Tag Archives: education

Culture Matters: How Indonesia Should Account Culture to Eradicate Corruption

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Corruption in Indonesia is endemic, permeating all levels of society. As I argued in my last post, Indonesia’s culture of corruption is a result of the corruption of culture: Far too many people see corruption as unsolvable and even “normal,” even though they clearly realize its wrongfulness.

To date, Indonesia’s independent anticorruption agency, the KPK, has pursued a main strategy of prosecuting the “big fish”—the high-ranking officials (including numerous parliament members and powerful politicians) whose corrupt behavior has caused massive damage to the country. Laudable though the KPK’s bold enforcement efforts have been, eradicating corruption requires more than prosecutions. Rather, the KPK needs to complement its aggressive law enforcement with preventive measures designed to change Indonesia’s “culture of corruption” to a “culture of anticorruption.” There are several strategies the KPK could pursue to foster such cultural change:

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Fighting Corruption With Art: Successfully Raising Public Awareness

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Art is “one of the best societal mediators of difficult messages — it has always created a bridge between the comprehension and the expression of critical problems in society.” So declares the 10th International Anti-Corruption Conference’s website, which organized an art program against corruption. In keeping with that sentiment, last September the Anti-Corruption Organization of Thailand (ACT) organized a “museum of corruption,” a temporary exhibition at the Bangkok Art and Culture Centre intended to raise public awareness about the extent and costs of corruption. Thailand is not the first country to undertake such an initiative. Museums of corruption (actual museums, not just temporary exhibitions) already exist in Paraguay, Ukraine and the United States, and many other enterprises that use art as a tool for anticorruption education and action are flourishing worldwide. For instance, the Open Society Initiative for West Africa has recently launched a hip hop video against corruption in Liberia, while the Inter-American Development Bank organized a cartoon contest to promote awareness and understanding of the corruption phenomenon and its harm to development. More recently, Pakistani President Mamnoon Hussain called upon poets and intellectuals to write against corruption. Other major players in the anticorruption field that have organized artistic projects include Transparency International (see here and here) and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). In additions to these institutionalized artistic anti-corruption projects, several countries have witnessed spontaneous public art displays – in the physical public domain, usually outside and accessible to all – to promote awareness and solidarity in fighting corruption (see for example in Afghanistan and South Africa).

Understandably, some are skeptical of these initiatives, arguing that museums and temporary exhibitions are not the right forum to communicate on corruption (this was one of the criticisms of the Thai museum of corruption). One might worry that expressing anticorruption messages through cartoons and popular music won’t lead people to take the message seriously enough. (This would also be true when the artistic initiative takes a more humorous approach, as is the case for many of the anticorruption cartoons, as well as New York’s corruption museum.) And of course, nobody thinks that art initiatives on their own are enough. Yet while artistic initiatives will not by themselves solve the issue of corruption, these initiatives are not just a fad or a gimmick or a distraction. Indeed, there’s quite a bit of research indicating that these programs can be quite effective in raising public awareness on corruption. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Empowering Youth To Fight Corruption — Examples from Kosovo

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Shqipe Neziri, Manager with UNDP’s anticorruption program in Kosovo, contributes the following guest post on behalf of UNDP-Kosovo. [Note: For purposes of this post, in reflection of the fact that Kosovo is not a member of the UN, references to “Kosovo” should be understood to be in the context of Security Council Resolution 1244 (1999)):

Young people are often forgotten victims of corruption, left without an opportunity to voice their concerns, to help make positive changes, or to enhance their skills and become active citizens for a better future. Yet young people can play an important role in the fight against corruption. They tend to be more open to wide-scale socio-political transformation and have less vested interested in maintaining the status quo. Moreover, the values and attitudes of young people today will shape the values of the society tomorrow. The question is how to harness then energy and innovation of young people, and to provide the right kinds of support.

UNDP’s recent efforts in Kosovo may provide an example of how to foster a youth-based anticorruption movement. Corruption in Kosovo is a serious problem, viewed by Kosovars as the third-most serious problem, after poverty and unemployment. Kosovo’s population skews young –half of its 2 million citizens are under the age of 30 – and Kosovo’s young people are frustrated by corruption and lack of economic opportunity. (The overall unemployment rate is 35%, while unemployment rate of youth aged 15-24 years is 60%.) For several years, UNDP Kosovo has been placing youth at the core of its development support. Through our anticorruption efforts we have been helping to strengthen the voice of the youth and to foster their participation in decision making through the use of traditional and social media, and working to make institutions more responsive to youth.

What are some of our most successful youth-focused anticorruption initiatives? Here are some examples, which might serve as useful models for others: Continue reading →

Guest Post: Spend Anticorruption Resources on Professional Training, Not Postgraduate Education

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Alan Doig, Professor at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University, contributes the following guest post:

Resources for anticorruption are scare; how should they be spent? In particular, how should the international community (national aid agencies, international institutions, and private donors and foundations) allocate resources for education and training programs for anticorruption professionals?

