Video | Audio | Transcript
How do citizens counter corruption and exact accountability from power holders? What strategic value does people power bring to the anticorruption struggle? Can bottom-up, citizen-based strategies complement and reinforce top-down anticorruption efforts? What are the policy implications for the international community and how can external actors support (and not inadvertently harm) homegrown civic mobilization? Addressing these questions—and demonstrating the critical role of grassroots efforts in the anticorruption/accountability equation—Shaazka Beyerle explores how millions of people around the world have refused to be victims of corruption and become instead the protagonists of successful nonviolent civic movements to gain accountability and promote positive political, social, and economic change.
Dr. Bert Spector defines corruption and identifies its different levels and forms.
Video | Audio | Transcript
As frustration over corruption increased across the country, the government set up a committee of ministers to draft an anti-corruption bill. But prominent social activist Anna Hazare, 72, was not satisfied. He decided to travel to New Delhi, and, on 4 April 2011, held a press conference to voice his disappointment that the prime minister had not included leading civil society members on the committee. More importantly, Hazare announced his intention to go on a hunger strike until the government enacted anti-corruption legislation, a fast that began on 5 April, the following day.
In 2008, an organization called the Movement to Combat Electoral Corruption (MCCE), an umbrella group comprising over forty-three like-minded local NGOs and organizations, took advantage of a popular initiative clause, by which a bill can be popularly presented to congress if it is supported with signatures from at least one percent of the Brazilian population.
