The University of Nottingham, one of ERCAS’s partners in the EU-financed project ANTICORRP, is currently involved in another research project in partnership with the City University of Hong Kong, with the objective of examining and comparing recent reforms in the integrity management framework in place in public services in the United Kingdom (UK), China and Hong Kong. The project, entitled “Re-designing the Integrity Management Framework in the British, Chinese and Hong Kong Public Services”, is jointly funded by the Economic and Social Research Council of the United Kingdom and the Research Grants Council of Hong Kong.
The project started in October 2011 and will run for two years. Its main motivation is the fact that, over the past two decades, there has been considerable change in integrity regulations in the three jurisdictions studied in the project. The changing forms and characteristics of corruption have led these three governments to re-assess the effectiveness of existing rules and regulations governing integrity management and to undertake reforms to better capture new forms of conflict of interest and other integrity issues.
The research thus aims to provide a comparative analysis of how the integrity management framework in the UK, China and Hong Kong has been re-designed. It focuses on why reforms have come about, how they have been implemented, what difficulties they have encountered or given rise to, and to what extent they can provide an effective approach to ensuring integrity in the public sector. The research also looks at mutual dependencies between regulators and the regulated, the relationship among integrity management agencies, and the interplay between global drivers and national-level initiatives.
Prof. Paul Heywood is the principal investigator in the project. As part of the project’s activities, the University of Nottingham hosted a Workshop on June 21, with presentations on papers by Paul Heywood, Jonathan Rose, Ian Scott, Ting Gong, Marija Zurnic, and Marko Trajkovic.
