The UK Department for International Development (DFID), through its East Africa Research Fund (EARF), commissioned the Basel Institute on Governance to conduct the research project “Corruption, Social Norms and Behaviours in East Africa” aiming at shedding light into those “[behavioural] factors that influence the propensity for poor people to engage in, resist and report ‘corrupt transactions’” in three East African countries, namely, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda.

Combatting corruption in the developing world has been a formidable challenge and taken a prominent place in the agenda of the international development community for the last two decades. Nonetheless, the results and outcomes of conventional anti-corruption interventions continue to be modest at best. This is often reflected in the so-called implementation gap, whereby countries adopting sound legal and organisational anti-corruption frameworks continue to experience very high levels of corruption.

The Basel Institute on Governance and the International Bar Association (IBA) have published a study on typologies of corruption in the judiciary in the context of the IBA's Judicial Integrity Initiative.

One of the key findings of the study is that while bribery is particularly prevalent when the rule of law is considered weak, undue political influence as a form of corruption occurs in countries across the board regardless of governance structures.

The Panama Papers provided proof to the world of something that had long been suspected: the secrecy havens – jurisdictions in which global financial flows were hidden in ways that not even those entrusted with enforcing the laws and regulations of countries around the world could detect – were being used by those engaged in a host of nefarious activities, from tax evasion to corruption and even to child pornography.

This case study pertains to an assessment conducted by the Basel Institute on Governance, in collaboration with UNDP’s Global Anti-Corruption Initiative (GAIN), of a social accountability monitoring project in the municipality of San Miguel, Bohol in the Philippines.

The aforementioned project, called Bayaniham Undertaking Living in a Healthy and Organised Neighborhood or BULHON sa Panguma (BULHON), involves the monitoring of agricultural subsidies and was developed and implemented by the Government Watch (G-Watch) programme of the Ateneo School of Government in Manila.

This paper focuses on local understandings of corrupt practices among indigenous groups in rural areas of Mexico and links the exercise of particular communitarian practices and social norms  among those groups to the effectiveness of social accountability mechanisms in the Mexican health sector.

This study was undertaken as part of the Basel Institute's contribution to ANTICORRP WP4 "the ethnographic study of corruption."

This paper highlights the key findings of a study conducted as part of the Basel Institute's contribution to ANTICORRP WP4 "the ethnographic study of corruption."

It explores the attitudes towards corrupt practices in the health sector among citizens in Dar es Salaam and how those are linked to coping mechanisms that have been spontaneously organised at the community level as well as to generalised perceptions on the role of the state and the prevailing legal order in contemporary Tanzania.

This publication is the output of the latest collaborative project between the Basel Institute on Governance and the World Health Organisation Regional Office for Europe.

The document, which is co-edited by Juan Tello of WHO and Claudia Baez Camargo of the Basel Institute, offers a comprehensive view of the various manners in which different WHO member states have strived to improve their governance performance and specially throws light as to how different strategies to improve accountability have been rolled out responding to variations across institutional frameworks. 

The Basel Institute has been working with the Ministry of Justice of Romania in a two-component project seeking to enhance the capacity of the Romanian authorities to recover the proceeds of crime. The project is being implemented by the Asset Recovery Office (ARO) of the Ministry of Justice in collaboration with the International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) of the Basel Institute. Funding of the project has been provided by the Swiss-Romanian Co-operation Programme.

The Basel Institute on Governance participated in several workshops between 8 and 9 October 2012 with key stakeholders of the South African anti-corruption system (Asset Forfeiture Unit of the National Prosecuting Authority, Special Investigating Unit, Department of Public Service Administration, South African Revenue Services, National Treasury, Directorate for Priority Crimes Investigations of the South African Police Services) at a special session hosted by the Anti-Corruption Task Team (ACTT).