Prof. Dr. Elizabeth (Liz) David-Barrett has joined IACA as Head of the Global Programme on Measuring Corruption. She is on leave from the University of Sussex, which she joined in 2014 and where she was Director of the Centre for the Study of Corruption from 2018 to 2022; prior to that, she was at the Saïd Business School, University of Oxford. Prof David-Barrett has published her research in top-tier academic journals including Governance, World Development, and the Annual Review of Political Science. She engages widely with policy-makers and practitioners and chaired the first Academic Roundtable of the G20 Anti-Corruption Working Group in 2020. She has advised several governments on anti-corruption policy as well as training their anti-corruption professionals, worked with private-sector organizations on improving integrity, and authored several reports for Transparency International; she was formerly chair of Spotlight on Corruption, a UK-based anti-corruption NGO (2019-22). The expertise of Prof. David-Barrett on corruption is regularly sought by the media, including the BBC, Guardian, Financial Times, and Le Monde. She has a D.Phil, MSc and BA from the University of Oxford, and an MA from the School of Slavonic and East European Studies.
The IACA Global Programme on Measuring Corruption is the result of growing intergovernmental commitment to re-thinking how the international community measures corruption. The issue was raised by the G7 in 2017, reiterated by the Conference of the States Parties to the UN Convention against Corruption in its Resolution 8/10 of 2019, and taken forward by the Saudi and Italian G20 presidencies in 2020 and 2021.
How we measure corruption shapes how we view and address the problem. Governance indicators create and spread international standards, influence the drivers of economic growth and affect our views about government performance. This material and reputational impact makes it critically important that they are as accurate – and actionable - as possible.
Yet measuring corruption is also extraordinarily difficult and complex. Great strides have been made in recent years, but there are no easy answers.
The Programme seeks to take the conversation about measurement to the next level through two work streams to investigate the ‘demand’ for corruption indicators and map the ‘supply’ of innovative methodological approaches.
On the demand side, IACA will consult users of measurement indicators in government, the private sector, and NGOs. Our aim is to find out how they utilize measures at the moment and in what ways indicators could be better tailored to their needs – whether they are interested in tracking their own anti-corruption progress, seeking intelligence to inform investment decisions, or building an evidence base to hold governments to account.
On the supply side, IACA will explore and test innovative approaches to measuring corruption that are emerging from civil society, academia, governments, companies and international organizations. We will investigate how new data sets, technology and techniques can help us address some of the biases and gaps left by existing indicators. This includes the need to quantify illicit financial flows, state capture, and improper influence on lobbying.
The defining principles of the Global Programme on Measuring Corruption are that corruption measurement should be:
1. scientifically robust
2. practically useful, and
3. truly global.