Hi, all - glad to be a part of this conversation and thanks to others hear for starting things off with some thoughtful and in-depth ideas and content.  I wanted to add one idea to the mix, regarding the first question posed in this discussion, namely, want can civil society do to combat corruption?

While the drivers of global corruption, both in the public sector and private sector, are complex, a key driver is wealth and profit. Simply put, all too often individuals or companies exploit or game weak governance mechanisms to enrich themselves personally, at the expense of the public and the commonwealth.

However, for those involved in such corrupt transactions, once they've attained their ill-gotten gains, they need to find a way to spend them without being detected and held accountable by law enforcement, electorates, the media or civil society. That's where the global financial system comes in.

Far from being a passive actor in the ecosystems that serve corruption, there are plenty of examples of institutions and individuals who are willing participants in a 'shadow' financial system that helps hide, move and launder illcit financial flows from one corner of the globe to the other.

The work we do at Global Witness - alongside partners such at TI and many others - seeks to expose not only corrupt deals in the first place, but the architecture of such schemes and how the financial system played a role in faciliating such deals in the first place.

But, beyond our work, perhaps the best example has been the Panama Papers - which, as some of you may know, was the largest single data leak ever recorded, and which uncovered a world of illcit finance, law firms taking on suspect clients, and shadowy shell companies that touched hundreds of countries. And, this just one law firm! The story showed just how broad and deep this world of shadow finance is, and how it is intertwined even at the highest levels of government and industry. 

So, given the critical role that the financial system plays in faciliating corruption, a recommendation we're making is that players in that world - from the banks and bankers, to the lawyers and accountants, the realtors and the tax havens - should be obligated to player a larger role in deterring illicit finance and to be held more accountable for their role in doing so.

If we can make it harder for corrupt actors to move the money siphoned off from corrupt deals in the first place, we can help deter such actions, but perhaps as important, we can create space for civil society and other reforms to build or remake the institutions of governance that can shine a light on pubilc spending, private and public sector interactions and transactions,and other aspects of governance that should be conducted more out in the open. 

We've got some ideas on how civil society, as well as individuals, can play a role in making that happen, but would love to hear other people's ideas and reactions about how groups and individuals can engage on this strategic front in the broader effort to tackle corruption. What do you all think?

Thanks for the invitation to participate in this conversation. I'll be happy to share some of the experiences we've had at the Open Contracting Partnership from working on uncovering and fighting corruption in public procurement, notably government's number one corruption risk.

One of the key developments over recent years in this space has the development of e-procurement and opening up that data publicly. This has happened in part through applying open contracting. The concept of open contracting builds on the idea of publishing standardized open data to open up the full public procurement process from planning to implementation and engage with citizens and the private sector to create change. This has opened up new opportunities for civil sociecty to monitor, track and engage with government in this crucial area.

Let me highlight some of the examples of how using open data in public procurement has worked: 

1. In Slovakia, the TI Slovakia and the Fairplay Alliance had done some awesome work in providing an easy-to-use took making government contracts accessible leading to a series of investigations into corruption in health, education and others. The relevance of public procurement to citizens can be seen through how much this tool has been used. 8% of citizens in Slovakia haved reviewed a contract online. 
2. In Chile, journalists have developed Compras Transparentes, a great tool for civil society to look in-depth at all the contracts by an entity such as a public hospital.
3. In Kosovo and Hungary, these tools highlight red flags in public procurement, providing a great starting point to analyze ongoing procurement and look into where the corruption risks are.

Brent, thanks for bringing all of us together. There are multiple dimensions to this online conversation on the role of civil society to combat public sector corruption. We're already starting to focus on the role of citizens. Already today so many compelling examples have been given and many more will be cited in the days ahead. Literally, over the past 18 years, millions of people have been involved in organized campaigns, social movements or other forms of civic initiatives impacting corruption.

What is corruption? How we define a problem affects how we try to tackle it. A traditional (Transparency International) definition is: "the misuse of entrusted power for private gain." But there are some limitations. First, the abuse of power is not limited to private gain, but can also be for political gain or collective benefits for a third party, entity, group, or sector, for example, state security forces, political parties, businesses, financial services, and unions. Second, it’s helpful to think about how corruption functions. It’s not just a collection of unconnected transactions. It functions as a system of power abuse involving a multitude of relationships, some visible but many others hidden, hence our struggle for transparency. Third, within this system are long-standing interests that will try really hard to maintain the venal status quo. They may try to supress honest people, reformers and integrity champions, and in public administrations they may pressure or force their colleagues or subordinates to engage in corrupt practices. They may thwart change through many different ways, from non-compliance to intimidation to violence.

