Our Programme

Top-down technical and regulatory approaches to tackling corruption implemented over recent decades have a very poor record of success.

In response, and taking account of the complexity of how corruption operates in practice and acknowledging the importance of understanding contextual factors, the GI ACE programme is designed to generate world-class evidence to help inform practitioners’ efforts to deliver more effective anti-corruption outcomes in specific contexts. 

Research undertaken is operationally relevant, problem-driven, rigorous, and actionable. The programme aims to help researchers communicate and share findings in ways that support practitioners designing and implementing more effective anti-corruption interventions.

In phase 2, the GI ACE programme will focus on three priority areas of research (themes):

• Global finance and the enablers of corruption
• Crisis responses and corruption in vulnerable sectors
• Corruption risks in global trade and commerce

In phase 1, the GI ACE programme focused on these three priority areas of research (themes):

• Addressing the international architecture that supports corrupt exchanges
• Promoting integrity systems in the public and private sectors
• Tackling corruption at subnational and sectoral levels

Examples include research projects that help identify malfeasance in public procurement, deter the theft of medicine, or determine whether ethics training can reduce corruption in the public sector.

The Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) programme is funded with UK aid from the British people
and represents a £15 million investment from 2015–2022. A new phase of funded research is coming in 2023.

ACE is designed to produce new, operationally relevant research evidence on tackling corruption and, through this, support more evidence-based and therefore effective anti-corruption initiatives.

Key Features:

• Investigating anti–corruption (not just corruption)

• Focusing on real-world problems (not just concepts or theory)

• Tackling the politics of anti-corruption (as well as the technical barriers)

• Demonstrating impact (by measuring reduced corruption)

ACE is an interdisciplinary programme, cutting across political science, economics, anthropology, sociology, and socio-legal studies. ACE’s research questions require a combination of research methods, and substantial fieldwork to generate new data, and some experimental methods. These are carried out through the sister programmes GI ACE and SOAS-ACE.