Despite significant investment and anti-corruption capacity building in the past decades, "most systematically corrupt countries are considered to be just as corrupt now as they were before the anti-corruption interventions"(1). Statements like this are indicative of the frustration shared by practitioners and scholars alike at the apparent lack of success in controlling corruption worldwide and point to the need to rethink our understanding of the factors that fuel corruption and make it so hard to abate.
From 8 –12 September 2014, the Asset Recovery Inter-Agency Network of South Africa (ARINSA), the United Nations Office on Drugs (UNODC) and the International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) conducted a joint workshop for prosecutors and investigators on Recovering the Proceeds from Wildlife and Forest Crimes in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
The workshop programme was designed to strengthen the capacity of prosecutors and investigators in recovering proceeds from wildlife and forest crimes. Some 60 participants from a number of government agencies of Tanzania attended the workshop.
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Seminar for the judiciary of Tanzania on the recovery of proceeds from wildlife and forest crime
From 21 to 24 April 2015, the United Nations Office for Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Asset Recovery Inter-Agency Network of South Africa (ARINSA), the Government of the United Republic of Tanzania and the International Center of Asset Recovery (ICAR) co-jointly conducted a four-day seminar for the Tanzanian judiciary on recovering the proceeds from wildlife and forest crime. The seminar was held on Zanzibar island and attended by some 40 Tanzanian judges.
The Basel Institute’s contribution to the EU-funded ANTICORRP research consortium through the Work Package “The ethnographic study of corruption” (WP4) has come to a close with the acceptance by the European Commission of the second set of publications emanating from this research effort.
On 17 March 2016, the Basel Institute’s Head of Public Governance (Research) Division, Dr. Claudia Baez-Camargo, presented her paper ‘Where does informality stop and corruption begin?
The Basel Institute has been awarded two new research grants; one by the British Academy as part of its GBP 4 million global anti-corruption research scheme in partnership with the Department for International Development (DFID) in the context of DFID’s Anti-Corruption Evidence ('ACE') Research Programme; the second by DFID’s East Africa Research Fund (EARF).
Experts from ICAR delivered a 5-day training workshop on Financial Investigations and Asset Recovery for the benefit of the Prevention and Combating of Corruption Bureau (PCCB) in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania from 11 to 15 April 2016.
Corruption is pervasive in Sub-Saharan Africa’s educational sector. The phenomenon includes not only bribery but also practices that the World Bank has labeled "quiet corruption." While anti-corruption interventions tackling such practices are typically based on assumptions of rational decision-making from classical economics, Cosimo analyses petty corruption practices through a behavioural lens.
Chapter 8 in Corruption in Public Administration: An Ethnographic Approach, edited by Davide Torsello.
Despite the growth in literature on political corruption, contributions from field research are still exiguous. This book, edited by Davide Torsello, provides a timely and much needed addition to current research, bridging the gap between macro level quantitative indicators of corruption and micro level qualitative evidence through an innovative ethnographic approach to the study of corruption and integrity in public administration.
This article applies a novel conceptual framework to characterise and assess the repertoire of practices used by informal networks to redistribute power and access to resources. These distinct norms and practices are typologised as co-optation, control, and camouflage. Co-optation involves recruitment into the network by means of the reciprocal exchange of favours. Control is about ensuring discipline amongst network members by means of shaming and social isolation. Camouflage refers to the formal facades behind which informality hides and is about protecting and legitimising the network.