Tag Archives: transparency

Bitcoin, Blockchain, and Land Reform: Can an “Incorruptible” Technology Cure Corruption?

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Since its inception in 2009, Bitcoin—a digital currency secured by encryption—has attracted attention, interest, and controversy. Less attention (at least until recently) has been paid to other applications of the underlying technology, “blockchain,” that makes Bitcoin possible. And while the anonymity associated with Bitcoin is, if anything, often associated with illicit transactions in the “dark web,” other applications of the blockchain technology might be used to enhance transparency and promote integrity. Some of the early proposals along these lines are indeed encouraging; at the same time, blockchain is not a technological panacea, and recognizing its limitations can identify areas that may require particular attention in anticorruption efforts.

First, a bit more (non-technical) information on the technology. Blockchain functions as an online, public digital ledger. In the Bitcoin context, the technology makes it possible to track and record Bitcoin transactions in the ledger and distribute that information in real-time to all computers connected to the Bitcoin network. Because of this distribution, the ledger is updated independent of any central authority. Moreover, because each chronological “block” in the chain contains both unique information about each transaction and also a unique identifier of the previous block, which is then distributed to all computers on the network, it is very difficult (perhaps impossible) to tamper with or alter the transaction records.

While the blockchain technology made Bitcoin possible, its public and tamper-proof data storage function could assist with efforts to promote transparency and fight corruption. For example, in the context of land reform, Austin-based start-up Factom has reached an agreement with the Honduran government to transfer its land registry onto a blockchain-enforced digital database. The objective is to create a reliable land title-keeping system in a country where, as USAID notes, “only 14% of Hondurans legally occupy properties and, of the properties held legally, only 30% are registered.” In addition to a lack of registration, government officials currently can alter titles to those properties that are registered, allocating properties to themselves (or to others in exchange for bribes). Moreover, citizens often lack access to records, which may provide conflicting information, and are thus unable to defend themselves against infringement of property, use, or mineral rights. By recording land title in an immutable public registry (relying, according to reports, on the Bitcoin blockchain’s data-embedding function), the partnership between Factom and the Honduran government seeks to secure for the public a clear, trustworthy record of ownership in order to improve protection of land rights, and to incentivize registration.

This seems like a worthwhile initiative, and one that transparency and anticorruption advocates should watch closely. At the same time, it’s worth noting several reasons we should be careful not to lose sight of important corruption challenges amidst the excitement surrounding the digitized ledger: Continue reading →

Guest Post: U.S. Implementation of the EITI–Good Progress, But Needs Improvement

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Daniel Dudis, Senior Policy Director for Government Accountability at Transparency International-USA, who contributes the following guest post:

The United States recently published its first narrative report and payment reconciliation report under the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI). The EITI was founded in 2003 to help end the “resource curse” by which the revenues generated from natural resource extraction benefit a small group of politically-connected insiders and do nothing to improve the lives of the vast majority of people in many resource-rich countries. The concept that underpins the EITI is simple: by requiring participating resource extraction companies to report the payments they make to all levels of government in a country, while simultaneously requiring participating governments to report the revenues (including royalties, bonuses, rents, penalties, fees, and corporate income taxes) received from those companies, one can compare the reported figures and bring transparency to an often opaque sector. This transparency can in turn be used to hold governments accountable for how they distribute and spend resource wealth. Membership in the EITI is voluntary; there are currently 49 countries participating. The EITI is governed at both the international and national levels by multi-stakeholder groups composed of representatives of government, civil society, and industry.

The recently published U.S. EITI report covers payments made and received in 2013. There is much valuable information in the both report and the accompanying U.S. EITI website. The Department of Interior is to be commended for publishing 100% of payments it received in 2013 from companies producing on federal lands and in federal waters (totaling approximately $12 billion), as well as state-by-state royalties for 18 resource-rich U.S. states. The report also provides detailed information on natural resource extraction governance at the federal, state, and tribal levels, statistics on the size of the extractives sector (in terms of economic output and employment), as well as a valuable assessment of the revenue sustainability in 12 resource-dependent counties.

