As a too-familiar cliché has it, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and this is a message many in the anticorruption community have taken to heart. But talking in general terms about the  importance of preventing corruption is one thing; figuring out how to design specific, practical anticorruption measures is a much greater challenge. Among the preventative tools in the anticorruption toolkit, one that has shown some promise in a number of countries, and that has attracted attention in many others, is the pre-enactment analysis of proposed laws to assess the corruption risks associated with those laws. This process is sometimes referred to as “corruption risk assessment” (CRA). (It is also—rather unfortunately—sometimes referred to as the “corruption-proofing” of proposed legislation, a label that vastly oversells what this sort of assessment is capable of doing.) We have had a couple of posts on this technique on the blog previously (see here and here).

Last month, the National Democratic Institute (NDI) published a useful resource guide on CRA intended primarily for parliaments (and other legislative bodies), authored by GAB’s own senior contributor Rick Messick. (Full disclosure: I provided some comments on a very early draft of the guide, and I also worked as a consultant, though in a comparatively minor role, on a related project with the NDI’s Bangkok office.) To quote from the introduction, this guide “suggests how a CRA procedure can be incorporated into the standing rules of parliament and provides a checklist of issues the CRA should consider…. While primarily written for stakeholders in parliament, the guide can be adapted for use by anti-corruption agencies, executive branch agencies, civil society organizations (CSO) and other groups to detect and highlight the corruption risks that exist in legislative processes.”

The link above goes to the NDI page with information about the guide and related documents. You can also go directly to a PDF of the guide itself here. I hope some of our readers find this to be a useful resource.