Topic Guide: Building Political Will to Fight Corruption

Reform toolkit: Making the most of public-private dialogue, an advocacy approach. Center for International Private Enterprise. 2011. Washington DC: Center for International Private Enterprise. http://www.cipe.org/sites/default/files/publication-docs/ppd_052411.pdf  

This toolkit gives an overview of relevant strategies to push for governance reforms through advocacy and dialogue. Although these strategies are originally designed for the private sector to seek economic and governance reforms, the advocacy strategies are also applicable for civil society and other external actors, such as donors.  

An analytical tool for understanding political won’t and identifying strategies to influence political will. Malena, C. 2010. CIVICUS Participatory Governance Programme.  

This tool is based on the analytical framework outlined in the book edited by Malena (2009), and it assumes that the presence or absence of political will is not an external factor which one must passively accept, but rather something one must actively seek to create and nurture. The tool aims to help development practitioners and activists to generate and nurture political will by: (i) understanding the different elements and key influencing factors of political will; (ii) in the context of a specific sector, issue or development goal, identifying positive and negative factors with regard to each of these, and; (iii) in light of these factors, formulating practical strategies to nurture political will.  

Combating corruption in judicial systems: An advocacy toolkit. Transparency International. 2007. Berlin: Transparency International. http://www.u4.no/recommended-r...  

This guide aims to help Transparency International chapters and other civil society groups to undertake effective advocacy to combat judicial corruption. In addition to providing basic advice about conducting advocacy, it provides examples from Transparency International chapters of work on judicial corruption, including monitoring the process of selecting supreme court judges, monitoring actual cases and diagnosing corruption problems. It also includes a diagnostic checklist for assessing safeguards against judicial corruption.  

Anti-corruption conventions in Africa: what civil society can do to make them work. Dell, G. 2006. Berlin: Transparency International. https://www.transparency.org/w...

This guide provides some practical input on how to foster political interest in anti-corruption reforms from a bottom-up approach. It focuses on two principal anti-corruption conventions in Africa, the African Union and United Nations conventions, explains their uses and describes why it is important and how to promote national ratification, implementation, inter-governmental monitoring, and discusses ways to carry out civil society monitoring.      

The Global Programme Against Corruption: UN anti-corruption toolkit. United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. 2004. Vienna: UNODC. http://www.unodc.org/pdf/crime...  

This toolkit offers an overview of anti-corruption strategies, both top-down and bottom-up and discusses each of them. It also identifies political will as a key element to the success of many of these policies and offers some specific guidelines on how to identify the presence of true political will to support these reforms.  

Confronting corruption: The elements of a national integrity system. Pope, J. 2000. Transparency International. http://www.u4.no/recommended-r...  

This source book is an attempt to describe the problem of corruption and its impact, and to present a comprehensive strategy for combating corruption. The book offers a holistic approach to transparency and accountability strategies based on “11 pillars” to create a national integrity system. These pillars range from the role of the executive and the judiciary to that of the media and civil society. The author also dedicates a section to the importance of political will and ways in which it can be built. He also highlights the potential role of external actors to generate political will and the importance of timing to achieve this.  

Helping countries combat corruption: The role of the World Bank. World Bank. 1997. Washington DC: World Bank. http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/anticorrupt/corruptn/coridx.htm  

This publication acknowledges that the success of national anti-corruption efforts depend mostly on the determination with which they are pursued and on the economic policies and institutions that underpin them. The World Bank, however, recognises that external agencies can also play an important supportive role in fighting corruption and outlines its strategies to help countries fight corruption, which combines bottom-up and top-down interventions.