Our Public Governance team will host a virtual event on Harnessing the intangible: enhancing integrity during crises at 13:00 CET on 25 March 2021. All are welcome.

The event is part of the 2021 OECD Global Anti-Corruption & Integrity Forum, for which we are proud to have been selected as Knowledge Partner.

Integrity, social norms and informal practices in emergency response situations

The panellists will focus on a long-standing problem that the covid-19 pandemic has thrown into the spotlight:

Health workers and administrators are often subject to intense social pressures to ignore official rules and procedure, even more so during times of crisis. These pressures are likely to be systematic because they are rooted in social norms: shared understandings about actions that are appropriate in society.

Such norms provide the unwritten rules of behaviour and in times of crisis the pressure to follow them can sharpen – overriding not just formal rules but even personal attitudes and beliefs. A similar argument applies to informal practices that are rooted in everyday routines and that become entrenched because they are functional.

The presenters in this panel will discuss how practitioners may tailor approaches to strengthen integrity during an emergency response to counter recurrent social norms and informal practices.

Some of the insights shared will highlight the approaches to working with social norms and social networks that are being tested in the scope of a current research project under the UK-funded Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence Research Programme (GI-ACE), titled Addressing bribery in the Tanzanian health sector: A behavioural approach.

The panel

Claudia Baez Camargo, Head of Public Governance at the Basel Institute on Governance, will moderate a panel of renowned speakers bringing different perspectives to the topic:

• Dina Balabanova, Professor of Health Systems and Policy, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
• David Jackson, Senior Adviser, U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre
• Ruth Persian, Senior Research Advisor, The Behavioural Insights Team

More info and registration

• Event: Thursday, 25 March 2021, 13:00–14:30 CET
• Register on Zoom