The Hertie School of Governance will be hosting on 18-20 October 2012 the 2nd meeting of the project ANTICORRP, funded by the European Commission’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7). This meeting will gather participants of Work Packages 1, 2 and 3 in the form of a workshop for the discussion of theoretical and methodological questions that will guide further research activities in the project.
The workshop will be preceded by a roundtable at the Hertie School of Governance, entitled The Global State of Corruption Control. Who Succeeds, Who Fails and What Can Be Done About It. The Research Agenda. The research team for ANTICORRP at the Hertie School will present data on global and regional corruption trends, in connection with the project’s research agenda. A panel of discussants, introduced by ERCAS’s director Prof. Alina Mungiu-Pippidi and including Paul Heywood, Claus Offe, Bo Rothstein and Dieter Zinnbauer, will talk about lessons learned from developments in anti-corruption work, the need for improved governance indicators and the future research agenda in the field.
The workshop to be held on 19 and 20 October will consist of a series of presentations by ANTICORRP participating researchers, followed by discussions and planning for the next stages of the project. The topics addressed in the workshop will include a review of the latest theoretical developments in corruption research, issues of measurement and the development of new indicators, and the application of historic and ethnographic approaches to research on corruption. The debate on these issues will be complemented by presentations on historical case-studies conducted by participating researchers, and discussions on contemporary case-studies to be conducted as part of the project.
The case study research, together with qualitative comparisons across the selected cases, will aim at explaining why countries reach different equilibria regarding government accountability and control of corruption. They will trace the process and the mechanisms of change, the strategies of actors and the mechanism of altering the power distribution of particularistic societies leading to new equilibria. By attempting to identify the essential ingredients of these equilibria, the project seeks to offer a more dynamic and historically grounded model explaining the emergence and consolidation of governance regimes.