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Welcome to week 1

Welcome to Making Anti-Corruption Effective.

In this section we introduce the team and what will be covered over the 2 week course.
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© Kanchana P

Welcome to Making Anti-Corruption Effective.

After decades of effort, the massive costs of corruption continue to harm many countries, and corruption appears to be increasing in some. Even worse, anti-corruption efforts have often been corrupted, with anti-corruption and enforcement agencies extracting from citizens or using their powers to harass and pick up the opposition. Why have anti-corruption efforts not delivered stronger results, particularly when they seem to work in some countries?

In this two week course we draw on evidence from the anticorruption and transparency and accountability fields to explore why many anticorruption efforts in less developed countries have tended to be ineffective. We then go on to explore insights and case studies from the 5 year SOAS Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) research programme which enable us to take account of the power, capabilities and interests of actors in different countries and sectors to develop feasible and effective anticorruption strategies.

In the first week we start by exploring different forms of corruption and why some of the dominant approaches to thinking about and addressing corruption have often proved ineffective.

At the end of the first week we introduce the new Power, Capabilities and Interests approach (PCI) approach which has been pioneered by the SOAS ACE research programme and its partners in a number of countries around the world.

In the second week, we explore how the PCI approach can be used to develop three different types of anticorruption strategies tailored to the specific sector and country within which one is trying to reduce corruption.

Throughout the course we provide links to short readings (briefing papers, working papers and journal articles) – we strongly encourage you to read these as they provide valuable background and knowledge to help you understand and apply what you will learn in this course. In many cases, we have provided page numbers to read within a given report or paper which focus on the topic at hand.

© SOAS University of London
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Making Anti-Corruption Effective

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