Today’s guest post is from Peter Evans, who recently stepped down as Director of the U4 Anticorruption Resource Centre, and who previously led the Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) program at the UK’s Department for International Development.

All too often, approaches to anticorruption reform—like mainstream approaches to growth, development and governance more generally—frame the issue as a technical problem. In development agencies, multilateral organizations, and civil society organizations working on corruption issues, it is not uncommon to hear people say, “We don’t do politics,” or to mention politics only in the context of blaming the failure of a project, or non-receptiveness to technically sound advice, on a “lack of political will.” But as Stefan Dercon emphasized in his influential recent book Gambling on Development: Why Some Countries Win and Others Lose, understanding and addressing development challenges requires engaging seriously with the political economy constraints and opportunities related to power and elites. While Dercon’s book is not about corruption specifically, it is chock-full of corruption examples. And, in fairness, an increasing number of anticorruption specialists have gotten the message that “technical only” approaches often fail, and that making real progress often requires us to understand, and be brave enough to talk about, politics—and in particular the way power is distributed and used in the relevant country or sector.

But while recognizing that politics matters—and that serious anticorruption work requires serious political economy analysis—is a necessary first step, actually putting this idea into practice turns out to be hard, even for people who want to do it—because political economy analysis is hard, and much of the available information is obscure, difficult to locate, or difficult for busy practitioners to digest. Some country- and sector-specific political economy research is published, though not all of it is written in an accessible way. And some research that is highly relevant to political economy analysis doesn’t include terms in the title or abstract that would make its relevance obvious to a busy professional trying to find useful information. Some agencies pay consultants to deliver bespoke political economy analysis, or build skills through training courses, but the utility of these efforts may be limited to that particular agency. SOAS ACE takes an explicit political economy framed approach to understanding and tackling corruption, and there have been a few efforts to provide more general information, such as the U4 Centre’s a workstream on the politics of anticorruption and the UK-based Governance and Social Development Resource Centre, but global coverage of relevant political economy research remains patchy.

To address this problem, I advocate the creation of a “Practical Politics Platform” where good quality, clearly explained political economy research is collected, curated, and presented in a form that is easy to search and freely available as a public good. It would be something like Our World in Data, but for practical political economy research. (To be clear, while corruption and anticorruption would be an important element of such a platform, the platform should more broadly integrate research on related issues, such as accountability, transparency, and public sector governance.) To increase user-friendliness, the platform could include clickable maps that allow users to focus on a country, and disaggregate the information, if desired, by sector and sub-unit.

Such a platform would help development and public policy practitioners find relevant political research, enable them to understand and tackle binding political constraints to growth and development, and unlock greater impact from their efforts. The platform would also serve to further “mainstream” political economy research in public policy and development practice by making it easier to find what already exists, prove its utility, and demonstrate pathways to impact. The wide availability of, and greater familiarity with, relevant political economy research would counter the notions that anticorruption, and other development challenges, are primarily technical issues, or that failures can be explained and excused by vague references to “lack of political will.” Additionally, by aggregating and synthesizing existing research, the platform could also help highlight critical evidence gaps – and persuade funders and researchers to fill them.

This sort of platform, then, would serve a valuable function. But it would be a lot of work to create, and would require funding and regular updating. Part of the challenge, then, will be finding an organization (or a coalition of organizations) willing to devote the time and personnel to create and maintain it, and convincing funders to back it, and others to use it. This may prove challenging, especially since the work involved in maintaining such a repository of information might be considerable, given the scope of the issues and the amount of potentially relevant new research that is produced each year. Still, there may be innovative solutions for these challenges. Artificial intelligence algorithms may be able to assist in finding, sorting, and summarizing research. And crowdsourcing and human innovation may also help, as demonstrated by such as the Wiki-inspired VoxDevLit Reviews, and Open Philanthropy’s “shallow investigations.”

To be sure, creating a Practical Politics Platform along the lines proposed above would be a heavy lift. But if we are serious about taking politics seriously in anticorruption, and development policy more generally, we need to get creative about finding ways to get more practical political information into the hands (and heads) of the practitioners and policymakers who will need to use it.

I’ll end with a “use case.”  Imagine that your long term partners bemoan “a lack of political will” to tackle an enduring problem in your field – perhaps health absenteeism, or deforestation. You point them to political economy research on exactly that problem, and in that place, on the practical politics platform. A new conversation – more political, and more transformational – begins.