GI-ACE was honoured to have the opportunity to be featured in a podcast episode that was produced and made available by KickBack – The Global Anticorruption Podcast.
The episode features Christopher Starke and Nils Köbis from The Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network (ICRN) interviewing GI-ACE’s very own Paul Heywood, as well as SOAS-ACE’s Mushtaq Khan, regarding their respective approaches to anti-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 (led by Paul Heywood) and SOAS-ACE (led by Mushtaq Khan)
Paul outlines the approach of GI-ACE, which has four 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)
Mushtaq explains how SOAS-ACE shares a common theory of change among all its research projects with a focus on Nigeria, Tanzania, and Bangladesh. He argues that the reason why many anti-corruption efforts have failed lies in the assumption that most people in developing countries follow rules and a few greedy people break the rules.
The conversation offers an in-depth insight into emerging approaches to anti-corruption work and how the two programmes can be compared, contrasted and used interchangeably.
Listen to find out more!