18.G. Workshop: Feasible and effective anti-corruption for public health: from analysis and advocacy to action

Abstract

Abstract Being able to identify corruption and call corrupt officials, health workers and citizens to account is critical in ensuring that public health policy and practice is shaped by evidence and reason rather than by powerful political forces. Despite substantial financial investments by bilateral and multilateral agencies to combat corruption, twenty years of initiatives based on good governance, improving law and changing regulatory approaches have been hugely disappointing - failing to effect significant changes in low- and middle-income countries. Public health activism on corruption is stepping up, diverse groups of actors are organizing around the threat that corruption creates to UHC, equity, social justice and the drive for global solidarity. They cannot rely on traditional good governance accountability and transparency approaches that pay insufficient attention to combinations of poor policy, under-funding and powerful interests that shape health systems, create perverse incentives, the need for survival corruption. To be effective, we need evidence of feasible and effective anti-corruption strategies. In this workshop, building on two years of theory development, qualitative and quantitative data collection and analysis in health services in LMICS we will set how feasible and effective anti-corruption strategies can be crafted and implemented. The session will introduce the Anti-Corruption Evidence ('ACE approach') and the idea of “developmental governance”. These have been used in other sectors but this is the first time that they have been applied to health. The approach is innovative in its targeted approach and focus on welfare-enhancing policies, seeking out space where for action that simultaneously tackles corruption and improves health systems but which is also politically and institutionally feasible to introduce. These strategies mark a shift away from blue-prints, interventions applied across countries without attending to context. We will use this workshop to show participants how to attend to the ways in which power and politics, culture and social networks shape health seeking and health care provision and how targeted, politically sensitive strategies offer the best anti-corruption solutions. Key messages New approaches to anti-corruption are critical for public health. Context-sensitive politically feasible, welfare-enhancing interventions offer the best way forward for anti-corruption.