Good Practice in Strengthening Transparency, Participation, Accountability and Integrity

"...[T]oo often, donor initiatives focus either on voice (affording avenues for citizens' participation and expression) or accountability (strengthening the state will and capacity to respond to citizens' demands) and underlines the need to strengthen simultaneously both sides of this accountability equation to achieve long lasting change."

This resource shares examples of development projects that have undertaken activities to strengthen the 4 key (interconnected, "deeply intertwined") principles of anti-corruption:

1. Transparency: "As it is impossible to mobilise citizens for change without providing them access to information, transparency of government processes and public access to official information are essential to support citizen's demand for good governance and anti-corruption." Examples:
   • Public access to information on school grants in Uganda: In 1996, public expenditure tracking surveys (PETS) revealed that schools received on average less than 20% of the annual capitation grant (fixed amount allocated to schools per student) from the central government, suggesting that more than 80% was captured by local officials either through corruption or diversion to other ends than intended. To remedy this situation, the government began to publish data on monthly transfers of capitation grants to local governments in local newspapers. A repeat PETS was conducted in 2001 to assess the effects of this information campaign as a tool to reduce capture and corruption. Findings indicated a large improvement of the situation, with schools receiving on average 80% of their annual entitlements in 2001.
   • Transparency in the procurement of medical supplies:
     • An anti-corruption crackdown in Argentina showed that, in the absence of consequences for poor performance, the impact of information on procurement prices proved to be only transitory, suggesting that transparency-related measures alone are not sufficient to guarantee sustained change and need to be accompanied by concrete measures (e.g. disciplinary actions, loss of employment, social stigma, etc.) to sanction "malpractice" and poor performance.
     • "Information technology can also help improve transparency in drug price information both within and across countries. Web based drug procurement databases can ensure consistent, timely and reliable access to disclosed information in a practical format and have the potential to empower citizens who could use the information to hold private and public institutions accountable. A prerequisite for this is that information must be user-friendly, consistently reported and accessible, be of reliable quality, standardised, comparable and disaggregated."
   • Revenue/budget transparency: "The International Budget Partnership has been pioneering efforts in this area, working through a network of civil society organisations around the world to make government budgeting more transparent and participatory, more responsive to national priorities, and better able to resist corruption. As part of these efforts, the Open Budget Initiative promotes public access to budget information and the adoption of accountable budget systems through research and advocacy activities. It conducts a biennale comprehensive analysis and survey that evaluate whether governments in 85 countries give the public access to budget information and opportunities to participate in the budget process at the national level."
2. Participation: "Citizens need to be empowered to use disclosed information to hold their leaders accountable for their actions and decisions. Increased transparency must therefore be matched by more opportunities and support for citizens to participate in decision-making, monitoring and oversight of public policies and programmes. The underlying principle of promoting participatory approaches to anti-corruption is that the people who benefit from development programmes have better incentives to monitor and reduce corruption on service delivery." Examples:
   • Participatory budget formulation in Brazil - Citizens meet within the framework of plenary assemblies organised in each of the city's 16 districts in order to identify the citizens' demands (in areas such as access to public services, specifically to water and sewage services) and to select regional budget delegates. A 44 member Council of Participatory Budgeting is constituted in order to do its work before the submission to the legislature of an overall municipal budget in September.
   • Participatory audits of public spending in India - In Rajasthan, to combat various forms of official corruption in public works programmes and fight for minimum wages, people sought access to official expenditure documents and accounts of their village council on payment of wages, infrastructures, and services. A team of "auditors" from the small organisation Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan (MKSS) then conducted participatory audits of local government performance based on these expenditure records, comparing and verifying stated expenditures with actual spending, through interviews with workers and contractors as well as villagers. Public hearings were held in villages where relevant details of questionable public work were read aloud to the assembly. "Social audits conducted by MKKS have documented corruption in many public projects that had been cleared by the public auditors, demonstrating the benefits of citizens' involvement in monitoring and oversight. The struggle to access official records also led to a national campaign for legislation granting citizens a right to information. MKSS succeeded in getting the state government to change the local government act to include local residents directly in auditing official development schemes."
