The ‘World Without Corruption’ – What Does It Mean for TI?
Workshop with Anja Gebel, PhD candidate at Aberystwyth University, Wales
15 May 2012, Transparency International, Berlin, Germany
Background of workshop
The background of the workshop is the research carried out by Anja Gebel, PhD candidate at Aberystwyth University, Wales, on conceptions of corruption, human nature, politics, economics and civil society within TI. From 2009-2011 the author has carried out an extensive analysis of TI documents as well as interviews with TI-Secretariat staff[1] (in addition to an extensive analysis of anticorruption documents by UNDP and the World Bank as well as interviews with respective staff in these organisations). The author’s work is part of a project funded by the European Research Council (FP7/2007–2013, grant agreement no. 202 596).[2] It is one aim of this project to refer the research findings back to the organisations which have been researched.
Aim of workshop
It is the overall aim of the workshop to inform the organisations of the research findings of the project and to generate discussion within TI about the aims and the means of the organisation’s anticorruption work, and the knowledge it draws on to decide on them.
Through the workshop, the researcher will draw attention to and facilitate debate about her findings, especially regarding some contradictions that they have revealed within TI between
- Claimed apoliticality of projects versus the reality that implicit conceptions of politics and economics are embedded in TI’s discourse
- Conception of humans as social-moral beings versus self-interested rational actors (and policy consequences of these assumptions)
- Stress on context-sensitivity and flexibility versus universalist conception of humans
- Conception of TI’s work as poverty-reducing and justice-enhancing with simultaneous emphasis on free markets
Why is this workshop interesting for people working at TI?
This workshop will be interesting for TI staff because it aims to create some space for discussion over some very fundamental questions – about how people are, how they can be, what kind of society we want to create and how we should try and do it. Although in TI’s daily work there is often little time to talk about the answers to these questions, certain conceptions of them necessarily structure the actions of people working at this NGO – even if partly in unconscious ways, for example in the form of expert knowledge on corruption and anticorruption that TI uses. This workshop provides TI staff not only with a view of the ideational dynamics within which their work is positioned but also with a little bit of time in which TI staff has the opportunity to step back from the daily activities; to look at their work from a more conceptual perspective; and to think about how the organisation’s work sits with their own personal ideals of a good, un-corrupt society as well as with current politico-economic trends in the world order.
Format of workshop
The format of the workshop is a 1 hour and 15 minutes lunch-time discussion in TI’s premises. All interested TI-Secretariat staff are invited to come along and are welcome to bring their lunch.
Anja Gebel will first report the most interesting findings to the participants and then facilitate a discussion about those findings and some of the above-mentioned questions. The main part of the workshop is to consist of a discussion among TI members.