Social norms
News & Blog
15 May 2025
BlogBridging the gap: How behavioural science can strengthen anti-corruption and crime prevention
Prevention, Research and Innovation
16 Jul 2024
BlogA new arrow in the quiver: making anti-corruption reform more effective and sustainable
Prevention, Research and Innovation
27 Jul 2022
NewsNew Working Paper on developing anti-corruption interventions based on a behaviour change approach
Prevention, Research and Innovation
28 Jun 2022
NewsApplying behaviour change approaches to fight corruption and illegal wildlife trade
Green Corruption, Prevention, Research and Innovation
2 Nov 2021
BlogBribery isn’t only an exchange of money: what new research tells us about how informal networks enable corruption and vice versa
Prevention, Research and Innovation
Publications
Quick Guide 35: Sexual corruption
Sexual corruption is a serious and under-recognised form of both corruption and sexual abuse. A particularly harmful form of corruption, it is difficult to measure and prosecute, and can have devastating physical and psychological impacts on survivors/victims.
As it disproportionately affects women and marginalised groups, sexual corruption has an important impact on the advancement of gender equality and minority rights.
This Quick Guide explains the basics of sexual corruption: what it is, its prevalence and why it persists. It takes a brief look at strategies to combat sexual corruption, with a focus on challenging the underlying social norms that help to sustain it.
About this Quick Guide
You are free to share and republish this work under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 Licence. It is part of the Basel Institute on Governance Quick Guide series, ISSN 2673-5229.
Research Case Study 5: Harnessing behavioural approaches against corruption
Social norms and behaviour change (SNBC) approaches are a promising complement to conventional anti-corruption strategies. Adopting a context-sensitive and nuanced approach is an essential ingredient for success.
We wanted to understand if and how behavioural approaches can promote anti-corruption outcomes, as well as conditions for success.
To do this we reviewed research from 2016–2022 on the use of behavioural approaches in anti-corruption practice. We also analysed our practical experience designing and piloting an intervention to tackle social norms of reciprocity which fuel bribery in health facilities in Tanzania.
Research case study 2: Leveraging informal networks for anti-corruption in East Africa
Citizens and business people may invest significant time and money in building informal networks with public officials to overcome public service delivery shortcomings and access business opportunities. Understanding these networks better can strengthen anti-corruption efforts.
This research case study gives a brief overview of our Public Governance team’s research in Uganda and Tanzania. Through interviews, the team explored when, how and why informal networks are built and used to access public services or business opportunities corruptly.
The research project described was carried out under the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence Programme (GI-ACE), funded with UK aid from the UK government. All results are freely shareable under a Creative Commons licence.
Behavioural insights and anti-corruption: Executive summary of a practitioner-tailored review of the latest evidence (2016–2022)
Donors, governments and anti-corruption practitioners seeking alternative tools to address systemic corruption are increasingly turning to behavioural science. Behavioural anti-corruption approaches appear promising because they respond to a growing body of descriptive evidence on how certain social norms and mental models drive corruption, particularly in fragile contexts. Interventions that target social norms and seek to shift people’s behaviours away from corrupt practices could be more effective and long-lasting than ones that, for example, simply add more regulations and controls.
Yet few large-scale anti-corruption programmes have so far been informed by behavioural insights – in part due to a lack of evidence on where such an approach would be appropriate, what works and what doesn’t.
That evidence is slowly becoming available, thanks to an increase in the past five years in what can be called Social Norms and Behaviour Change (SNBC) intervention studies. Many have yielded positive effects and demonstrate the potential of SNBC interventions to tackle systemic corruption, but some studies have encountered counterproductive effects of anti-corruption messaging.
Based on a synthesis of the evidence, this brief paper summarises a set of behavioural explanations (i.e. insights and pitfalls) for why some of these SNBC approaches have failed, while others have been effective. The aim is to provide practitioners designing SNBC interventions with evidence to help them develop effective programmes and avoid common pitfalls.
The full research paper and analysis tables are available to practitioners upon request. Please email info@baselgovernance.org.
Acknowledgements and open-access licence
The publication is a technical report published by the Basel Institute on Governance. It is free to share under a Creative Commons AttributionNonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence.
This is a short version of a substantial in-depth review of the latest evidence (2016-21) on how SNBC approaches can inform anti-corruption practice. The publication was supported by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf of the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). The contents of this publication do not represent the official position of either BMZ or GIZ.
Informal networks as investment: A qualitative analysis from Uganda and Tanzania
Published in the peer-reviewed journal Governance, this paper interprets informal networks as investments made by citizens and business people to cope with the public sphere. Informal networks often orchestrate corruption, connecting public and private actors. The paper aims to understand their key characteristics, scopes, and functional roles.
Ten mini case studies from Tanzania and Uganda are studied. The research applies narrative analysis to explore the experiences of citizens, entrepreneurs, and low-level public officials, who built informal networks as a problem-solving mechanism. It uses a grounded theory approach. The findings serve as working hypotheses about variables and patterns emerging from the bottom-up analysis.
The paper outlines:
- Whether there are distinct types of informal networks associated with particular types of corruption;
- How, why and by whom these networks are built;
- Whether different individuals play specific roles;
- The unwritten expectations and norms that govern such networks.
The results highlight critical implications for anti-corruption practice, showing, for example, how this can be strengthened by shifting the intervention unit from individuals to networks.
About this article
This peer-reviewed article is based on extensive field research and analysis conducted by the Basel Institute’s Public Governance team in Tanzania and Uganda. The research was funded by UK Aid under the Global Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence (GI-ACE) programme. See the links below for the open-access research outputs, including a full research report and two sets of case studies.
