Transparency
News & Blog
28 Jan 2025
NewsPeru’s Integrity Week celebrates transparency and good governance, including for the environment
Green Corruption, Public Finance Management
20 Jul 2022
NewsOpening Extractives: how beneficial ownership transparency in extractive sectors helps curb corruption
Collective Action, Private Sector
11 Dec 2020
BlogGabriel Cifuentes on the High Level Reporting Mechanism: "Not a vaccine against corruption, but a very useful tool for clean procurement"
Collective Action, HLRM, Private Sector
31 May 2019
BlogEl Salvador’s rule-of-law election deserves our support – here’s how
Publications
Corruption risks in the forestry sector in Ukraine
This report identifies the most widespread corruption risks affecting Ukraine’s forestry sector and the state-owned enterprise Forests of Ukraine. It also formulates recommendations to mitigate the key risks.
It is based on a comprehensive analysis of corruption risks in the forestry sector conducted by experts from the National Agency on Corruption Prevention, together with the Specialized Environmental Prosecutor’s Office of the Prosecutor General’s Office, the Basel Institute on Governance and WWF Ukraine.
The complete report is available in Ukrainian and the summary in English (forthcoming).
About this report and acknowledgments
This publication has been made possible with the support of Switzerland through the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation of the Federal Department of Foreign Affairs.
The contents of this publication are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Basel Institute on Governance, its donors and partners, or the University of Basel
Beneficial ownership transparency – a GCFCC position paper
This position paper by the Global Coalition to Fight Financial Crime (GCFFC) outlines a set of features that GCFFC members recommend jurisdictions should include in beneficial ownership disclosure regimes.
The GCFFC, as part of its objectives to promote more effective information sharing between public and private entities, and to propose mechanisms to identify emerging threats and best practice approaches to more robust controls against money laundering, believes that all actors fighting financial crime should have instant access to high quality, highly usable beneficial ownership data.
The GCFFC comprises different actors engaged in fighting financial crime: law enforcement agencies, obliged legal entities, civil society organisations.
This position paper was collaboratively developed through the collective expertise of GCFCC members and is based on the Open Ownership principles for effective disclosure.
Norm diffusion and reputation: The rise of the extractive industries transparency initiative
Transparency in the extractives sector is widely seen as a key tool for improving accountability and deterring corruption. Yet for those very reasons, it is a puzzle that so many governments in corruption-prone countries have voluntarily signed up to greater scrutiny in this area, by joining the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI).
We argue that EITI serves as a reputational intermediary, whereby reformers can signal good intentions and international actors can reward achievement. International and domestic actors thus utilize EITI to diffuse the norm of resource transparency and to advance reformist aims in a highly problematic policy area.
Corruption and Transparency in the Water Sector
This article sets out the experience of Transparency International (TI) in fighting corruption worldwide in the water sector. It focuses on identifying the sources of corruption in the sector and the available toolkits (best practice) for combating it.
Case studies from Cambodia, Japan, Colombia and Pakistan are used to illustrate some of the major points.
The article highlights the importance of forming inclusive multistakeholder approaches to fight corruption, involving government, regulators, utilities, the private sector and civil society organizations (CSOs) and uses as an example the Water Integrity Network (WIN) - a recent initiative to set up a network to combat corruption in the water sector.
It appeared as chapter 16 in Llamas, M. R., Martinez-Cortina, L., and Mukherji, A. (eds.) 2009.* Water Ethics: Marcelino Botin Water Forum 2007. *CRC Press.
Working Paper 6: Managing proceeds of asset recovery: The case of Nigeria, Peru, the Philippines and Kazakhstan
This paper looks at the use of proceeds of asset recovered from Sani Abacha, Vladimir Montesinos, and Ferdinand Marcos and their families. It will also briefly address a much more recent case involving Kazakhstan.
Repatriation of stolen monies makes available additional resources for development activities. The challenge is to ensure efficient, accountable and transparent use of such assets, given states may lack capacity or political will and that corruption may be prevalent at various levels of government.
Transparency allows for better utilisation of recovered assets, and better targeting of resources into sectors that have potential to benefit the victims of corruption, who happen to be mostly the poor. Lack of effective follow up mechanisms may lead to the inappropriate allocation of resources into sectors that have little effect on alleviating poverty.
The cases under review here offer lessons on how to manage repatriation and utilisation of proceeds of asset recovery. Further lessons relate to the participation of third parties and the benefits of making the results of the entire process public.
About this Working Paper
This paper is part of the Basel Institute on Governance Working Paper Series, ISSN: 2624-9650.
