Generating and Sustaining Political Will to Prevent Corruption: Lessons from Korea’s Anti-Corruption Initiative Assessment

December 21, 2021

UNDP Seoul Policy Centre (USPC), together with UNDP Anti-Corruption for Peaceful and Inclusive Societies (ACPIS) Global Project Team based in Singapore, facilitated a policy dialogue on 4 November 2021, exploring its partner countries’ lessons learned from adopting effective corruption prevention mechanisms and strategies with sustained political will. The Anti-Corruption & Civil Rights Commission (ACRC) of the Republic of Korea shared key lessons from sustainably implementing corruption prevention tools such as its Anti-Corruption Initiative Assessment (AIA). Representatives of anti-corruption agencies from Viet Nam and Uzbekistan, as well as UNDP Montenegro, showcased how they developed solutions to overcome the challenge of lacking political will to tackle corruption through USPC’s programmatic support to learn from ACRC’s experiences. UNDP’s Global Anti-Corruption Team also shared insights on how UNDP can contribute to enabling self-sustaining corruption prevention work in partner countries. 

Since 2015, USPC has been facilitating knowledge sharing on the topic of anti-corruption through its ‘SDG Partnerships on Transparency & Accountability’.* Ms. Anne Juepner, Acting Director of USPC, underlined the importance of having an honest conversation about the hardships experienced when trying to create a favorable policy environment for Anti-Corruption projects to flourish and be fruitful in a sustainable manner”. Ms. Sarah Lister, Head of Governance at UNDP Bureau for Policy and Programme Support, emphasized that “strengthening corruption prevention mechanisms and anti-corruption systems is critical to building responsive, transparent and accountable institutions” and achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. Mr. Anga Timilsina, Global Programme Advisor on Anti-Corruption at UNDP ACPIS Global Programme, stated that UNDP should continue to collect relevant data, overcome silos, go beyond one-off pilots, provide longer-term support and advocate anti-corruption with evidence-based observation and analysis. 

Mr. Young Jae Won, Director of International Relations Division at ACRC, highlighted that “there is no perfect tool or measure that can be applied to all situations, all contexts, or all countries”, and that finding the right balance of top-down and bottom-up approaches is essential for the sustainability of effective corruption prevention mechanisms. ACRC recommended maintaining and strengthening the legal ground as it can represent political willingness and contribute to sustaining anti-corruption tools. In addition, Mr. Jungoh Son, Anti-Corruption Policy Advisor and ACRC Secondee to UNDP, explained that the government must also internalize and institutionalize corruption prevention tools and integrate them with all government functions to guarantee connecting them to existing policies, continuing an ongoing implementation, and ensuring completeness of the tools. Last but not least, Mr. Kyungyong Kim, Deputy Director of the Anti-Corruption Survey and Evaluation Division at ACRC, emphasized the significance of “ensuring the objectivity and reliability of the mechanism and regularly getting feedback from the concerned organizations” to build political will.

With the goal of generating political will, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam and Montenegro have undertaken different measures inspired by Korea’s AIA. Mr. Hoang Duc Hung, Deputy Head of UNCAC Implementation Division in the Anti-Corruption Bureau of the Government Inspectorate of Viet Nam underlined that applying digital technologies to corruption assessments is important for increased efficiency and transparency. Following a presentation of the AIA-inspired procedure of conducting corruption assessments, Ms. Mushtariy Madrahimova, Chief Inspector of Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA) of Uzbekistan, explained how ACA decided to form a group of nine independent experts from civil society institutions to evaluate ACA’s corruption assessments. Ms. Jelena Mrdak, Programme Manager for EU Accession and Public Administration Reform at UNDP Montenegro, noted that the country will now demand its public institutions to submit evidence for their corruption evaluation reports. Montenegro also showed how it went beyond adopting the Korean example by setting incentives for public institutions to publicize their anti-corruption work, enabling them to gain additional points if they do so in their performance assessment by the national anti-corruption agency. 

All in all, the webinar represented a valuable opportunity to reaffirm the importance of facilitating knowledge exchange on the topic of anti-corruption and discuss different approaches for generating and sustaining political will to tackle corruption. The rich presentations exemplified the significance and effectiveness of USPC's programmatic support to UNDP COs through knowledge exchange over the course of three generations. The webinar closed with Ms. Juepner encouraging all participants “to stay informed, engaged, and call for actions for anti-corruption”.

* UNDP Seoul Policy Centre (USPC) shares Korea’s tested-and-proven policy tools with other countries through SDG Partnerships. SDG Partnerships provide a combination of support, including partnership development with Korean institutions, seed funding, technical assistance, and policy advisory services. It utilizes UNDP’s global policy network of country offices and the policy expertise and know-how of partner organizations such as ACRC.

The recording of the webinar could be found here.