How Do You Tackle a Problem Like Corruption? NRGI’s Tool Can Help

Corruption has, as ever, been hitting the headlines. Guatemala’s Ministry of Energy and Mines has announced a full investigation into all recent decisions on mining licenses in response to multiple allegations of bribery and corruption. The Portuguese prime minister will step down over a high-level corruption investigation into lithium projects in the country. Swiss authorities have charged Trafigura with bribing a government official, allegedly a chief executive of a subsidiary of Angola’s state-owned enterprise Sonangol–merely the latest in a series of commodity trading corruption scandals.

Yet these cases are not just fodder for newspapers’ financial or politics pages; they have a real and devastating impact on people and the planet. The UN estimates that Africa loses USD 88.6 billion each year in illicit financial flows, money that cannot be put towards healthcare, education, or essential infrastructure. In the extractives sector, this corruption can also come at a physical cost to communities, such as through pollution or eviction, and harms our global ambitions to fight climate change.

The pervasive nature of extractives sector corruption is widely acknowledged by civil society, governments, international organizations and businesses. While there is agreement on the existence of the problem, the question of how to address corruption is still ever-present. It can be difficult to know where to start, but inaction is not an option if we are to reach a fairer, more sustainable future. This is why at NRGI we developed a corruption diagnostic tool.

What is our corruption diagnostic tool?

First developed in 2021, NRGI’s corruption diagnostic tool is an adaptable, step-by-step process designed to help anticorruption actors identify and understand major corruption issues in the extractives sector of their country or region, prioritize which issues are most important to focus on, and then build and implement action plans for reforms to address these issues. The process emphasizes collaboration across stakeholders, both to strengthen understanding of the most pressing issues and to build buy-in for reform. Newly relaunched, we’ve incorporated new insights and research to make this tool as effective as possible.

A tool is a practical guide, therefore understanding how it is used in practice is essential to making sure that it is as effective as possible in supporting anticorruption actors. We’ve gathered feedback from five different uses of the tool on what has been helpful, what could be improved, and what new information is needed to refine and update the tool.

What’s new?

As part of this update to the tool, future users can now find:

• Updated step-by-step guidance. One of the most significant changes to our guidance is adding a new step on implementation. As any campaigner or policy wonk will tell you, securing buy-in and effective implementation for your reform ideas is the toughest challenge–especially when there may be actors with vested interests working against you. This has proved true for users of the tool as well, so we’ve now dedicated more space to advocacy and what comes after you’ve developed an action plan. But this isn’t the only change to the guidance. We’ve also, for example, sought to clarify topics such as definitions on policy and state capture and provide quick glance summaries of the main types of corruption under different stages of the decision-making chain or thematic topics.
• Three new research modules. One of the key steps of the tool is Step 4, where users carry out more in-depth research into high-priority topics. To support this, we’ve developed three more modules covering corruption and artisanal and small-scale mining (ASM), socioenvironmental harm in the mining sector, and fossil-fuel phase out. These modules are designed to help users better navigate specific challenges, particularly around the energy transition. Users can also still draw on five existing modules on the decision chain (the decision to extract, license, and contract; operations; revenue collection; and revenue management) and state-owned enterprises.
• Summaries of past uses of the tool. Whenever you start a new project, it can be helpful to understand how others have approached the same problem. We’ve therefore developed summaries outlining how the tool was used in Chile, Colombia, Guinea, Mongolia, and the Philippines, placing a particular focus on the action plans they developed. For more about lessons learned and advice, you can also read blog posts about the process from users in Mongolia, Colombia, and Guinea. By examining the experiences of others, users can gain valuable insights to inform their own anticorruption efforts and adapt strategies for maximum impact.
• Two new research briefings. We also wanted to bring in lessons from elsewhere in the anticorruption or resource governance spaces, so we’ve developed two new briefings. The first explains new provisions in the 2023 EITI Standard, offering practical insights for anticorruption actors—whether they are multi-stakeholder groups, CSOs and journalists or anticorruption institutions, how to use this information and examples of how this has been done in the past. The second briefing looks at anticorruption reforms in other sectors, such as forestry and defense, to understand what lessons anticorruption actors in the extractives space can learn from these efforts. We’ve focused on successful reforms, drawing out key principles from these cases to help guide action planning, which have also been incorporated into the updated guidance.
• A digital platform to navigate this information. All this content may seem a bit intimidating to anyone new to the tool or who wants to learn more about a specific topic, such as how corruption could manifest in the licensing process or as fossil-fuels are being phased out. That’s why we developed a one-stop-shop for all this information. Our microsite summarizes the steps in the process, including clear links to all the information shared above. We hope that this will also make the research developed for the tool more accessible for all actors working to tackle corruption in the extractives sector.

We have exciting plans for the tool in NRGI’s focus countries over the next couple of years, so keep an eye out for more updates on this work.