PartnersGlobal’s Innovative Approach to Combating Corruption

PartnersGlobal is committed to combating corruption. We are currently implementing several initiatives with our local partners in West Africa, including Partners West Africa — Nigeria which have achieved some success in improving access to justice and promoting greater transparency. But perhaps the most effective work of Partners in this area was developed in Central and Eastern Europe. Whilst most efforts to combat corruption have tended to focus on centralized, top-down control of corruption, by creating or strengthening anti-corruption legislation, empowering the institutions of law and order, enlarging the judicial and investigative systems, and encouraging the capacity of civil society to play ‘watch-dog’ roles, FPDL (Partners Foundation for Local Development) developed a highly successful methodology that adopts a different approach. The approach they developed relies on securing the active participation of the leaders of local government and their staff to work together to find solutions rooted in an analysis of factors that permit and encourage a culture of corrupt actions. The approach was informed and inspired by the highly successful intervention of four-time Mayor of La Paz Bolivia, Ronald MacLean Abaroa, who worked with one of the giants of academic anticorruption research, Robert Klitgaard, to turn around a culture of corruption in public services in La Paz during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Working off a model of the causes of corruption as represented in the formula: C = M + D — A, or, ‘corruption equals monopoly plus discretion minus accountability’, Abaroa worked with his staff to look for ways to break the monopolies operated by the local government, limit and clarify discretion, and increase transparency and accountability, all the while taking account of the costs, both direct and indirect, of these ways. He also addressed the pay and working conditions of staff and worked with Unions to get their support for the changes he introduced. In the context of Bolivia’s worst economic crisis ever, within the first two years of his administration, the approach successfully restored and improved the municipal government services, multiplied city revenues, increased investments in public works tenfold while regaining the city’s international creditworthiness.

FPDL teamed up with Abaroa and Klitgaard to develop a transferable methodology that has now been successfully implemented in more than 10 Central and South Eastern European countries in 27 local governments. As part of this effort, the Partners team trained a cadres of 150 anti-corruption practitioners and developed a network of ‘change agents’ from more than 50 countries and 4 continents, involved in the public administration reform in their countries. The approach has been internationally recognized by a UN Public Service Award (2011). What this approach demonstrates is that even where corruption is endemic and seemingly intractable, it is possible to create islands of integrity in a sea of corruption, leading to the improvement of public services and the quality of peoples’ lives.

PartnersGlobal is now actively expanding this program to Sub Saharan Africa and Latin America, and creating a new Certificate Program for Anti-Corruption Practitioners to implement the Islands of Integrity Approach directly within their local contexts.