I have been involved in many different sorts of anti-corruption efforts since 1985. First, as an oil industry executive for Shell in West Africa and in China, then leading a civil society programme tackling military and security corruption with Transparency International, then as an International Commissioner on anti-corruption in Afghanistan; and now as the co- founder of a large website on practical ways for reform-minded individuals to tackle corruption.
My personal involvement almost parallels the timeline of the modern anti-corruption movement. That started with the US Financial Corrupt Practices Act of 1978/1986, the founding of Transparency International in 1993, the conversion of the World Bank to the importance of corruption in 1996, the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention in 1999, the UN Convention Against Corruption in 2003, and onwards from there with a multiplicity of new laws, new international initiatives and the professionalisation of compliance.
So, what have I learnt regarding corruption? Corruption really does matter…it destroys lives, it impoverishes people, it inhibits wealth-generation and hurts law-abiding communities. It is an evil that is rejected by all the faiths of the world. Yet not only does it persist, but it has been tolerated by too many communities for too long. Corruption is not ‘just’ a development issue. It is as bad in developed countries, just different. We saw this when Iceland, a supposedly super-clean country, collapsed in the financial crisis of 2008 as the corrupt links between the members of the Icelandic elite led to the whole economy shattering. We see it today in the design of corrupt structures and the laundering of the benefits of corruption in global; hubs like London.
At a personal level, it matters to me – I am emotionally upset by the injustice of corruption, to individuals, to communities and to societies. At the same time, I am gratified to find that this is a subject where my particular mix of knowledge and experience seems to be useful in making sense of a complex phenomenon.
What to do and where to start – my perspective
After many years of thinking about this – and, sadly, growing older – I think the best place to start about corruption is with the components of my own ‘mental model’. I make no claim that these form a coherent whole, nor that they could be the ‘only truth’. But, as much change management research has shown, we each carry deeply held assumptions about how we think the world works, which operate almost below the level of logical argument. So, rather than ‘explain’ the rationale of what I think, here are what I think of as the ten core elements. You can see the thinking behind each assertion by clicking on the + button.
1. Corruption is one form of abuse of power, and is therefore fundamentally about injustice
It’s not the only form of injustice, so too are cruelty, poverty and sexual abuse, for example, but this is where I start. Not with logical definitions, like the classic one of corruption being the abuse of authority for personal gain, but at that point where we feel outrage as human beings. This is what drives us, or at least me. For two excellent arguments on how and why injustice is the core of corruption, see Rothstein and Varrach, 2017, eg p52, and Ceva and Ferretti, 2021’Political corruption – the internal enemy of public institutions’.
2. Corruption needs to be disaggregated for reforms to be effective. I believe that Sectors should be the first level of disaggregation, and the specific types of abuse within the sector should be the second level
In order to be capable of being tackled, you have to break corruption down into one or two or three lower levels of classification. As Rothstein and Varraich put it, ‘Biologists classify hummingbirds, hens, eagles and ostriches all as ‘birds’ despite the fact that they are, to say the least, quite different ‘birds’. (ibid, p45).
In the same way, I believe that the first level of disaggregation should be ‘sector’ (health, education, construction, fisheries, etc) and below that, each sector has 20-50 different specific corruption types. At a sector level, like in health, construction or water, you can be specific about the detailed types of corruption. You can integrate both public and private sector issues, and you can address the political context more realistically. There is more ownership and pride from those working in the sector. Sector-level initiatives are more feasible, whether small, such as within a department, or large, such as across the Ministry or an agency. Even in the toughest corruption environments, where progress may only be possible in tiny steps, there are many sector improvement measures that can help, and which can form the basis of a much larger improvement when circumstances change. For example, the various pharmaceutical-related corruption types within health, or the ways that telecom licenses are corruptly granted. Even when a corruption type is common across sectors, such as the corrupt diversion of salaries from the ministry to the worker, the ways that this happens and the ways that it can be stopped are different from one sector to another.
Merits of sectors: A sector typology gets us away from binary types – Grand/petty, need/greed, political/ bureaucratic, institutional/individual all vanish: all types are in the one typology. A sector approach integrates public sector reform and private sector reform. In every sector, the public sector and the private sector are deeply intertwined; whether through integration of contractors, outsourcing of support roles, or complete privatisation of previously government tasks. Political context differs markedly between sectors. It is usually not nationally homogenous. Incentives: Understanding and changing the ‘rules of the game’ happens within sectors.
You will always find professionally credible champions within sectors to articulate/drive change. The corruption differences between individual sectors within any one country are large and often bigger than the differences in corruption between countries. Sector knowledge also transcends national boundaries: medical staff in one country may well have knowledge that is helpful in another, and transnational initiatives to solve sector-specific corruption problems now exist, such as education, mineral extraction, defence and shipping.
3. There have been enough success stories around the world for us to be confident that corruption can be reduced to the level of an exception rather than the norm
Enough countries have made progress against corruption, it seems to me, for this to be ‘obvious’. Countries such as Botswana, Chile, Uruguay, Georgia, Estonia, Lithuania, the Nordics, Singapore and Hong Kong. The ‘Anticorpp’ research led by Professor Mungui Pippidi goes into immense detail on the how, why and the process.