That said, there are a couple of important respects in which the report falls short: Continue reading →

The Case of the Disappearing Transparency Report

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Last week a colleague sent a link to a report assessing Norway’s compliance with its promises to the Open Government Partnership to increase government transparency.  Surprisingly, given the Norwegian government is considered one of the more open and transparent on the planet, the authors gave the government low marks. What’s even more surprising is their candor in assessing the transparency movement in Norway. They suggest that transparency has become an end in itself.

My fear is that this is a trend not confined to Norway.  Rather than pursuing transparency as a means to a more accountable, less corrupt government, the Norwegian case illustrates what has become all too common among transparency advocates: they have come to believe that transparency is an end in itself — to be pursued no matter the consequences.

Shortly after the report appeared on the website of the NGO Engine Room, its institutional author, it disappeared — which may mean I am not the only one who found the report quite damning.  In any event, while I didn’t download the entire report before it was taken down, I did copy an excerpt from the abstract showing my fear is not fanciful: Continue reading →

Justice v. Corruption: Challenges to the Independence of the Judiciary in Cambodia

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Last month, the International Bar Association (IBA) Human Rights Institute issued a report entitled Justice versus Corruption: Challenges to the Independence of the Judiciary in Cambodia which paints a dark picture of the extent of political and financial corruption in the Cambodian judicial system. This report was prompted by the enactment of three controversial laws that enabled the Cambodian government to undermine the independence of the courts, but the IBA’s investigation went beyond these three laws to examine the judicial system as a whole, only to discover that, in addition to persistent problems of government interference with judicial independence, the entire Cambodian judicial system was riddled with both bribery and political corruption.

There are credible allegations that cases are often decided in favor of the party offering the larger bribe; Cambodian lawyers interviewed by the IBA researchers estimated that 90% of the cases heard by the courts involve bribes to judges or clerks, and that when no bribe is offered, judges often give no attention to the case, and court staff will refuse to release basic information, or give lawyers access to the case files. In addition, the report found that trainee judges are asked for large bribes to access to their professional trainings — meaning that what the report calls the “the culture of bribe giving and receiving” is taught to judges from the very beginning of their career. In addition to this widespread bribery, political corruption of the judiciary is also pervasive. The report notes suspicions of judges and clerks sometimes being given specific instructions from powerful politicians how to decide cases in which these politicians have a financial interest.

To address this widespread, systemic corruption, the IBA offers a series of recommendations. A few of the report’s recommendations are concrete and implementable. For example, report recommends that the IBA exercise influence on the Cambodian Bar Association (the BAKC) to reform itself if it wishes to remain a member of the IBA; such pressure may be help to end corrupt practices in the BAKC itself, and encourage the independence and protection of lawyers in Cambodia. Unfortunately, however, most of the report’s recommendations, while appealing in theory, are not terribly practical, at least in the context of Cambodia today. In emphasizing idealistic, aspirational recommendations, the report perhaps missed an opportunity to recommend some more concrete, practical goals that, while not fully addressing the problem, might at least have some chance of being adopted. Continue reading →

Guest Post: Promoting Ambient Accountability with Architecture and Design

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GAB is delighted to welcome back Dieter Zinnbauer, Programme Manager at Transparency International, who contributes the following guest post:

Corrupt transactions do not merely “take place” – they take place in a place, a specific place at a specific time: at customs authorities and land registrars, at hospital wards, police road-stops, school headmaster offices, or the offices of social benefits agencies. The fact that most form of corruption occur in physical locations may seem both obvious and unimportant, but in fact there may be some promising ways to modify the physical settings for government-citizen interactions that would make various kinds of corruption less likely to occur (or easier to detect and remedy). This possibility builds on the observation that many corrupt transactions are fragile forms of social exchange, often involving power asymmetries, established social roles, norms, and expectations. These social dynamics are critical to enabling the parties to engage in an illegal transaction that could get both of them into a lot of trouble. These complex social dynamics and expectations are affected by the physical environment; modifications to that environment can therefore disrupt or alter the social dynamics of a specific situation—creating feelings of empowerment for potential targets of extortion and feelings of uncertainty and anxiety for those who would propose corrupt exchanges.

