Corruption is increasingly understood as a form of collective, social behaviour. It slips easily across borders and involves sophisticated financial strategies and transactions to launder the stolen money. 

Yet the nexus between corruption and money laundering is poorly understood. So too are the structures, functions and mechanisms that enable these crimes.

Citizens and business people may invest significant time and money in building informal networks with public officials to overcome public service delivery shortcomings and access business opportunities. Understanding these networks better can strengthen anti-corruption efforts.

This research case study gives a brief overview of our Public Governance team's research in Uganda and Tanzania. Through interviews, the team explored when, how and why informal networks are built and used to access public services or business opportunities corruptly.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal Governance, this paper interprets informal networks as investments made by citizens and business people to cope with the public sphere. Informal networks often orchestrate corruption, connecting public and private actors. The paper aims to understand their key characteristics, scopes, and functional roles.

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.

Corruption is frequently associated with money alone and the behaviours of a few individual “bad apples” operating in otherwise healthy governance systems. This is too simplistic. As the latest research shows, including research in Tanzania and Uganda on which this Policy Brief is based, corruption is a networked phenomenon. This Policy Brief explains what this means and its implications for anti-corruption practice.

This Policy Brief distils recommendations for Collective Action practitioners based on empirical insights on certain forms of corruption involving private-sector actors.

The four case studies in this collection form part of a research project entitled Harnessing informality: Designing anti-corruption network interventions and strategic use of legal instruments” funded by UK Aid as part of the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme (GI-ACE).

The six case studies in this collection form part of a research project entitled Harnessing informality: Designing anti-corruption network interventions and strategic use of legal instruments” funded by UK Aid as part of the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme (GI-ACE).

This report presents findings from a research project entitled Harnessing informality: Designing anti-corruption network interventions and strategic use of legal instruments” funded by UK Aid as part of the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme (GI-ACE).