Navigating the Political Economy of Corruption - Hudson et al. (2025)

This How-To guide was produced by the Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) consortium based at SOAS in the UK. It sets out the logic of the SOAS-ACE approach to understanding and addressing policy-distorting corruption, describes how to put it into practice, and provides two case studies of its application, in Bangladesh and Nigeria. 

The approach is founded on three complementary and interconnected elements:

1. Observing the behaviour of various actors engaged around a flow of policy-related resources, looking in particular for situations where some actors are following the rules rather than engaging in corruption;
2. Analyzing and understanding how actors' behaviours are influenced by their own interests, their relationships with other actors, and the systems they are part of; and
3. Crafting feasible and impactful policy proposals that enhance and extend existing pockets of rule-following behaviour, or enable rule-following behaviours that were previously absent.

Putting the SOAS-ACE approach into practice involves a three-phase process of research and analysis:

1. Understanding the national political settlement and landscape of corruption involves examining how power is exercised and resources flow, ruling out sectors where reform is not possible, and identifying sectors where addressing corruption might be both feasible and impactful.
2. Analyzing sectoral political economy dynamics begins by mapping formal policy and institutional frameworks—how resources and rents are meant to be managed within a sector. It then involves a process of "economic ethnography" to directly observe how actors behave and how resources flow in practice. This analysis helps to identify entry points (pockets of effectiveness, or sites of positive deviance) where self-interested action by actors with appropriate levels of power, might help to reduce corruption.
3. Specifying and testing hypotheses uses the emerging insights about behaviours and possible entry points from Phase 2 to formulate and rigorously test hypotheses about how rule-following behaviours might be encouraged or enabled at promising points in the system of policy resource flows. If the hypotheses are validated by testing against new evidence, they can then be used to design effective policy that will reduce corruption and improve development outcomes.