Safeguarding our environment by ensuring a successful energy transition is one of humanity’s greatest challenges – one that is deeply connected to stability, security, peace and economic development. 

However, corruption undermines global efforts to combat climate change and environmental degradation. It enables illegal exploitation of natural resources, weakens environmental policies, facilitates organised environmental crimes and diverts critical funds meant for energy transition and climate change adaptation and mitigation.

The Green Corruption programme at the Basel Institute on Governance is a multi-disciplinary initiative that applies anti-corruption and governance tools to environmental and energy transition-related challenges. Our work prioritises efforts to safeguard forests and critical minerals. 

How we work

We collaborate with governments, the private sector, and civil society across the world, with team members based and working with partners in Ukraine, Indonesia, Madagascar, Malawi, Uganda, Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador. Our team includes specialists in financial investigations, asset recovery, corruption risk mitigation, internal controls and environmental crime. We work hands-on with local partners in the public, private and civil society sectors to, among other things:

• Secure supply chains for minerals critical to the energy transition, such as lithium, nickel and germanium. 
• Build robust internal controls for our partners entrusted with protecting and sustainably utilising natural resources. 
• Bring environmental criminals to justice and recover illicit assets.
• Enhance corruption safeguards in green finance mechanisms.
• Convene practitioners in the green corruption space from around the world to learn from each other and bolster each other’s efforts.  

Our impact

Since 2018, the Green Corruption programme has driven tangible progress in efforts to understand, prevent and combat corruption affecting the environment. Drawing on expertise across the Basel Institute and its International Centre for Asset Recovery, we have applied a multi-pronged approach covering:

• Enforcement: Training and assisting partner agencies to apply “follow the money” approaches to environmental crime cases. Some have now achieved their first ever asset recovery successes, including in cases targeting millions of dollars in assets linked to forestry, gold trafficking, illegal wildlife trade and more.
• Prevention: Strengthening corruption prevention systems, such as codes of ethics, whistleblowing system, automation, business process optimisation, etc in government agencies and state-owned enterprises to ensure better management of natural resources such as timber and minerals.
• Partnerships: Bridging the gap between anti-corruption, conservation and environmental crime experts through initiatives like the Countering Environmental Corruption Practitioners Forum.
• Knowledge: Advancing research and awareness on how corruption and governance failures fuel environmental degradation and jeopardise the green transition, shaping global discussions and policy responses.

By bringing our anti-corruption and governance expertise, we strengthen efforts to protect the environment, address climate change and ensure a just, sustainable future.

The Green Corruption programme has been the grateful recipient of multi-year core funding from the Principality of Liechtenstein and project funding from the United Kingdom, the United States and Switzerland.