Cosimo Stahl
Publications and news by Cosimo Stahl.
Publications
Quick Guide 23: Informal networks and anti-corruption
Why do many countries still struggle with high levels of corruption, in spite of years of investment in anti-corruption programmes and even where the right laws, rules and institutions are in place?
We believe one reason is that anti-corruption laws and policies are too often focused narrowly on individuals, rather than networks of individuals.
In our research, we see repeatedly how high levels of corruption are rarely the result of individual behaviour – some isolated rotten apples transgressing the formal legal order and leading others astray. Rather, corruption more frequently springs from the social norms and group dynamics of well-articulated and resilient informal networks.
And it’s those networks that have much to lose from integrity and ethics. Their behaviour as a group entrenches corruption, and they block attempts at reforms. This quick guide takes a look at what this means and the implications for anti-corruption programming.
About this Quick Guide
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. It is part of the Basel Institute on Governance Quick Guide series, ISSN 2673-5229.
How political economy analysis can support corruption risk assessments to strengthen law enforcement against wildlife crimes
As part of a collaboration with the Targeting Natural Resource Corruption (TNRC) project, the Basel Institute on Governance undertook political economy analyses in three countries in Latin America and Africa.
The purpose was to understand why corruption risks may emerge in investigations and prosecutions of illegal wildlife trade (IWT) cases. The analyses complemented the findings of corruption risks assessments conducted in the three countries and focused on the IWT law enforcement process.
The experience showed that political economy analyses can help practitioners better understand corruption risks in a specific context. This understanding helps practitioners to design and implement corruption risk mitigation measures that take prevailing political and power dynamics into account. In particular, it helps to identify windows of opportunity for addressing corruption risks and highlight strategically important stakeholders that may support or oppose the intervention.
Based on the research, this Practice Note:
- summarises the value added and key insights gained by complementing the corruption risk assessments with political economy analyses;
- explains the lessons learned from the experience of implementing the analyses;
- offers practical guidance to natural resource management and conservation practitioners interested in incorporating a similar approach in the design of corruption risk mitigation measures.
The paper was developed by the Basel Institute’s Public Governance team together with the Green Corruption programme as part of a wider research collaboration between the Basel Institute and TNRC project consortium.
About the TNRC project
The TNRC project seeks to improve biodiversity conservation outcomes by helping practitioners to address the threats posed by corruption to wildlife, fisheries and forests. TNRC harnesses existing knowledge, generates new evidence, and supports innovative policy and practice for more effective anti-corruption programming on the ground.
A USAID-funded project, TNRC is implemented by a consortium of leading organizations in anti-corruption, natural resource management, and conservation: World Wildlife Fund (WWF), the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre at the Chr. Michelsen Institute, TRAFFIC, and the Terrorism, Transnational Crime and Corruption Center (TraCCC) at George Mason University.
Behavioural insights and anti-corruption: A practitioner-tailored review of the latest evidence (2016–2022)
Donors, governments and anti-corruption practitioners seeking alternative tools to address systemic corruption are increasingly turning to behavioural science. Behavioural anti-corruption approaches appear promising because they respond to a growing body of descriptive evidence on how certain social norms and mental models drive corruption, particularly in fragile contexts. Interventions that target social norms and seek to shift people’s behaviours away from corrupt practices could be more effective and long-lasting than ones that, for example, simply add more regulations and controls.
Yet few large-scale anti-corruption programmes have so far been informed by behavioural insights – in part due to a lack of evidence on where such an approach would be appropriate, what works and what doesn’t.
That evidence is slowly becoming available, thanks to an increase in the past five years in what can be called Social Norms and Behaviour Change (SNBC) intervention studies. Many have yielded positive effects and demonstrate the potential of SNBC interventions to tackle systemic corruption, but some studies have encountered counterproductive effects of anti-corruption messaging.
Based on a synthesis of the evidence, this brief paper summarises a set of behavioural explanations (i.e. insights and pitfalls) for why some of these SNBC approaches have failed, while others have been effective. The aim is to provide practitioners designing SNBC interventions with evidence to help them develop effective programmes and avoid common pitfalls.
The full research paper and analysis tables are available to practitioners upon request. Please email info@baselgovernance.org.
Acknowledgements and open-access licence
The publication is a technical report published by the Basel Institute on Governance. It is free to share under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence.
This is a short version of a substantial in-depth review of the latest evidence (2016-21) on how SNBC approaches can inform anti-corruption practice. The publication was supported by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The contents of this publication do not represent the official position of either BMZ or GIZ.
Gendered corruption: Initial insights into sextortion and double bribery affecting female businesswomen in Malawi
This report offers an initial insight into the problem of gendered corruption, including sextortion and so-called double bribery, based on interviews with 19 businesswomen in Malawi. Part of a wider research project into procurement corruption, the interviews aimed to explore the extent of gendered corruption as a coercive form of social exchange, as well as the role of informal corrupt networks in magnifying gender-specific inequalities.
Though based on a small sample in one particular context, the findings indicate that more research into this topic is urgently needed globally with a view to mainstreaming sexual corruption into anti-corruption programming. Initial findings indicate that:
- Sextortion, forced sexual favours, “double bribery” and other forms of sexual corruption are perceived to be widespread in Malawi.
- Women’s risk of being subjected to sexual corruption increases in informal network settings, such as those in which business takes place.
- Socio-economic factors and gender-imbalanced power dynamics play an important role in enabling sexual corruption to take place with impunity.
- Trustworthy reporting and support mechanisms for sexual corruption are said to be lacking.
- Existing female-only business self-help groups could provide a strong base for enabling women to address issues of sexual corruption and related gendered violence.
