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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...

Edouard's blog

Dani Kaufmann: the institution, the idea and the man

Submitted by Edouard on Mon, 2008-12-08 14:35

So Dani Kaufmann is leaving us after all. Since he’s made that announcement a few weeks ago, our small Global Governance unit at the World Bank Institute has had trouble coming to terms with the reality. I guess what finally made the news sink in were the posters and messages announcing his Farewell Lecture tomorrow December 9th, 9.00 a.m. at the World Bank’s Preston Auditorium.

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.

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. 

Don't rush to dismiss governance, it'll come back to haunt you

Submitted by Edouard on Wed, 2008-07-09 17:52

Noted Le Monde economic journalist Eric Le Boucher recently wrote that the sustained growth over several decades of East Asian economies with poor democratic governance, such as China, signals the demise of the values of democracy and humanism that the West inherited from Classical Greece and developed and advocated for the next 25 centuries. The worry is that the countries growing without democratic governance were championing a development model (he called it the “Chinese model”) that does away with democracy and good governance (the “Greek heritage model”).  His article, provocatively titled “the decline of white man”, takes a number of debatable shortcuts to make this point.