Speaker: Professor Mushtaq Khan School of Oriental and African Studies

Conventional anti-corruption strategies have achieved very poor results in developing countries because they have often ignored critical features of the distribution of organizational power (the political settlement) in these contexts. The political settlement framework identifies the importance of enforcement when looking for institutional solutions. Feasible anti-corruption strategies that have a positive developmental impact in developing countries are likely to be bottom-up solutions to sectoral problems where powerful interests can be induced to behave in more productive ways in their own interest. The SOAS ACE research programme is exploring these possibilities in Nigeria, Tanzania and Bangladesh and our preliminary research shows that there are many such opportunities.

Professor Mushtaq Khan is a senior academic at the Department of Economics, SOAS, University of London, and a leading thinker on anti-corruption, governance, economic development, industrial policy and political settlements. He is the executive director of SOAS ACE, the Anti-Corruption Evidence Research Consortium. He has led multidisciplinary and multi-country research teams in the past including UK aid’s three year Governance and Growth Research Programme and has been a member of the United Nation Committee of Experts on Public Administration and the World Bank’s Panel of Experts on Policy.

This event is co-organised with the Institute for Conflict, Cooperation, and Security (ICCS).

Recorded: Monday 19 March 2018