Digitizing collective action in anti-corruption - a short (ish) summary
In 2015, I started my PhD. I started by looking at a very broad question: how does the use of digital technology impact the fight against corruption? As with most academic research, this led me on to a review of all the literature that was written on this since the dawn of time: There is a lot.
The Literature Review
Reviewing all this literature helped me to sum it up and categorise it (#ShitsAcademicsDo) and structure it according to their focus on: #internetaccess, #transparency, #egovernment, #mobilisation and finally: the role of #civilsociety in this context. This review and restructuring of literature, as well as the many open research questions that result from it, was published this year as a book chapter with Edward Elgar Publishing, in a volume edited by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and Paul Heywood.
If you do not regularly access academic books (how dare you!?), there are two options if you want to read it:
- I presented an early (!) version of the paper at the ECPR general conference in Hamburg in 2018. It is available to download.
- I was also able to use my research to consult organisations working in the #anticorruption space. For the GIZ's Sector Programme on Anti-Corruption and Integrity, the wonderful Victoria Boeck and I wrote an overview on ICT in anti-corruption. Big parts of my research, as well as many interviews with project leads around the world fed into this.
The Blockchain Detour
During this time, I got slightly side-tracked from the main focus of my PhD: I set out to discover uses of #blockchain / #DLT in anti-corruption and in #publicadministration generally. A short output from this was published by Transparency International's Knowledge Hub: One of several helpdesk answers I (co-)authored for this team.
Spoiler: Yes, #blockchain can serve as anti-corruption tool, but only when looking to address very specific corruption risk factors. Don't expect it to be a panacea!
A more detailed report on this topic can be found again, on the website of the GIZ, for whom I also conducted more empirical work on this question, analysing corruption risks in aid delivery, supply chains and public administration, evaluating if blockchain applications can lower these risks.
I also researched and wrote about how #blockchain can be used in #publicadministration more generally. This resulted in a working paper on this that was never developed further because at some point I had to get back to work on the core of the PhD.
The Theoretical Framework
Back at my desk working diligently on my dissertation, I focussed on coming up with a theoretical approach as to how digital technologies feed into anti-corruption work. Together with the fantastic Roberto Martínez Barranco Kukutschka, I built on anti-corruption theory and added evidence from a quantitative analysis. This was published in Crime, Law, and Social Change (an academic journal) and is available under #OpenAccess:
Tl;dr – we found evidence that digital technologies support #civilsociety's struggle against corruption and that digital technologies can only be effective if there is enough civil society capacity to use them. That sounds intuitive, but is actually often enough ignored.
The Case Study: E-Procurement in Ukraine
To test this take on anti-corruption theory, I dived into a case study on digital anti-corruption reforms implemented in a specific setting. I chose to focus on #publicprocurement reforms in #Ukraine and looked at the ProZorro project. This represents an effort to introduce e-procurement across Ukraine, a process that started as a civil society initiative in 2014 and resulted in the ProZorro e-procurement platform to be introduced nationwide in Ukraine in 2016.
I took A LOT of tender data from the ProZorro dataset. I downloaded a bit more than 4 million tenders and tried to make sense of them. In the end I broke this down to average numbers per Ukrainian region to look for corruption risk indicators.
Spoiler: corruption risks in Ukrainian procurement are still very high, even though the ProZorro project did a fantastic job on making this field more transparent than ever.
I then tested if corruption risks were related to civil society capacity in different regions. According to my theory, I should have found a correlation between the two.
The Frustrations of Academia
At this point, I welcome you to the frustrations of academia:
I did not find enough evidence to confirm this hypothesis.
There was definitely an issue with data quality and the short time frame that I analysed. However, having also conducted interviews in Ukraine I found that political will was more important than I thought. Without it, change is difficult to achieve.
To me, that was a difficult conclusion to draw. But academic research is about the pursuit of knowledge, not the pursuit of happiness. As such, the lack of definitive data and the role of political will in this context became the main conclusion of my case study research.
This final paper has not yet been published, but was now submitted as part of my PhD. I hope to get it through peer review at some point after my defence and until then look forward to comments.
For now, however, I will take a well-needed holiday. If you made it this far: thank you for all the interest. This was my first ever long LinkedIn post – I hope this was useful.
If you want to know more, reach out to me here or via my profile, but please don't forget to add a note on why we should connect when you add me to your network.