Overall, there is a great need for more research and policy attention globally to gendered corruption and related issues that still remain – tragically – hidden from view or considered as normal.
About this publication
The research underpinning this report has been undertaken in support of the Tackling Serious and Organised Crime (TSOC) programme in Malawi, which is funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).
Suggested citation: Stahl, C., 2021. Gendered corruption: Initial insights into sextortion and double bribery affecting female businesswomen in Malawi. Basel Institute on Governance, https://baselgovernance.org/publications/gendered-corruption-initial-in….
Petty corruption in the public sector: A comparative study of three East African countries through a behavioural lens
This article presents comparative evidence about the relevance of behavioural drivers in relation to petty corruption in three East African countries. It discusses the potential to incorporate behavioural insights into anti-corruption policy-making.
Persistently high levels of bureaucratic corruption prevail in many countries across the African continent. This along with the limited effectiveness of conventional anti-corruption prescriptions call for a contextualised understanding of the multiple factors determining corruption-related decision-making.
Adopting a behavioural lens involves accounting for the human factor as it relates to the effects of sociality and social constructs on propensities for corruption. As such, this novel approach complements the literature that has sought to understand corruption on the basis of political, economic, and institutional drivers and constraints.
Field research conducted in Tanzania, Uganda and Rwanda found evidence for such behavioural drivers, showing that citizens are swayed by social pressures and beliefs that ultimately spur petty corruption by endorsing associated maladaptive practices. Sustained by social norms of group solidarity and reciprocity and legitimised by commonly shared perceptions of corruption as the norm, the research points to a problematic overlap of the public (formal) and the socio-cultural (informal) spheres.
By adding a behavioural dimension to the study of the drivers of corruption, this article seeks to contribute towards the development of more effective anti-corruption policy formulation that acknowledges the pitfalls attached to behavioural factors that conventional anti-corruption prescriptions have largely failed to address.
The article was published in the open-access African Studies journal on 19 August 2020.
Social Norms and Attitudes Towards Corruption: Comparative Insights from East Africa
This eye-opening exploration of social norms and attitudes towards corruption appears in Chapter 12 of Ellis, Jane (ed.) Corruption, Social Sciences and the Law – Exploration across the disciplines, published by Routledge on 15 May 2019 as part of a series entitled The Law of Financial Crime. See the publisher’s flyer with full details of the book and a 20% discount code.
Much of the original material for this chapter comes from a recent Basel Institute research project on Corruption, Social Norms and Behaviours in East Africa, commissioned by the UK Department for International Development (DFID) through its East Africa Research Fund (EARF).
Excerpt from the chapter introduction
Despite more than two decades of concerted efforts by the international development community to address corruption, progress remains far from satisfactory, especially in those countries where corruption is endemic and pervasive. Such cases of seemingly entrenched corruption highlight the importance of increasing our understanding about context-specific drivers of corrupt behaviours.
Traditionally, anti-corruption has focused on the incentives and constraints that impinge on individuals’ cost-benefit calculations and decision-making as determined by the law and associated regulatory frameworks. Nevertheless, a growing body of evidence suggests the relevance of more intuitive, automatic, quasi-rational and non-rational decision-making factors that take place in the subconscious mind and which may be heavily influenced by contextual factors grounded in sociality, collective ways of thinking and culture.
This chapter presents empirical evidence from the application of a behavioural research perspective to shed light on how collective practices of petty corruption are experienced, understood, and ultimately justified from the perspective of those directly engaging in them.
Informal networks: the invisible drivers of corruption and implications for anti-corruption practice
Conventional anti-corruption approaches advocate for the adoption of legal and institutional reforms in line with international best practices. Nevertheless, these anti-corruption frameworks are often weakly implemented across the Global South. Overcoming these limitations invites the rethinking of some of the core assumptions of anti-corruption practice, which has mainly aimed to address poor accountability and weak law enforcement capabilities of the state. A promising perspective brings in the dimensions of sociality and informality to shed light on context-specific factors, such as social norms and informal power structures, that are associated with high levels of corruption.
Two of our research projects have evidenced the role of informal social networks in fuelling corruption. At the grassroots, social networks are key to solving problems on the basis of an economy of favours that seamlessly penetrates the public sector. Top-down, grand corruption is perpetuated by networks of elites that engage in mutually favourable exchanges to promote their respective interests, in the process effecting an informal re-distribution of public resources.
This publication appeared in the Public Administration Review’s recent Blog Symposium dedicated to the topic of corruption.
Working Paper 26: The ambivalence of social networks and their role in spurring and potential for curbing petty corruption: comparative insights from East Africa
This paper compares social network dynamics and related petty corrupt practices in East Africa. It highlights how the properties of structural and functional networks could serve as entry points for anti-corruption interventions.
With a focus on the health sector in Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, the empirical findings from this research corroborate the role of social networks in perpetuating collective practices of petty corruption, including bribery, favouritism and gift-giving.
The paper makes a case for designing a novel type of behavioural anti-corruption intervention, whereby the power of social networks is harnessed to elicit behavioural and attitudinal change for anti-corruption outcomes.
This paper is part of the Basel Institute on Governance Working Paper Series, ISSN: 2624-9650.
The analysis of corruption in the education sector through a behavioural lens
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.
Discussing the cases of Tanzania, Uganda, and Rwanda, he makes the case for a novel type of content-sensitive intervention that acknowledges the role of multiple drivers – including those that are non-rational.
This article appeared as a blog plot on the ETICO portal of UNESCO’s International Institute for Educational Planning (IIEP-UNESCO).
Behavioural influences on attitudes towards petty corruption: a study of social norms, automatic thinking and mental models in Rwanda
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.
This report presents the main findings from the field research activities for the case of Rwanda, which focused on the health and police sectors.