David Jackson | GAB | The Global Anticorruption Blog

Perhaps unsurprisingly, folks in the anticorruption community have started to generate a fair amount of commentary on the links between the coronavirus pandemic and corruption/anticorruption; these pieces approach the connection from various angles, including how corruption might have contributed to the outbreak and deficiencies in the response, the importance of ensuring adequate anticorruption safeguards in the various emergency measures being implemented to address both the public health crisis and the associated economic crisis, and concerns about the longer term impact on institutional integrity and checks and balances. Last week I posted links to four such commentaries. Since then, we’ve had two commentaries on the corruption-coronavirus relationship here on GAB (yesterday’s post from Sarah Steingrüber, and last week’s post from Shruti Shah and Alex Amico). Since then, I’ve come across some more, and I thought it would be useful to provide those additional links, and perhaps to try to start collecting in one place a list of commentaries on corruption and coronavirus. The new sources I’ve come across are as follows:

Sarah Steingrüber, Monica Kirya, David Jackson, and Saul Mullard have a U4 Anticorruption Resource Centre publication, “Corruption in the Time of Covid-19: A Double-Threat for Low Income Countries,” which emphasizes the ways in which the disease outbreak may be causing an associated corruption outbreak, and suggests ways that donors and other development actors can try to minimize the threat that corruption poses to an effective response to the crisis.
Roy Poses has a piece on the Health Care Renewal blog entitled “The Ultimate Conflict of Interest: Trump Organization Revenue vs Lives Lost to Coronavirus,” which (as the title implies) argues that President Trump’s financial interests may have distorted his response to the coronavirus in ways that undermined the effectiveness of that response.
Finally, I came across one more commentary that was a bit ahead of the curve on this topic–back on March 4, Rebecca Rohr wrote a blog post on the Corporate Counsel blog on “Addressing Anti-Corruption Risks from the Coronavirus.” This post is directed more towards private sector firms (especially their legal and compliance departments) rather than government policymakers, and focuses on how to managed the heightened bribery risks associated with the pandemic and the economic disruption it will cause.

In case it’s helpful to readers, I may start to compile and regularly update a list of corruption-coronavirus resources. The ones I’ve got so far (including those noted above):

Gretta Fenner & Monica Guy, “Did Corruption Cause the Deadly Coronavirus Outbreak?” (FCPA Blog post, January 30, 2020)
Rebecca Rohr, “Addressing Anti-Corruption Risks from the Coronavirus” (Corporate Counsel blog post, March 4, 2020)
Natalie Rhodes, “Coronavirus: The Perfect Incubator for Corruption in Our Health Systems? 7 Key COVID-19 Points To Consider” (Transparency International article, March 13, 2020).
Natalie Rhodes, “Corruption and the Coronavirus: How To Prevent the Abuse of Power During a Global Health Pandemic” (Transparency International article, March 18, 2020) (expanded version of Ms. Rhodes’ March 13 piece, listed above)
Abigail Bellows, “Coronavirus Meets Corruption: Recommendations for U.S. Leadership” (Carnegie Endowment post, March 20, 2020)
Jodi Vittori, “Corruption Vulnerabilities in the U.S. Response to Coronavirus” (Carnegie Endowment post, March 20, 2020)
Shruti Shah & Alex Amico, “Ensuring Adequate Accountability, Transparency, and Anticorruption Measures During the Pandemic” (Global Anticorruption Blog post, March 24, 2020)
Roy Poses, “The Ultimate Conflict of Interest: Trump Organization Revenue vs Lives Lost to Coronavirus,” (Health Care Renewal blog post, March 24, 2020)
Sarah Steingrüber, Monica Kirya, David Jackson & Saul Mullard, “Corruption in the Time of Covid-19: A Double-Threat for Low Income Countries” (U4 Basic Guide, March 27, 2020)
Sarah Steingrüber, “Coronavirus and the Corruption Outbreak” (Global Anticorruption Blog post, March 30, 2020)

I’m sure there are more useful commentaries, and many more to come over the coming weeks. I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep a comprehensive list, but I’ll do my best to provide links to the resources I’m aware of, so if you know of useful pieces on the corruption-coronavirus link, please send me a note.

Thanks everyone, and stay safe.

GAB is pleased to welcome Finn Heinrich, Research Director at Transparency International, who contributes the following guest post:

Listening to conversations about corruption among global policy-makers, corruption researchers, and anticorruption activists alike, I can’t help but notice that the focus of anticorruption research and policy is changing. The 1990s focused mainly on demonstrating that corruption exists and finding ways to measure it (largely through perception-based indicators), and the early 2000s were about assessing corruption risks in specific countries, sectors, or communities, and assessing the performance of anticorruption institutions. More recently, researchers (and their funders and clients) are shifting from the “Where is corruption?” question toward the “How can we fight corruption?” question. They ask: Do we know what works, when, where, and under which circumstances in curbing a specific type of corrupt behavior?

Answering such questions is extremely challenging. Corruption’s clandestine nature makes it difficult to measure, data is often of low quality or simply not available for time-series or cross-sectional analysis beyond aggregate country-level indicators. Furthermore, anticorruption interventions often lack an underlying theory of change which would be needed to design robust research evaluations to find out whether they worked and if so, how (and if not, why not). And we lack realistic but parsimonious causal models which can take account of contextual factors, which are so important to understand and tackle corruption, as corruption is an integral part of broader social and political power structures and relationships which differ across contexts. Similarly, there is a lack of exchange between micro-level approaches focusing on specific, usually local anticorruption interventions, on the one hand, and the macro-level literature on anti-corruption strategies and theories, on the other.

While we at Transparency International certainly do not have any ready-made solutions for these extremely tricky methodological and conceptual issues, we are committed to joining others in making headway on them and have therefore put the “what works” question at the heart of our organizational learning agenda by engaging in reviews of the existing evidence as well as ramping up impact reviews of some of our own key interventions. For example, we have just released a first rapid evidence review on how to curb political corruption, written by David Jackson and Daniel Salgado Moreno, which showcases some fascinating evidence from the vibrant field of political anticorruption research. We are also working with colleagues from Global Integrity on a more thorough evidence review on corruption grievance as a motivator for anti-corruption engagement and are planning further evidence reviews and impact evaluations.

As we start to get our feet wet and figure out how to best go about generating and making sense of the existing evidence on what works in anti-corruption, we are keen to engage with the broader anticorruption research community. Maybe there are others out there who have some ideas about how to go about learning about what works in fighting corruption? If so, please use the comment box on this blog or get in touch directly at acevidence@transparency.org.

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