Ana Luiza Melo Aranha

Bio

Ana Luiza Aranha holds a PhD in Political Science from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG, Brazil) – “The Web of Accountability Institutions in Brazil” was chosen the best dissertation of 2015. During her PhD, she I mapped out how Brazilian accountability institutions interact in order to control corruption cases. From the longitudinal data (the dataset had more than 20.000 irregularities) and the sixty interviews with bureaucrats, she concluded that the Brazilian web of accountability institutions is able to coordinate itself in order to hold public officials accountable (something new in the country), but not in a homogeneous way across all institutions (something the literature has missed). Ana was recently invited by the OECD to present her research at the 2018 Global Anti-Corruption & Integrity Forum.

Ana is currently a researcher at Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV, Brazil) and a research consultant at Transparency International Brazil. She also holds a research scholarship from the National Public Administration School (ENAP, Brazil) to study corruption at the local level (not always the irregularities at the local level are related to corruption, many times it is much more a matter of mismanagement and waste).

Ana learned from her internship at the International Anti-Corruption Academy (IACA, Austria) to apply her research experience to bridge the gap between academia and the world around it. Her international experience also includes contributions to the Centre for the Study of Democratic Institutions (at UBC, Canada) and the Canadian Red Cross. Ana is especially motivated by great challenges – she is absolutely passionate about promoting social justice, gender equality and fighting against corruption. Ana has extensive experience as a researcher on accountability issues in Brazil and she is specialized in mixing methods – qualitative and quantitative ones, with fieldwork experience in Latin America and Canada.

Ana´s work at Transparency International Brazil includes supporting the development of an Anti-Corruption Knowledge Centre that aims to be a focal point of integrity research in the Global South. She also analyzes social accountability institutions in Brazil (nongovernmental organizations which fight corruption in the country) and contributes to the Brazilian shadow report about the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16 – which covers anti-corruption and accountability issues on the UN 2030 Agenda. Ana also contributes to TI Brazil´s agenda about Local governments, Transparency of political parties, Integrity in State-Owned Enterprises and Judicial Integrity.