Although “education” and “training” are often lumped together as one category, in fact they are quite different. Education is about the acquisition of knowledge, with the accompanying change in awareness and understanding, through the provision and assimilation of information. Training involves the acquisition of the applied knowledge and technical skills required to improve individual and organizational performance in the workplace, invariably in relation to specific roles or functions. In terms of impact, education would look for longer-term benefits and impact while training can be judged more immediately by what the person does once trained.

The question of how to spend the even more limited funds that are not tied to the big spenders (the multilateral and bilateral donors) brings this issue into sharp focus, and raises the question of whether too much too much is allocated to postgraduate anticorruption education, at the expense of practical anticorruption training. Continue reading →

Beyond Atlanta: Fixing Corruption in High Stakes Standardized Testing

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Although corruption in educational systems is viewed as a pervasive problem in developing countries, wealthy countries have had their fair share of educational corruption as well. In the United States, for example, the harsh prison sentences in the recent cheating scandal in the Atlanta school system cheating received extensive news coverage this past spring. While it’s true that what happened in Atlanta was particularly wide-spread, involving 44 separate schools (and dozens of principals and hundreds of teachers), this is hardly the first time a significant teacher or administration-driven cheating scandal has come to light. In the last few years, teachers and principals have been caught cheating all over the United States: twenty teachers in Houston were removed from the classroom for cheating on elementary school tests while in Philadelphia, there was a multi-year investigation that involved 138 educators in 27 schools. The National Center for Fair and Open Testing claims that in the last five years, there have been reports of standardized exam cheating in 37 states and the District of Columbia. They have catalogued over fifty different ways that educators helped their students cheat. And although anticorruption efforts in education frequently revolve around the exchange of money or sometimes sex for grades, the sort of cheating involved in these scandals is also a form of educational corruption. Alteration of student tests, even when the students themselves may not benefit from it, is a perversion of the system and a way for teachers and principals to put themselves in line for undeserved awards, given that many educational systems in the U.S. now operate under a high-stakes testing regime in which student performance has a significant impact on teacher and principal evaluations.

Indeed, it is clear that we are not dealing with a few corrupt “bad apples,” but rather with a widespread pattern of teacher and principal corruption. A significant contributor to this problem is the high-stakes testing system described above, which gives teachers and principals to manipulate test results for their own material benefit. Fortunately, there are a few fairly simple steps that would eliminate most of the opportunities for this sort of corruption:

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Making Anticorruption Education Work: The To Do List

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In a previous post, I discussed how in Indonesia, entrenched cultural norms make corruption hard to eradicate, and I argued that because of this anticorruption reformers should promote educational curricula–at the elementary, junior high school, and high school levels–as a long-term mechanism to change the corruption culture. While my earlier post focused on Indonesia, many other countries–such as the Philippines, India, China, and others–are also beset by an entrenched culture of corruption. These countries, therefore, should also adopt anticorruption education initiatives to help change this culture.

But what goes into the design of effective anticorruption education programs? What factors must be considered? How can we ensure that anticorruption education is genuinely effective? While the issues are complex and many are country-specific, I want to highlight six important components of a successful anticorruption education program. Continue reading →

Anti-Corruption Education versus Pro-Corruption Culture

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For Indonesia, the eradication of systemic corruption is one of the country’s biggest challenges. A central part of Indonesia’s anticorruption strategy has been strengthening the country’s anticorruption institutions, most notably through the establishment of the Indonesian Corruption Commission (Komisi Pemberantasan Korupsi/, or  ”KPK”) in 2002. The KPK has been quite successful over the past decade, yet Indonesia is still perceived as corrupt. One reason for this may be Indonesia’s own pro-corruption culture. Public officials are not ashamed to ask for bribes, and the public and investors are not reluctant to pay them. Indeed, some Indonesian public servants do not even recognize their corrupt acts as illegal or wrongful. For example, when Indonesia’s Minister of Religion Suryadharma Ali was named as a suspect for embezzling money from the Hajj fund, he testified before the KPK that he did not know that his action was corrupt. The same line of argument was advanced by Jero Wacik, another minister named as a suspect in a corruption case by the KPK. These claims may seem absurd, but a person who lived in Indonesia can easily say that a lot of Indonesian people may indeed not know that certain wrongful behavior is (illegal) corruption. For example, giving petty cash to a public official as “gratitude” for expediting the issuance of a national identification card would not be considered as corrupt behavior by many Indonesians.

