Alternative title: Dismantling networks of corruption: challenges and opportunities in reforming informal governance in Tanzania.
This Tanzania country report is part of a research project funded by the Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Programme of the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) and the British Academy.
Alena Ledeneva invites you on a voyage of discovery, to explore society’s open secrets, unwritten rules and know-how practices. Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done’, these invisible yet powerful informal practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse. They include emotion-driven exchanges of gifts or favours and tributes for services, interest-driven know-how (from informal welfare to informal employment and entrepreneurship), identity-driven practices of solidarity, and power-driven forms of co-optation and control.
Despite significant investment and anti-corruption capacity building in the past decades, "most systematically corrupt countries are considered to be just as corrupt now as they were before the anti-corruption interventions"(1). Statements like this are indicative of the frustration shared by practitioners and scholars alike at the apparent lack of success in controlling corruption worldwide and point to the need to rethink our understanding of the factors that fuel corruption and make it so hard to abate.
If you are interested in the links between informal governance and corruption, you'll want to read this new publication on Human resource management practices of (anti) corruption mechanisms within informal networks. It is by Maral Muratbekova-Touron and Tolganay Umbetalijeva, our partners in a current research project on Informal Governance and Corruption funded by DFID through its Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme.
Within the context of the “Engaged Citizenry for Responsible Governance” project, funded by the USAID, experts from the Basel Institute’s public governance division conducted two training workshops for representatives of civil society organizations (CSO) in Yerevan, Armenia, from 4 – 8 May 2015.
On April 20-22 the Basel Institute on Governance offered a workshop on Quantitative and Qualitative Research Methods on Corruption. The workshop was held at the University of Basel and brought together a group of 12 academics and practitioners from around the world. Nationalities represented were Nigerian, Brazilian, American, Romanian, Greek, Japanese, French, German and Swiss.
The Basel Institute’s contribution to the EU-funded ANTICORRP research consortium through the Work Package “The ethnographic study of corruption” (WP4) has come to a close with the acceptance by the European Commission of the second set of publications emanating from this research effort.
The Basel Institute on Governance is organising a panel in the upcoming 5th World Sustainability Forum. Panel title: The elusive search for sustainable anti-corruption strategies: what have we overlooked?
The publication "Strengthening Health System Accountability: a WHO European Region Multi-Country Study" is the output of the latest collaborative project between the Basel Institute on Governance and the World Health Organisation Regional Office for Europe.
On 17 March 2016, the Basel Institute’s Head of Public Governance (Research) Division, Dr. Claudia Baez-Camargo, presented her paper ‘Where does informality stop and corruption begin?