The ingredients of success for national anti-corruption agencies include a clear legal mandate and close collaboration with other law enforcement bodies, according to World Bank anti-graft expert Francesca Recanatini.
Further, anti-corruption agencies shouldn’t focus only on prosecution and ignore public relations. That would mean missing an opportunity to educate the public of their achievements, while enlisting citizens in the battle. “They should start to report and even advertise the success they achieve,” according to Ms. Recanatini, a senior economist at the Bank.
Ms Recanatini spoke during an anti-corruption conference organised by the EuropeAid Governance, Security, Human Rights and Gender Unit. Dozens of guests gathered in Brussels the week of Oct. 18-21, 2010 to discuss anti-graft efforts.
A video interview with Ms Recanatini on the sidelines of the conference can be found here:
Ms Recanatini’s presentation to the attendees concerned the challenges facing anti-corruption agencies as well how to evaluate their performances. Her presentation sketched the progression of many anti-corruption agencies: They are established in response to a crisis but their work ultimately fails to meet expectations and ultimately fizzles out with little documented impact.
To avoid that arc, some steps can be taken. For her, a first challenge is to ensure that the bodies have the proper legal framework to allow them to function effectively.
A next step is to get the working with other government and international agencies focused on combating corruption, she said in the interview.
“If these agencies have a very clear mandate in a law or in a regulation, then the challenge becomes how they cooperate and collaborate with other agencies within the same country and other agencies outside the country,” she said.
“In the few countries where there has been some success, there have been establishing memorandums of understanding between different government agencies to clarify the roles, the contributions and inputs of each and as a consequence the accountability of who is cooperating,” according to Ms Recanatini.
“When you think of an anti corruption agency, you never think about how they collaborate with another agency,” she said. “So that has been a lesson we have learned.”
The Anti-Corruption Thematic Group (ACTG) at the World Bank, chaired by Francesca Recanatini, in collaboration with the European Commission, the United Nation Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the US State Department, has launched a new initiative to better understand the institutional structure of individual Anti Corruption Agencies (ACAs) in an attempt to support their efforts more effectively in the future.
The exercise will provide important information on the form and the structure of ACAs and is intended to help other ACAs facing similar challenges, improve their effectiveness, and guide other donors and practitioners in further work. It seeks to centralise ACA-related data and creates a knowledge platform that will assist developing countries and donors to obtain information on the composition and the structure of ACAs.
In that framework, researcher Arsema Tamyalew has developed a case study that examines the effectiveness of the Federal Ethics and Anti-corruption Commission (FEACC) of Ethiopia based on questionnaires and in-depth interview conducted with the FEACC’s leadership, staff and other pertinent parties.
To watch a video interview with Ms Tamyalew, click on the icon below.
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