Thus, I propose a systemic definition: "a system of abuse of entrusted power for private, collective, or political gain – often involving a complex, intertwined set of relationships, some obvious, others hidden, with established vested interests, that can operate vertically within an institution or horizontally cut across political, economic and social spheres in a society or transnationally." A systemic approach looks to disrupting systems of corruption or the corrupt status quo in the short run, with the longer term objectives of dismantling them, reforming/reshaping institutions, and changing practices, norms and attitudes. Activities such as monitoring are examples of disrupting the corrupt status quo. They also include citizen-generated information and engagement with both the public, officials and other stakeholders both state and non-state (e.g. private sector, unions, professional organizations, cultural/community/youth organizations, religious organizations, educational institutions, etc.)

But what about a bottom-up, people-centered view of corruption? For regular people, corruption is not an abstract evil. We can experience it. Aruna Roy, the great Indian civic leader (among other things, in the Right to Information movement) said corruption is "the external manifestation of the denial of a right, an entitlement, a wage, a medicine." When we take Aruna Roy’s people-centered view, the priorities shift to controlling those forms of graft and abuse that are most harmful or common to citizens, particularly among the poor and marginalized. This brings us full circle to combatting corruption in the public sector. Those who are often affected and harmed are the poor and marginalized in a given society, as they have the least resources and a great need of public sector services and support.

Nonviolent action - also called civil resistance, nonviolent struggle, and nonviolent conflict - is the bottom-up method to fight oppression and injustice through which people power is wielded. It involves strategy, planning, organization, communications, and tactical selection and sequencing.

People power refers to the social, economic, political and psychological pressure that is exerted on state and non-state powerholders by significant numbers of individuals, organized around shared grievances and goals, engaging in a variety of nonviolent tactics, such as civil disobedience, non-cooperation, monitoring, information gathering, face-the-public forums, petition drives (offline and online), strikes, boycotts, low-risk mass actions, and demonstrations. The pioneering nonviolent struggle scholar, Gene Sharp, documented over 198 types of tactics. New ones are constantly generated by movements and campaigns, including those targeting corruption, for example: monitoring; public forums; information gathering about budgets, spending, public services, development projects; Right to Information procedures; cooperation with state integrity champions; protection of state integrity champions under threat; aiding whistle-blowers; joint citizen-state committees and boards (e.g., Provincial Monitoring Boards launched by Integrity Watch Afghanistan); negotiation;bottom-up ethics and integrity trainings for public officials.

Monitoring is a tactic often used by civic actors – including regular citizens - to combat public sector corruption. It can involve: observing, recording, verifying, comparing, overseeing, checking, and inspecting. In the anti-corruption context, the targets of such activities are: 1) people (for example, election candidates, parliamentarians, government leaders, public officials, civil servants, social service providers, police); 2) institutions (parliaments, public administrations, government agencies, judiciaries, state security forces, municipalities, corporations, universities, schools, hospitals); 3) policies (such as poverty reduction, education, natural resource exploitation);  4) budgets and expenditures; 5) public programs, social services, public works; procurement practices; procurement outcomes; and 6) social and economic development projects conducted by governments and/ or external actors.  Monitoring can either be visible (for example, public audits or site inspections) or anonymous (for instance, mobile phone videos or SMS reports of public officials and police demanding bribes). Effective monitoring creates social pressure and disrupts corrupt practices within systems of graft and abuse.

There are three main dynamics to people power in the corruption context, including in the public sector:

• Disrupting - systems of graft and abuse through strategically chosen and sequenced nonviolent actions (tactics). This can entail upending activities, practices, and relationships, thereby making “business as usual” difficult, if not impossible.
• Applying - nonviolent pressure on corruptors who refuse to change the venal status quo through the power of numbers, namely people raising their collective voice over shared demands. This can range from a community effort, such as in a social audit or community-based monitoring, all the way at the macro level to a national social movement involving hundreds of thousands or millions. "Numbers" depends on the context. When most of the people in a community are involved in a social audit, that's a lot of people in that context and they have the potential to wield nonviolent pressure.
• Engaging - the public and powerholders in order to win people over to the struggle; shift positions (loyalties) of decisionmakers; and produce defections”, that is, individuals and groups within the corrupt system who refuse to go along with it. The engagement dynamic is based on the reality that not everyone is equally loyal, equally corruptible and equally wedded to the system enabling corruption, including in the public sector. The engagement dynamic is based on the reality that not everyone is equally loyal, equally corruptible and equally wedded to the malfeasant system. Nor are such stances etched in stone; they can change or shift as a result of people power. The spectrum of allies is a useful tool to conceptualize such shifts and develop strategies and tactics to produce them [Martin Oppenheimer and George Lakey, A Manual for Direct Action (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1965)].
  

  This Spectrum of Allies illustration by Joshua Kahn Russell was originally published in Beautiful Trouble and appears here courtesy of a Creative Commons license.