4. Most people who are engaged in corruption are caught up in systems that are not of their making. Many, if not most of them are ready to implement anti-corruption measures
This was a core insight from my years of working with the senior military in numerous defence forces. Many of the officers were corrupted, well aware that colluding in a corrupt system was the only way to advance. But this did not stop their readiness to enact reforms. It only stopped their readiness to take actions that might endanger or impoverish themselves or their family. The readiness of groups that are largely corrupt to take reform action is a critical insight for catalysing change.
5. Reform actions at the whole-of-government level are important, but they carry a high risk of failure. They are also insufficient
Such large-scale reforms, eg to the civil service, the judicial system or national cultures, are undoubtedly part of the ‘mix’ of reforms and therefore necessary. BUT, due to complexity and the lack of anyone who owns the whole change, they carry a very high risk of failure.
6. All reforms, whether successful or not, will be accompanied by an unchanging, continuing level of anger and complaint about ongoing corruption
This is normal and needs to be anticipated.
7. Sector-specific corruption reform - eg in health, or education, or agriculture - has been underemphasised over the last 25 years. Each sector needs sector-specific expertise, advocacy and monitoring, which is largely lacking today
8. We need to give more agency and support to the people who have to own the change - usually senior Ministry officials, Ministers and companies in the sector
9. Stop 'admiring the problem' of corruption. Put the majority of effort into fixing it and into analysing what seems to work
Put 90% of the focus on fixing the problem instead. Academics, multilateral..they all know it’s much easier to analyse the problem than it is to develop and sustain solutions. I know there is a genuine issue of needing to carefully and thoroughly identify the nature of the problem, but this has been taken to ridiculous extremes in the A-C community.
10. Anti-corruption strategies - whether sectoral, national, sub-national or international - are still in a very early stage of evolution.
Lessons from working in Afghanistan
From 2015 through 2017, I was one of three International Committee Members on the Afghanistan independent Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Committee. Established by the President of Afghanistan, the Committee – known as the ‘MEC’ – comprises 6 people, three well-respected Afghans and three internationally known anti-corruption experts, supported by a supporting secretariat of 25 professionals in Kabul. They monitor what is going right and wrong in anti-corruption efforts in the country, carry out detailed analyses of the corruption issues, and press for change. More detail on MEC can be found here.
Here are the things that I learned:
World class solutions can come out of tough places like Afghanistan
I was astonished at how some of the most imaginative anti-corruption solutions – impressive even by developed world standards – were emerging out of this unpromising soil. Examples include the National Procurement Authority; and a recruitment system for recruiting hundreds, indeed thousands of public officials on an almost meritocratic basis.
Corruption is very different from one sector to another
Despite corruption being ‘endemic’ in Afghanistan, it took quite different forms and had quite different political support in the different sectors. It was most deeply ingrained in policing and in mines, for example, because of the centrality of these functions to power and money. It was also deeply ingrained in less high money/high power sectors, because fewer people were looking and there was less competition for the corruption: in sectors such as transport, religious affairs and telecoms for example. For the same reason, the corruption could be more easily addressed. It was least deeply ingrained in the health ministry, because so much of the health system was outsourced to international NGOs. This helped me to understand how corruption can be better tackled by taking different approaches in each sector
International sector-specific knowledge on corruption reform is awful
I was horrified to discover that the world’s anti-corruption knowledge in almost every sector – from education to telecommunications – was desperately poorly organised, difficult to access, and focused more on problem definition than on fixing corruption. Worse, I found that many international development specialists, for example, in education and health, deliberately avoided the subject of corruption altogether, perhaps because they saw it as too difficult or perhaps of the risk that they would lose funding.
Huge hunger among officials for sharing positive impact
For the two years that I was one of the international commissioners, I convened a quarterly roundtable of senior Afghan public officials sharing knowledge of anti-corruption measures that had worked or were promising in their Ministries. We had an invitation list of some 100 officials, from Minister level down to Department Director level, and typically 25 came to each meeting. They really appreciated these meetings – as very busy officials, they wouldn’t repeatedly come to a 4 hr meeting from 5 pm to 9 pm unless it was worthwhile. They told me there were three reasons: nice to hear what others are doing, nice to blow ones own trumpet for once, and most of all, for shared succour in a difficult endeavour.
Immense scope for better independent monitoring
Monitoring and Evaluation are always much harder to do than to talk about, but the problem is extreme in a conflict country. On the one hand, the ‘official’ monitoring and audit systems such as those of the Embassies, Aid Agencies and Multilateral institutions were rather easy to subvert. Sometimes they were tick-box efforts where it was clear that the host agency didn’t really want to ‘find’ any irregularities. Where they were more well intended, Afghans would tell me how relatively easy they were to subvert. On the other hand, civil society monitoring was much less prevalent than I hoped or expected. It led me to think that a whole new generation of single-sector-focused monitoring entities could be established. In MEC, we started doing this with separate teams monitoring progress in health, education, attorney-generals office, etc, which I think showed a lot of promise.
