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This is the World Bank's blog on governance and anti-corruption. It aims at providing a space for debate and knowledge sharing on this critical field of development. | Learn more...

September 2008

The dilemmas of measuring corruption: is there an agreement of where should we move on?

Submitted by Alfredo on Thu, 2008-09-25 16:00

As corruption issues around the world seem to be endless, so is the debate about the best way to develop and use corruption indicators.  Whether aggregate or disaggregated; whether actionable or not; whether perception-based or experience-based; whether they should measure inputs or outputs; and whether assessments should be locally-owned or conducted by international institutions are just part of the on-going discussions in open forums and informal chats.

This month we witnessed the publication of two valuable efforts that move towards different directions on corruption measurement: (i) the 2008 Corruption Perception Index launched this week by Transparency International; and (ii) “A Users’ Guide to Measuring Corruption,” published at the beginning of this month by the UNDP Oslo Governance Centre and Global Integrity. 

While Transparency International’s approach relies on composite, cross-country and perception-based indicators, the User’s Guide suggests –among other things– the need for more locally owned assessments that capture the voice and experience of the poor and minority groups, as well as actionable measurements that give a better sense of what needs to be reformed.

The human faces of corruption

Submitted by Edouard on Tue, 2008-09-16 11:51
I was in Yemen three weeks ago, in part to lay the groundwork for a national diagnostics survey of governance and anticorruption in the health sector. Its focus was to be on bribery and informal payments.

Number of governance datasets - short

93
Number of periodic cross-country governance datasets available online.
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Aid Effectiveness beyond Accra: good governance & anticorruption 2010

Submitted by Kaufmann on Wed, 2008-09-10 09:01

Evidently it was Huge, and very ‘High Level’ -- the Forum on Aid Effectiveness which just ended in Accra, with 1,700 attendees.  I wasn’t one of them. But I read and talk to people. The sense is that at the end of the day some promising steps may have taken place.  Mark Nelson was there, blogging already about the Parallel Forum with civil society, and the main declaration points of the Accra Agenda for Action (AAA), which was improved at the 11th hour.

What transpired at the High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Accra?

Submitted by Mark on Fri, 2008-09-05 13:10

The 1700 people who came to Accra for the big aid effectiveness conference this week are packing their bags, but the agreement they managed to cobble together here looks to leave a lasting impact.

More than 100 ministers were on hand here for what many called a watershed.  As I noted in an earlier posting, the Accra conference was preceded by a major conference of civil society organizations (CSOs).  Then starting on Tuesday at the official conference, 82 CSOs were given seats and played a major role in the proceedings.  That CSO presence, combined with a strong push from some of the official delegations here, produced an agreement that goes much further than ever before towards transparency, civil society engagement, and fostering stronger developing country leadership in the $100 billion-a-year international aid business.

Corruption warning signs: is your project at risk?

Submitted by Edouard on Wed, 2008-09-03 13:51


What factors conspire to cause a development project to fail? Poor project design and management of course. Also lack of client ownership. And capacity constraints. And corruption. 
 
Corruption puts assistance projects at risk at every step of the project’s life, and even before that projects exist on paper.  "Corruption warning signs: is your project at risk?" is a toolkit recently developed by the Latin America and Caribbean unit of the World Bank that lists these pitfalls phase by phase throughout the project's life.  The toolkit is addressed to Bank project managers and teams.  Here's a quick synthesis of these warning signs. 

Delicious Governance: Not always an Oxymoron?

Submitted by Kaufmann on Tue, 2008-09-02 09:40

Governance is integral to everyday happenings around the world.  They don't always make the big headlines.  Corruption, lack of transparency and accountability in government, censorship, abuse of and by the judiciary, regional conflicts and state-sponsored aggression, are some of the common manifestations of misgovernance.  By contrast, there are also notable instances of good governance and integrity in many institutions around the world. 

We have been blogging about many of these before, but a blog entry is one selective take on a particular issue, whether news that day or not.  So we thought that it is worth also giving some broader snapshot of the governance news of the day.

But what does this have to do with ‘Delicious Governance’?   Well, it is simply a play with words, because some governance news may be delicious, but unfortunately many are not, so the answer lies elsewhere: building on the social bookmarking trend, we are piloting a "Governance News" blog section through a space on Delicious –a social bookmarking service to manage and share web pages–, where we will show a selection of governance content from the news, blogs and other sources around the web.  It is not going to be an exhaustive compilation of governance news and happenings, and it will not necessarily reflect our own opinions or points of view. 

Aid effectiveness without better governance and capacity development? Don't bet on it!

Submitted by Mark on Tue, 2008-09-02 08:23

I'm sitting in the audience at the "CSO Parallel Forum on Aid Effectiveness" in Accra, Ghana, listening to speaker after speaker read a list of demands that ought to come without saying.

CSOs are civil society organizations, and this is a very engaged group of activists, more than 500 strong, who came here to offer their opinions and inputs before the big official "High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness" that starts here on Tuesday.  At that time, more than 100 ministers and a total delegation of more than 1200 people are expected to descend on this pleasant capital in West Africa to take stock of the $100-billion-a-year international development aid business.