Multi-stakeholder initiatives
News & Blog
7 Jul 2025
NewsNew book! Explore the impact of anti-corruption Collective Action
Collective Action
28 Jan 2025
NewsPeru’s Integrity Week celebrates transparency and good governance, including for the environment
Green Corruption, Public Finance Management
16 Jun 2022
NewsNew guidance for governments to engage business in preventing corruption
Collective Action, HLRM, Integrity Pacts, Private Sector
14 Dec 2021
NewsNew Policy Brief on how Collective Action initiatives can benefit from studying informal corrupt networks
Collective Action, Private Sector, Prevention, Research and Innovation
Publications
Collective Action in practice: a game-changer for business integrity
Putting business integrity on the global agenda: Report from the 5th International Collective Action Conference
The 5th International Collective Action Conference represented another significant milestone in the development of responsible and ethical business practices through anti-corruption Collective Action.
The conference, hosted by the Basel Institute with the support of the Siemens Integrity Initiative, took place on 24 and 25 June 2024 in Basel, Switzerland. This short conference report presents main insights, quotes as well as infographics and graphic recordings from the two-day event, which welcomed around 200 people from around the world and across all sectors.
A key theme of this year’s conference was the importance of building local, regional and international communities of practice. These communities bring together different constellations of people and organisations interested in the Collective Action approach to improve skills, develop joint solutions and advance knowledge about how to make initiatives effective in different contexts.
Five panel discussions, three interactive breakout sessions and multiple networking opportunities, including an exhibition, offered many occasions for sharing experiences and best practices in anti-corruption Collective Action and breaking down silos.
About this report and acknowledgements
The Basel Institute on Governance thanks the Siemens Integrity Initiative for supporting and providing funding for the conference’s 5th edition, as well as all speakers and breakout session facilitating organisations. The full list of presenters and sessions can be found on conference pages of the B20 Collective Action Hub.
Graphic recording illustrations: Tetyana Kalyuzhna, Basel Institute on Governance. Photo and video credit: David Borter, LEO MEDIA GmbH / BBM PRODUCTIONS AG.
The report is free to share or republish under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Please credit the Basel Institute on Governance and link to: https://collective-action.com.
Policy Brief 8: It takes a network to defeat a network – What Collective Action practitioners can learn from research into corrupt networks
This Policy Brief distils recommendations for Collective Action practitioners based on empirical insights on certain forms of corruption involving private-sector actors.
Field research carried out in Tanzania and Uganda produced detailed case studies that show how informal networks link private and public sector actors to pursue common illicit goals, such as gaining an unfair business advantage, avoiding a sanction, decreasing taxes owed or jumping the queue at the point of delivery of public services. Corruption, most often bribery, is the currency that works to cement and nurture those networks.
This Policy Brief is based on that research and a series of in-depth interviews with Collective Action practitioners working in Africa, Eastern Europe and Latin America. The goal is to extract insights from what we have learned about the networks that fuel corruption and discuss implications for anti-corruption Collective Action initiatives.
About this Policy Brief
This publication is part of the Basel Institute on Governance Policy Brief series, ISSN 2624-9669.
It is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Suggested citation: Baez Camargo, C., Costa, Hans,V., J., Koechlin, L. and Wannenwetsch, S. (2021) It takes a network to defeat a network: What Collective Action practitioners can learn from research into corrupt networks. Policy Brief 8, Basel Institute on Governance.
The research underpinning this Policy Brief was funded by the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme, funded with UK Aid from the British people.
Conditions of Collective Commitment in Sector-Specific Coordinated Governance Initiatives
Although both the problem of corruption and its detrimental effects on society, economy, and environment has widely been recognized, corruption remains one of the most challenging problems of today. In light of globalization, the exclusive focus on compliance-oriented measures such as sharpening laws seems to be more and more ineffective.
Apparently, the problem is not so much a lack of anti-corruption regulation, but rather a lack of enforcement of existing regulatory frameworks. This governance gap is increasingly tackled by the business sector. As a consequence, new governance mechanisms characterized by the involvement of non-state actors have emerged in recent years, in an attempt to fill this gap.
These Coordinated Governance Initiatives in which companies along with representatives of other societal sectors join forces to tackle the problem of corruption have not been in the focus of research so far. More research is needed particularly on the effectiveness of these collective anti-corruption efforts to explain whether this approach is useful to curb corruption. Therefore, we attempt to identify potential success factors of Coordinated Governance Initiatives that aim to curb corruption by means of a qualitative multiple-case study.
Twenty semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of three different initiatives. Additionally, secondary data sources were examined. Three different anti-corruption initiatives were selected: the Ethics Management of the Bavarian Construction Industry (EMB), the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), and the Maritime Anti-Corruption Network (MACN).
We found five success factors and one basic prerequisite for sector-specific Coordinated Governance Initiatives. Although the identification of success factors of Coordinated Governance Initiatives is just the first step in the assessment of these initiatives, results indicate that a collective commitment obviously matters when it comes to fighting corruption.
Collective Action to tackle corruption
An important factor for success in anti-corruption Collective Action is that it should be a business-driven endeavour. That being said, the role of civil society must be recognised for its important contributions towards successful multi-stakeholder approaches against corruption.
This article from the Spring 2016 edition of Ethical Boardroom magazine looks at how building a strong coalition with civil society puts business on the front foot.