Reformist ministers really need help on reform strategy
Lessons from working with military & police forces
From 2004 to 2015, I founded and then led the global Defence and Security programme at the NGO Transparency International. This large, ground-breaking programme works on tackling the ways that corruption undermines security and military forces in countries. I led the team’s fieldwork in over 30 countries, including Afghanistan, Bulgaria, Burundi, Colombia, Georgia, Kenya, Latvia, Lebanon, Norway, Palestine, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, UK and the USA. This work was instrumental in shaping the United Nations Arms Trade Treaty (2013), influencing NATO policy and operations in respect of counter-corruption, shaping the military doctrine of several countries, and in policy forums such as the Munich Security Conference.
Here is what I learned:
1. Military officers can be in a deeply corrupt system but still keen for reform
I was struck by how senior officials and senior officers were open about their participation in corrupt or questionable practices. They knew very well the political constraints on what they could do, but many were nonetheless taking small actions to reduce the corruption. Their question, almost every time, was What do you suggest I could best do, and where do I find the necessary knowledge? For many, finding that defence-specific anti-corruption knowledge existed was like finding water in the desert.
2. Defence is impenetrable unless you can speak the jargon and have a credible colleague
3. Pride is a powerful motivator of reform
Officers all over the world receive similar training in integrity (The core officer training for most national militaries is historically modelled on one system, that from Sandhurst Military Academy in the UK). The purpose of the training is not so much against corruption and rather it is the integrity needed for soldiers to follow the officers into battle, perhaps to die. Nevertheless, officers know how deeply corruption goes against the ethos of military leadership. Many are ashamed of the situation in their military and are ready to take action to change it.
4. National quantitative comparisons are immensely powerful
I pioneered detailed, comparative analyses of the defence corruption risks of some 130 countries.
5. Corruption inside police forces is a massive issue, remarkably little explored
Though our work was largely focused on militaries and Defence Ministries, we were also engaged in corruption reform in police services in Afghanistan, Burundi, Palestine, Ukraine and the UK. This subject has been the subject of many national Commissions in anglophone countries, notably the USA, UK and Australia, by a few groups, notable DCAF in Switzerland, and by a few academics.
Lessons from working at global oil company Shell
From 1985 to 2003, I was a senior executive at Shell International. In those 18 years, I did 6 jobs: Manager of an internal Shell consultancy, Manager of Shell’s investor relations with the City of London, Chief Financial Officer of Shell International in Gabon (West Africa), Chief Financial Officer for Shell in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Korea, Programme Director for reform of Shell Products across Europe and Chief Financial Officer for Shell’s global IT operations.
Shell prides itself on its business principles, including non-involvement in corruption, and I was on the ‘front line’ of this issue in most of these jobs. Here’s what I learned in relation to corruption:
Large corporations really can deeply support a guiding value
There is plenty of research evidence showing that Corporations can have deeply held values. Shell is one such company, where the ‘business principles’ that were established in 1976 were supported by everyone as core values. My wife loved being the spouse of a Shell executive, because when she refused the demands for end-of-month money from police on the streets in Gabon, she would say ‘I’m Shell’, and the police officer would let her go because he knew that getting money from her would be very unlikely and that Shell would appeal any impoundment of the car. More seriously, this same ‘soft protection’ can apply to the whole of the company and its suppliers if suitably thoroughly done.
But conflicts still need fighting over, one by one
I probably had one serious corruption issue in my in-tray every month whilst I was in Gabon, many of them in the multi-million dollar category. Generally, there was noone to speak to or seek help from. Somehow you were expected to work it out for yourself. Worse, several of my bosses in London or the Hague would stay very quiet, hoping that I came to the ‘right’ business-friendly conclusion without requiring them to rule on the issue.
And parts of the company can remain non-compliant
Later, when I was reviewing issue reporting across different Shell companies, I was struck by how much active compliance depended on the character of the chief executive, even in this ‘standardised’ system. Some of the Shell national companies had a record of very few bribery issues when this was more than improbable.
The desire to 'belong' is so powerful, so sometimes scrutiny would go only to a certain depth
Because affiliation is a hugely strong emotion, the sensitivity of how far you can take an issue before you are causing real discomfort inside the organisation is almost palpable. I met this head-on not with a corruption issue but with a case of the abduction of a staff member by the Chinese security services. I was the Shell ‘crisis manager’ when this happened to Shell in China about 1995. Trying to get her released over the course of the next year was almost a full-time task, and it was evident when I was butting up against the need/desire for the Shell business to re-establish normal relations with the Chinese authorities; which meant no longer raising the question of her detention at every high-level meeting. This is a version of the implicit ostracism that whistleblowers face. The need for affiliation is deep into the psyche of how company staff relate to their organisation, and I, for one, cannot see yet how whistleblowing will ever really succeed for this reason.
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