Working Paper 63: Anticipating future corruption

This Working Paper explores how insights from foresight and anticipatory governance can strengthen anti-corruption approaches and initiatives. It aims to:

• explain why it is important to understand corruption as a challenge that arises in complex social systems and consider the implications of this for the fight against corruption;
• present key approaches in foresight and anticipatory governance; and
• show how insights from these approaches can help develop and implement more forward-looking and adaptive anti-corruption strategies by anticipating unintended consequences and identifying future risks and opportunities.

About this Working Paper

This paper is published as part of the Basel Institute on Governance Working Paper series, ISSN: 2624-9650. It is a Diamond Open Access publication, also hosted on the Basel University Library’s open publishing platform eterna as part of our Basel Institute on Governance Working Paper Journal, with DOI: 10.12685/bigwp.2026.63.1-31.

You may share or republish it under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 International Licence.

This Working Paper was written as part of the FALCON (Fight Against Largescale Corruption and Organised Crime Networks) project. FALCON is funded under the European Union’s Horizon Europe Framework Program Grant Agreement ID 101121281. The Basel Institute on Governance, as an associated partner without the right to receive funds directly from the European Research Executive Agency, has received funding from the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI).

The contents of this document are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Union, the European Research Executive Agency or SERI.

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