the right path to tackling corruption.

More concretely, in response to the Prime Minister’s announcement and in preparation for this global summit, Transparency International UK (TI-UK) has been assembling a database of the current “big ideas” on anticorruption policy from the academic, activist, business and policy communities. The database, currently contains over 100 “game-changer” policy proposals (including a number of suggestions put forward and debated on this very blog (such as truth commissions and the potential benefits of expanding UNCAC article 35). To enhance academic, public, and policy awareness of the range of current policy proposals, the database will be published in the near future with full attribution to authors and researchers. We hope this will lead to further debate on which ideas have the potential to significantly improve anti-corruption efforts and deter corruption. We also hope that the summit will provide an opportunity to showcase the growth of “anticorruption hacking”, a collective action phenomenon in which civil society generates pioneering technological approaches to fighting corruption.

The London summit represents a chance for new ideas to come to the fore and be at the heart of UK and global effort against corruption. Civil society has already made a huge contribution in the overwhelming response to TI-UK’s call for big idea policies, which we hope will be influential in shaping the agenda of the summit and demonstrating an international commitment to making a change for the better. If you have any big “game-changing” ideas that you believe would further UK or international anti-corruption efforts, we encourage you to leave an overview in the comment!