Understanding functionality for more effective SOC & corruption strategies and interventions
PROJECT TEAM
Professor Heather Marquette
University of Birmingham
Contact: h.a.marquette@bham.ac.uk
Professor Heather Marquette is the Director of the Serious Organised Crime & Anti-Corruption Evidence (SOC ACE) research programme. She is Professor of Development Politics at the University of Birmingham and is seconded part-time to FCDO’s Research and Evidence Directorate as Senior Research Fellow (Governance and Conflict). In addition, she is an Expert Member of the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organised Crime’s expert network, a member of the RUSI State Threats Task Force and a Lead Advisor and founding member of the global Thinking & Working Politically Community of Practice. Her research, which has been funded by the British Academy/Global Challenges Research Fund, DFID/FCDO, DFAT and the EU, focuses on transnational threats, particularly corruption and organised crime, as well as aid and foreign policy, governance and political analysis.
Dr Caryn Peiffer
University of Bristol
Contact: caryn.peiffer@bristol.ac.uk
Dr Caryn Peiffer is Senior Lecturer of International Public Policy and Governance at the University of Bristol. Her research largely focuses on patterns of grass-roots corruption, the functionality of corruption, and the consequences of anticorruption policies. She has conducted research in several countries and works regularly with Transparency International and other international organisations to understand the likely impacts of anticorruption efforts and on the measurement of corruption.
PROJECT SUMMARY
This research project will test an innovative new approach to developing more effective and politically feasible anti-corruption strategies and approaches in a way that brings together serious organised crime and corruption in specific sectors and/or contexts.
The Corruption Functionality Framework (CFF) was developed by Professor Heather Marquette and Dr Caryn Peiffer, drawing on their research on corruption, collective action and functionality. It was published by Global Integrity ACE as part of their ‘Re-thinking Anti-Corruption’ series.
Evidence shows that corruption and organised crime persist, in part, because they fill functions for people that cannot be filled in other ways. The definition of corruption functionality developed for the Framework is: ‘the ways in which corruption provides solutions to the everyday problems people face, particularly in resource-scarce environments, problems that often have deep social, structural, economic and political roots’. Research suggests that better understanding the real-life challenges that people face is important for developing more sustainable and effective strategies and operational approaches that don’t just disrupt and displace problems but, instead, look to disrupt and replace. It’s also important for avoiding the potential negative unintended consequences that could occur if anti-corruption or counter-SOC interventions leave people more vulnerable when the solutions people use to manage their everyday problems disappear without being replaced with legal/uncorrupted alternatives.
The team will work with policymakers to test the approach in multi-agency settings, focusing on specific problems in specific locations. The approach combines facilitated workshops with country and sector experts followed by semi-structured interviews to assess whether participants found the CFF useful for triggering new thinking and potential strategic and/or operational approaches. The research will also help to develop more granular understanding of how functionality works in specific contexts that could, in future research, be developed into a series of comparative case studies. Insights from the research will also be used to adapt the CFF to help ensure it is as useful as possible.
Expected impact
The aim of the research is ultimately to improve our understanding of how functionality operates in real-world settings in order to help ensure that anti-corruption and counter-SOC operational approaches are more effective, more sustainable and produce fewer negative unintended consequences. In doing so, we anticipate that the research will also shine a light on some of the political realities of tackling these problems and how sometimes ‘lack of political will’ may instead be pragmatism (or resignation) in the face of difficult or even intractable problems, where focusing on the underlying problems may help trigger more politically feasible responses.
PUBLICATIONS
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Publications from this project will be posted here when available
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Publications from this project will be posted here when available
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Heather Marquette & Caryn Peiffer, Grappling with the “real politics” of systemic corruption: theoretical debates versus “real-world” functions, Governance, 31(3), 2018, pp. 499-514.
Heather Marquette & Caryn Peiffer, Thinking politically about corruption as problem-solving: a reply to Persson, Rothstein, and Teorell, Governance, 32(4), 2019, pp. 811-820.
Caryn Peiffer, Heather Marquette, Rosita Armytage & Trevor Budhram, The surprising case of police bribery reduction in South Africa, Crime, Law & Social Change, 72, 2019, pp. 587-606.
Caryn Peiffer, Rosita Armytage, Heather Marquette & Pius Gumiziriza, Lessons from reducing bribery in Uganda’s health services, Development Policy Review, 39(5), 2021, pp. 721-739.
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Heather Marquette & Caryn Peiffer, Corruption and transnational organized crime, in Felia Allum & Stan Gilmour (eds.) Routledge Handbook of Transnational Organized Crime (2nd ed.), London: Routledge, 2021. Full text available soon.
Heather Marquette & Caryn Peiffer, Corruption and anticorruption: Uganda and South Africa as positive outliers in governance reforms?, in Wil Hout & Jane Hutchison (eds.) Handbook on Governance & Development, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2022, pp. 196-210. Full text available soon.
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Heather Marquette & Caryn Peiffer, Corruption Functionality Framework, 2021, part of the GI ACE ‘Rethinking Anti-Corruption‘ series