Congratulations to our partners in Malawi on the launch of the new Malawi National Anti-Corruption Strategy (NACS II).

We are delighted to have been able to contribute our multi-disciplinary expertise to what we believe is a state-of-the-art anti-corruption strategy that will have real impact on corruption in Malawi over the next five years.

A new research project led by the Basel Institute's Public Governance team aims to help anti-corruption practitioners design more effective interventions by taking into account – and in fact leveraging – the informal relationships and social networks that underlie people's behaviour.

A summary of groundbreaking research into social norms and attitudes towards corruption by our Public Governance team has been published in Ellis, Jane (ed.) Corruption, Social Sciences and the Law – Exploration across the disciplines. Published by Routledge, the book is part of a series entitled The Law of Financial Crime.

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.

This article results from the project on Informal governance and corruption - Transcending the Principal Agent and Collective Action Paradigms, funded by the British Academy-DFID Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) programme.

The author's aim in this project was to explore local patterns of informality in Kyrgyzstan in order to understand how relations of power and influence are organised in daily life.