   • Community-based monitoring of health services in Uganda through citizen report cards - "This intervention proved effective to improve both the quantity and quality of service provided, leading to increased service utilisation and better health outcomes."
   • Participatory management of development programmes in Indonesia - Covering over 20,000 villages across Indonesia, the Kecamatan (Sub-district) Development Program (KDP) has encouraged villagers, especially women and economically poor villagers, to engage in decision making to allocate the KDP resources according to their own priorities through a community-based planning process. During implementation, progress is periodically reported at open village meetings prior to the project releasing the next trench of funds. "Some assessments also point towards evidence of improved local governance, with villagers holding local government officials more accountable and demanding greater transparency within other government-sponsored programs."
   • Transparency and community participation in an education programme governance model in Africa - At the programme level, Camfed (an international non-governmental organisation (NGO) dedicated to eradicating poverty in rural Africa through the education of girls and the empowerment of young women) has developed a governance model that combines both transparency and social accountability elements for the delivery of its services. Local communities are given responsibility to run the programmes, using transparency and accountability as key organising principles. The Camfed governance programme is explicitly expected to deter corruption in a number of ways.
3. Accountability: "...[This section will focus more specifically on horizontal accountability, which requires agencies to report sideways and subjects public officials to restraint and oversight, or 'checks and balances' by other institutions that can question and eventually sanction improper behaviours." Examples:
   • The use of government audits in village road construction projects in Indonesia - A randomised field experiment on reducing corruption in over 600 villages suggests that traditional top-down accountability mechanisms in the form of government audits had a more substantial impact on reducing missing expenditures than participatory approaches had.
   • Detecting and reducing teachers absenteeism in Rajasthan - Cameras were used by an NGO to monitor teachers' school attendance in a rural district in Rajasthan where remote locations made school monitoring difficult. The experiment showed that the absence rate fell by half in the schools that were given a camera, much more than in the other 60 schools. "This experiment suggests that with the help of technological tools, providing incentives in the form of reward and sanctions can help curb absenteeism, as long as the incentive system is based on measures of performance/attendance that are adequately monitored and controlled."
   • Using financial performance information indicators to promote accountability in health systems in South Africa - District management health teams used financial data and service utilisation statistics as performance indicators, providing information to hold public officials accountable. Gains in accountability were achieved by linking planned and actual services to the resources used to achieve them and to compare performance over time.
4. Integrity: According to Transparency International (TI), integrity refers to "behaviours and actions consistent with a set of moral or ethical principles and standards, embraced by individuals as well as institutions that create a barrier to corruption". Strategies include:
   • Development and enforcement of sectoral codes of conducts - For example, within the education sector, such codes generally aim at enhancing the commitments, dedication, and efficiency of the teaching profession, as well as providing self-disciplinary guidelines and establishing norms of professional conduct. They often address all forms of unethical behaviours, including sexual extortion or harassment. In many countries, however, "the impact of such codes is limited by lack of teachers' awareness of the existence of the code, difficulties in understanding it, inadequate teachers’ training, lack of enforcement capacity, etc." A competence-based training approach is recommended.
   • Raising ethical standards in the private sector: the business principles to counter bribery - TI's Business Principles for Countering Bribery provide a framework for companies to develop comprehensive anti-bribery programmes and policies.
   • Integrity pledges - These tools, called "integrity pacts" (IP) by TI, can be used to promote transparency and integrity in the area of public contracting. "By declaring up-front that the procurement process will be corruption free, both public institutions and private agencies open up their operations for public scrutiny and the IP also introduces a monitoring system that provides for independent oversight and accountability of the procurement process."
   • Campaigns of asset disclosure for politicians - In Romania, for example, all high-level government officials must disclose on a public website their financial and property holdings, the positions they hold in associations and businesses, any paid professional activities, and any investment made in companies.