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    Citizens Against Corruption: Report from the Front Line
    Unavailable
    Citizens Against Corruption: Report from the Front Line
    Unavailable
    Citizens Against Corruption: Report from the Front Line
    Ebook478 pages6 hours

    Citizens Against Corruption: Report from the Front Line

    By Pierre Landell-Mills

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Citizens Against Corruption: Report From The Front Line tells the story of how groups of courageous and dedicated citizens across the globe are taking direct action to root out corruption. It shows how people are no longer prepared to accept the predatory activities of dishonest officials and are challenging their scams. It draws on over 200 unique case studies that describe initiatives undertaken by 130 civil society organisations (CSOs) which engage directly with public agencies to stop the bribery and extortion that damages peoples’ lives and obstructs social and economic progress. This book challenges the notion that, at best, civil society can only have a marginal impact on reducing corruption and argues that aid donors need to radically rethink their assistance for governance reform.

    Part 1 analyses the role citizens can play in fighting corruption and promoting good governance and briefly tells the story of the Partnership for Transparency Fund (PTF). Part 2 presents studies of India, Mongolia, Philippines, and Uganda – each with its unique history and distinctive circumstances – to illustrate activities undertaken by CSOs to root out corruption, including the tools and approaches that are being used to build pressure on corrupt public agencies to become transparent and accountable. Part 3 addresses key themes – strengthening the rule of law, putting in place effective national anti-corruption strategies and institutions, making public buying and selling honest, promoting grassroots monitoring of public expenditures and the provision of public services, mounting media campaigns to expose and defeat corruption, and empowering ordinary citizens to keep watch on what actually happens at the point of delivery of public services. Part 4 is a summary of lessons learnt and explores the potential, as well as the risks and limitations, of civic activism in a world where greed and dishonesty is the norm. Finally, the book explores the opportunities and dangers faced by aid donors in supporting local CSOs and charts a way forward.

    Citizens Against Corruption: Report From The Front Line will be of interest to staff working in CSOs and aid agencies, policy analysts and researchers concerned about corruption and poor governance.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTroubador Publishing Ltd
    Release dateJan 24, 2017
    ISBN9781783069880
    Unavailable
    Citizens Against Corruption: Report from the Front Line
    Author

    Pierre Landell-Mills

    Pierre Landell-Mills has spent a lifetime in development, first as Chief Economist and Director of Planning in Botswana, and then at The World Bank. He founded and was CEO of an international NGO, Partnership for Transparency Fund, and is a Principal of The Policy Practice, a consulting company specialising in issues of political economy. He was recently a Visiting Professor at the University of Bath.

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    Reviews for Citizens Against Corruption

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    • 4/5
      Citizens Against Corruption is at once the most inspiring and the most dismaying book I have read of late. It is inspiring because with very little money (typically a grant of $30,000), an ad hoc organization (Civil Society Organization – CSO) of locals can and does repeatedly have dramatic effects on corruption. Dismaying, because corruption is so widespread and ingrained, that unless such programs are continually renewed, not only will the corruption not stay suppressed, but it will return and keep spreading. As it always has.PTF (Partnership for Transparency Fund) is an offshoot of Transparency International, those wonderful people who rank countries by how tough if not absurd it is to live in them. It gives very small grants to CSOs all over the world to call out corrupt practices, shame the offenders and draft laws to make contracting, aid distribution and government programs work as intended. Since 2000, it has given 127 CSOs in 51 countries money for 200 programs. Incredibly, no government has yet objected to a PTF program, though co-operation is not always forthcoming, either. And of course, those demanding bribes will stand firmly to keep the cash coming. Simply promoting a decent, open head of an agency out, and putting a closed, corrupt new head in, is all it takes to stop a program cold. And the book cites exactly such occurrences in numerous campaigns.Corruption comes in many flavors. My favorite quote in the book comes from Kibera, the giant slum of Nairobi: “Around here no one dares carry any cash. There are far too many policemen.” Teachers withhold grades until bribed, doctors sell meds meant for free distribution, or take private patients in public institutions. Laws passed in parliaments get “edited” later by civil servants for the benefit of their patrons. 70% of donated drugs in Uganda disappear through “leakage”. Builders use substandard and wrong materials, producing crumbling roads and falling buildings. Bids come in at triple the real price to accommodate kickbacks. Stores charge for free rations, then shortchange the customer with lower quantities and poorer quality. You’d be crazy not to bribe the whole surgical team before an operation. This is daily life in most of the world.PTF estimates $6 trillion in aid was diverted in the past decade alone. “The challenge is to build up the effort until a tipping point is reached, when a combination of reform, monitoring and sanctions make being corrupt too risky for most officials, at which point corruption will start to decline.” Getting donors to stop wasting money on corrupt governments and channel a little of it to citizen-led efforts is a monumental task that has not taken off. Yet the dividends are gigantic. Again and again, PTF cites cases where a $25,000 grant led to the saving of tens of millions of dollars that would have been diverted, spent badly or simply disappeared.The mere threat of exposure is sometimes enough. Land distribution to peasants that bureaucrats would not implement for 25 years awaiting bribes from the penniless, suddenly got sorted out in a month after a CSO laid out its plans to a shine a light there.It is precisely at the lowest level that CSOs see the worst effects and make the really dramatic gains. Boy and girl scouts examined the route taken by textbooks in the Philippines. That led to better quality books, actually distributed, and $3 million “more” to spend on them. Youths snap photos of government cars at spas and shopping malls to shame civil servants. India’s ipaidabribe outs functionaries who withhold services they are paid to perform. So far, it has exposed 15,000 cases on its internet site of the same name. Its only weapon: it names names.CSOs are also effective at the highest levels, where some governments rely on them to draw up fairer bidding laws, and monitor procurements for fairness. It is weakest in the middle, where “victimless” crime thrives.Sadly, these efforts need guidance and cash, neither of which is in great supply. The author cites dozens of projects that have transformed villages in India, but then points out there are 684,000 such villages in India alone. “Dozens” isn’t even a rounding error in those ranks. The book is admittedly not an easy read. It is very dry. Photos appear in a section in the middle instead of within the stories. Mills wrote it largely in the passive voice, like a lab report. It has a cast of driven characters worthy of great exposition, but they are not so much extolled as referred to. There are no interviews. This is more of an old fashioned ten year agency review than an exposé.It has always puzzled me why countries would continue to plow truckloads of money to corrupt governments, knowing, with absolute certainty, that a great percentage of it would disappear into Swiss bank accounts, London flats, New York condos, and BMWs. It dismays the PTF too, because if just 2-3% of those donations went to train investigative journalists and citizen activists, the level of corruption would plummet and far more of the allocated money would actually do good.In the mean time, Citizens Against Corruption documents the critical truth that corruption is vulnerable to sunlight. But with $6 trillion on the table, you would think it would attract more flies.