Building Public Support for Anti-Corruption Efforts: Why Anti-Corruption Agencies Need to Communicate and How

"To their immense cost, many [anti-corruption] agencies underestimate the critical challenges and negative effects of weak and inadequate communication. This failure is one of the reasons why we are losing the fight against corruption."

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and the World Bank's Communication for Governance and Accountability Program (CommGAP) initiative developed this 74-page publication to respond to the anti-corruption community's need for tools to address the challenges of working with the media and mobilising public support in the fight against corruption. It is intended as a "how-to guide" to help agencies understand how to control the way they present themselves to the public, how to frame their agencies' work, and how to develop allies in the press and the community at large.

The first part of the guide explains why anti-corruption agencies need to take the media particularly seriously, how the media communicate, and what effects they have on the public. Case studies illustrate all of these points - showing, for instance, how the media can distort the reality of corruption by following their own pre-formed perceptions of a corruption case. As argued here, government agencies can set things straight only by providing sufficient and clear information, and by working closely with the media to ensure the message is accurate.

The second focus area is the role of public opinion in the fight against corruption. The authors explain why public opinion can be a powerful tool in promoting an agency's work - or in bringing about its downfall - and how the media can shape public opinion and change norms about corruption. Communication campaigns can show that it not only is illegal to pay bribes to public officials, but also is immoral and does real harm to the community. This message can encourage the public to change the expectation of bribes and to resist demands for them. In India, for instance, anti-corruption efforts led to the printing of the "zero-rupee" note with a picture of Gandhi on its face. These notes were given to bribe seekers to shame them. In order to capitalise on such possibilities, the authors stress that anti-corruption agencies need to understand the role of journalism and the conditions under which journalists work. "Because of economic and other pressures, journalists often tend to simplify or dramatize stories - and that can produce the wrong perceptions among their audiences."

Third, the authors explore the difficulties of communicating about actual vs. perceived corruption, such as moral vs. legal corruption and petty vs. grand corruption. The citizenry and government officials may misjudge the success of an agency's work entirely if they measure it only through the simplified corruption indexes. A common definition of corruption has been suggested by Transparency International; another source for understanding the actual meaning of corruption is the list of offenses presented by the United Nations Convention against Corruption (see Box 1 on page 3 of the paper).

The fourth part of the paper addresses communication in this context. The media may overemphasise the problem of corruption by honing in on a specific number from a corruption index. People reading or hearing that message may believe that corruption is a greater problem than it actually is and that the corruption-countering agencies are not doing their jobs. Clear and comprehensive information is needed to explain the role of such indexes to the media and their audiences.

The next section offers practical, hands-on advice for dealing with the media and for building corruption-fighting coalitions with the media and civil society. As the authors argue, anti-corruption agencies need to use very specific communication techniques such as framing to make their messages interesting and easy to understand. There are particular problems that must be addressed and overcome when planning a communication campaign. For instance, the lack of freedom of information and speech can hinder any good work done by the media.

The paper concludes with pragmatic media actions that can be taken by anti-corruption agencies.

In addition to its discussion of the role of the media, this paper provides several tools and checklists for agencies. The first toolkit lists real-world challenges that anti-corruption agencies face in their daily work and activities designed to help meet those challenges. The second tool is a road map for designing a communication strategy. The last tool sketches the phases of a coalition-building strategy, from building trust to achieving sustainable transformation.