In the framework of the ANTICORRP research consortium, the Basel Institute, in collaboration with partners from four research institutions across Europe, finalized and submitted the first deliverable of the research work package 4 (WP4), The Ethnographic Study of Corruption, to the European Commission.

In the context of a series of capacity building workshops by the German Development Cooperation (GIZ) to strengthen governance in Central Africa’s extractive sector, the Basel Institute contributed to a 4-day seminar on good governance in the extractive industries in the Central African Monetary Community (CEMAC), held in Douala, Cameroon, in December 2014.

In the spirit of the Association Agreement between the Basel Institute and the University of Basel, the Basel Institute’s governance specialist, Dr Claudia Baez-Camargo, is again co-teaching a Spring semester course on “Sustainability and Health Governance” together with Professor Krista Nadakavukaren.

The course is taught as part of the Masters Programme on Life Sciences of the University’s Law Faculty. 

The Basel Institute's Head of Governance Research, Dr Claudia Baez-Camargo, has been able to pass on some of her governance expertise to students of the University of Basel.

In the autumn semester 2015, she co-lectured a weekly course on "Contradictions and Sustainability of Governance" at the Sociology Seminar, building on a case-based, practice-oriented approach.

An expert from the Basel Institute's Public Governance Division has provided technical support to the "Health For All Programme (HAP) Albania", led by the Swiss Tropical and Public Health Institute.

The aim of the programme is to assist Albania with the development of an anti-corruption strategy in association with their efforts at strengthening primary health care in the country.

In the context of a multi-centre research project, the Institute and its partners seek to map the manner in which informality is associated with the resilience of corruption. In this innovative project, researchers shift the focus away from analysing the implementation of formal legal frameworks, regulations and policies to concentrate on informal actions and practices that may be effectively taken into consideration where conventional anti-corruption interventions have failed.

The Basel Institute has a long-standing working relationship with the government of Bhutan covering a range of joint endeavours on developing anti-corruption policies and asset recovery. For a new project, commissioned by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), researchers from the Basel Institute worked with Bhutanese authorities to introduce social accountability concepts to support efforts to encourage citizen participation in democratic practices at the local government level.

Recently, researchers from the Basel Institute, University College London (UCL), SOAS London and other international institutions met in Basel to take stock of progress made and discuss next steps in their new anti-corruption research project on “Informal Governance and Corruption”. Emerging evidence from the fieldwork, carried out in East Africa, Central Asia and the Caucasus, suggests that informal practices are not only essential for regime survival but also associated with the prevalence of high levels of corruption. 

Researchers from the Basel Institute recently delivered a workshop on quantitative and qualitative research methodologies for corruption research at the Protestant University of Rwanda (PUR) in Butare, Rwanda. 

The Basel Institute and the Institute for Development Studies (IDS) will work together to provide expert support to the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) in the framework of SDC's thematic network on democratisation, decentralisation and local government (DDLG).  IDS is a leading global institution for development research, teaching and learning, and impact and communications, based at the University of Sussex.