That a culture of corruption is embedded in Indonesia is not surprising. After all, it was only recently, under the reign of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, that the government began to take significant steps to eradicate corruption. If Indonesia’s pro-corruption culture is part of the problem, as it seems to be, more steps have to be taken beyond “mere” legal reform, institutional reform, and more aggressive law enforcement. Indonesia needs to establish a new strategy and approach in eradicating the endemic corruption, one that takes culture into consideration and implements anticorruption education programs to change this culture. What kind of anticorruption education might effectively change Indonesia’s pro-corruption culture in the long run? Here are three proposals the Indonesian government might consider: Continue reading →

Can Universities Teach People Not To Be Corrupt? Reflections on the Poznan Declaration

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Some months back, I came across the Poznan Declaration on “Whole-of-University Promotion of Social Capital, Health and Development,” which its proponents describe as “a formal statement aimed at mainstreaming ethics and anti-corruption in higher education.” (I’d meant to write about it earlier, but I got sidetracked by a relatively peripheral reference in the Declaration to changes in national corruption levels.) In general, I like the idea of promoting anticorruption norms through education, and as a university professor I’m naturally sympathetic to (and flattered by) the idea that university education could make a big difference here. And insofar as the main objective of the Poznan Declaration’s supporters is to promote more discussion among university faculty and administrators in different countries about these issues, I’m all for it.

Yet in reading the Declaration, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of nagging skepticism about some of the implicit premises behind the enterprise. Let me see if I can try to articulate some of the reasons, and perhaps invite some of the proponents of the Poznan Declaration, and the more general push to incorporate “anticorruption education” in the university curriculum, to respond. Continue reading →

It’s Time to Stop Branding Public Works in the Philippines

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In a post a few months ago, Matthew noted some challenges involved with education initiatives in the Philippines, where income disparities played a significant role in the success of an anti-vote-buying campaign. In particular, poor Filipinos perceived one campaign as condescending or insulting, and believed that the middle- and upper-class individuals behind those campaigns demonstrated a lack of respect in their approach to voter education. The issue goes much deeper than a single poorly-executed education campaign. Even popular anticorruption movements—such as the one that ousted President Joseph Estrada in 2001—were divided along class lines. Poorer Filipinos celebrated (and continue to regard) Estrada as a champion of the poor, while middle- and upper-class Filipinos demanded his resignation following allegations of plunder.

This tension between socioeconomic classes affects countless issues tied to Philippine corruption—from how Filipinos view their politicians, to how they define corruption at all. In his post, Matthew noted one such definitional problem–whether a politician helping constituents to pay for expenses associated with events like funerals or weddings can be classified as “vote buying”–but there are many other similar socioeconomic disparities in the perception of such interactions. It seems that members of different socioeconomic classes expect different things from their local, provincial, and national governments and politicians. To many of those facing extreme poverty, receiving a free birthday cake each year, or having government officials pay for a funeral, are not acts of impropriety, but rather are demonstrations of goodwill and a concern for wellbeing—values which they admire in political candidates.

But the conceptual problem is not simply borne of economic disparity. In many ways, politicians exacerbate these problems by “branding” public acts as their own personal contributions to society, rather than as official acts of their office. A simple drive around any Philippine province demonstrates the extent of this problem. Countless bridges, banners, buses, public housing units, food, disaster relief goods, and even announcements of recent public school graduates prominently feature the names and photographs of politicians. These purposeful efforts to put ones personal stamp on government works are insidious and must be eradicated from Philippine politics.

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Combating Corruption in Uganda or Merely Displacing it: The World Bank’s Public Expenditure Tracking Survey

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A World Bank-initiated effort to reduce corruption in school funding in Uganda is widely, and rightly, celebrated for its results (click here and here for background).  In the early nineteen nineties on average 87 percent of the monies the Ugandan central government budgeted for textbooks and other school supplies “leaked out” somewhere between departing the Finance Ministry and arriving at the school house front door.  Yearly data revealed that 73 percent of the schools received less than five percent of the monies to which they were entitled, and only ten percent received more than half.  The 1996 Bank project had an immediate effect on the rate of losses.  By 1999 the government found schools were receiving on average 95 percent of what they were supposed to receive, and a 2002 World Bank study likewise showed a sharp drop in fund leakage.

The dramatic improvement is attributed to the enormous publicity the data on losses garnered.  Parents were outraged and the government and donor agencies embarrassed.  Within the development community, the Uganda Public Expenditure Tracking Survey, as the work to dig out and publicize the loss data became known, has been enormously influential, the story becoming a parable for how to fight corruption.  A Uganda-like PETS project is now routinely prescribed for attacking corruption in public expenditures, and a Google search on “Uganda PETS” yields over 100,000 hits and returns some 20,000 citations on Google scholar.

But for all the attention the effort has generated, there is evidence that it may not have had any impact on the level of corruption in Uganda.  It is possible that all it did was force those raking funds off the school fund program to turn elsewhere.  The Uganda PETS thus may simply have displaced the corruption in the school funding program rather than ending it. Continue reading →