We should therefore think about ways to use architecture and design to empower citizens to become more aware of their rights and entitlements, to better understand and assess the services they receive, and to register complaints and seek remedies more effectively. I call this concept “ambient accountability.” I have developed this idea more fully in two recent papers (here and here), but here are some concrete examples of how this sort of intervention might work in other contexts: Continue reading →

Guest Post: Pro-Transparency Organizations Fail To Practice What They Preach

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Till Bruckner, freelance journalist and Advocacy Manager for Transparify (an initiative that rates the financial transparency of think tanks and advocacy groups), contributes the following guest post in a private capacity:

“Transparency” is the watchword of the international anticorruption movement, a fact perhaps best illustrated by Transparency International’s choice of name. And partly due to the efforts of TI and many other groups, the world has changed for the better: transparency has become the new norm. Yet many of the anticorruption groups themselves need to wake up to this reality, and become more transparent themselves. Indeed, those of us in the anticorruption community would do a lot better if we started to walk our transparency talk.

This fact was driven home to me in a recent exchange I had with Professor Peter Eigen, the living legend who helped found Transparency International, about his newest venture, the Fisheries Transparency Initiative (FiTI). FiTI aims to curb corruption in international fisheries, and if it works as planned, it could have a positive impact on many issues, including overfishing, food security, and public revenue in developing countries. Somewhat unconventionally, FiTI is financed by the government of Mauritania, whose controversial president, Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz, first announced the initiative. (see my recent article in Foreign Policy for more background.) I asked Professor Eigen about Mauritania’s financial support for the FiTI; he explained that Mauritania was only sponsoring the initial conceptual phase of FiTI, and he persuasively argued that its government would have no undue influence, let alone control, over outcomes. I then asked Professor Eigen how much Mauritania was paying his organization (the Humboldt-Viadrina Governance Platform) in connection with its work on the FiTI project, but he told me he didn’t want to disclose the figure. He explained:

“This is a normal consulting arrangement of our not-for-profit organization with the [Mauritanian] government. We do not feel it would be proper for us to disclose details of contracts. If media or taxpayers want to find out how [the] Government spends its budget, they can ask the Government. This is for FiTI an unimportant side issue.”

Professor Eigen added two more points. First, his organization would at some later point account for the money on its website. Second, he himself would be working “pro bono.”

Summary: There’s no influence peddling; the use of taxpayer funds is a domestic issue; all money will be accounted for; and nobody is lining their pockets. So, everything is okay, right?

No, it’s not okay at all. Here’s why: Continue reading →

A U.S. Court Jeopardizes Corporate Transparency Rules, in the Name of Free Speech

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Transparency is often seen as an important anticorruption tool, perhaps nowhere more than in extractive industries. Notably, an international movement has called on extractive industry firms to “Publish What You Pay” (PWYP). The idea is that if it were public knowledge what these firms had paid for the concessions they receive from governments, the citizens in those countries (as well as journalists, NGOs, and others) would be better able to hold governments accountable for what they did with the money (and would make it harder for governments, or individual government officials, to lie about how much money they received). Many advocates therefore believe that it would be good public policy to enact PWYP rules that would compel these sorts of disclosures. But would such disclosure requirements violate the constitutional principle of freedom of speech? Alas, some U.S. judges seem to think so.

If the whole idea that disclosure requirements of this sort might infringe free speech rights seems bizarre, I’m with you—in my earlier post on this topic, discussing an earlier case that seemed to take this position, I used words like “absurd” and “inane.” Yet last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit issued a new ruling (a follow-up to the earlier decision I ranted about last year) that seemed to strongly endorse a very broad constitutional protection for corporations against “compelled commercial speech,” which bodes ill. Although the most recent opinion, like the one I posted about last year, does not directly address PWYP mandates, the larger themes of the D.C. Circuit opinion are troubling, and suggest that this court (or at least some judges) may be hostile to the whole idea of using mandatory disclosures as a way to advance important public policy goals, including the fight against corruption. Continue reading →

Community-Level Aid and Corruption in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

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As Rick has discussed in a previous post, one common strategy adopted by donors seeking to engage in development and humanitarian work in countries with corrupt governments is to try to bypass national institutions. Instead, they direct their efforts towards the local level, engaging with communities, local leaders, and smaller-scale NGOs. Theoretically, this approach means the money passes through fewer hands, and there are therefore fewer opportunities for some of it to be skimmed off. Furthermore, donors may believe that local institutions are less corrupt or more easily subjected to (or more responsive to) monitoring by donors or other overseers. Donors may also opt for a local-oriented approach for reasons not related to corruption, like supporting projects that are more responsive to people’s actual needs, furthering community empowerment, and building institutions.

However, recent evidence from the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) indicates that a local-oriented approach has its corruption-related drawbacks. Resources channeled through national political figures may have the potential to be stolen or misdirected for personal gain, but community-driven development programs are also vulnerable to elite capture. In fact, broader research has indicated that members of community development organizations—the very people with whom donors are partnering in hopes of side-stepping corruption—are more likely to pay bribes than non-members.  Furthermore, even when donor programs succeed in creating infrastructure, they tend to fail to improve local governance, accountability, or capacity.

Still, given the pervasive corruption in national governments (in the DRC and elsewhere), and the way those in power benefit from avoiding any meaningful action against corruption, the impulse towards local-side aid is understandable. What, then, are donors to do? Though it’s impossible to guarantee positive results, there are some steps that foreign governments and NGOs can take to mitigate the risk of the money targeted locally from being illicitly diverted:

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Development Aid–A Blind Spot for EU Anticorruption Efforts

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GAB is pleased to welcome back Jesper Johnsøn, Senior Advisor at the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre, who, along with his colleagues Nils Taxell and Thor Olav Iversen, contributes the following guest post:

A new study from the European Parliament entitled Cost of Corruption in Developing Countries – How Effectively is Aid Being Spent? shows that, despite an impressive track record of ambitious anticorruption reforms in countries working toward European Union membership, the EU’s overall anticorruption strategy marginalizes efforts to address corruption through development aid. The EU could spend aid more effectively, the report concludes, if it prioritized corruption control in developing countries. The analysis in the report suggests several measures that the EU should adopt to reduce corruption in its development aid programs:

Continue reading →

Two Questions for the Open Contracting Partnership

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One of today’s more promising global anticorruption movements is The Open Contracting Partnership.  A venture that brings together organizations as different as the World Bank, the Philippines Government Procurement Policy Board, and Oxfam, its goal is to open government contracting to greater transparency and public participation.  As many studies show (click here, here, and here for recent examples), corruption infects all stages of the procurement process  — from skewing the specifications to favor a single firm to rigging the tendering process to rampant cheating in contract performance.  And as many of these same studies argue, less secrecy and more public involvement in the process is one way to curb it.

The Partnership has taken important steps towards realizing these objectives since its launch in October 2012.  It has developed global principles governing contract openness, created a standard format for reporting data on government contracts, collated information on open contracting in the award of natural resource concessions and land, assembled a quality staff and advisory board, and a fostered an enthusiastic global community of practice.

All this is not only welcome but laudable, and the organizers and supporters of the Partnership are to be congratulated for the initiative.  Now that the Partnership is firmly established, however, it is time to address two questions it has so far avoided. Continue reading →