The article reviews aspects of the literature on public sector organisational development in developing countries, and on Anti‐Corruption Agencies or Commissions (ACC), to set the context for its empirical research into five African countries' ACCs1. This argues that ACCs are as likely to be affected by the same problems as any other public sector institution, but the approaches taken by donors and the consequential expectations on performance fail to recognise this.The article further argues that, in addition to these two dilemmas relating to the conditions necessary to promote organisational development and performance expectation––organisational continuity––of ACCs, a third dilemma––differing cycles of donor and government activity––also poses problems for that development.This has practitioner and policy relevance. With multilateral and bilateral donors still continuing to establish ACCs as the lead agency to address corruption there is a need to address the future organisational development of existing ACCs as well as using the lessons from the performance of such ACCs to provide the continuity for new ACCs to be capable of dealing with corruption. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.The agencies visited were those with a responsibility for addressing corruption: the Anti‐Corruption Bureau (ACB) in Malawi; the Inspectorate of Government (IG), Uganda; the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) and the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), Ghana; the Anti‐Corruption Commission (ACC), Sierra Leone; the Prevention of Corruption Bureau (PCB), Tanzania; the Anti‐Corruption Commission (ACC), Zambia. The authors would like to thank the staff for their cooperation; the views in the article are solely those of the authors. Part of the field research was for a U4 research project.

This is a repository copy of Cyberfraud and the implications for effective risk-based responses: themes from UK research.

Aid donors are increasingly seeking to link assistance to sustainable reform, including the provision of a responsible and responsive political and legal framework, the improvement of recipient countries' social, health and educational prospects, and the promotion of economic development and liberalization. Much attention is given to the first of these because of the size and cost to the state and the perceived constraints it exercises on the longer‐term changes to the economy and society; in general terms, good government is an essential precondition for good governance and economic development. Increasingly donors have focused on corruption, both as a core obstacle to the encouragement of good government, and on the steps taken to dealing with it as evidence of commitment and the will of recipient countries to their introduction. While the types of activity associated with corruption are readily identifiable, as are the means to attempt to deal with it, it is usually much more difficult to determine effective implementation, particularly with limited resources at a time when longer‐term political and economic reforms are also being promoted. It is therefore especially important that, in relation to corruption and good government, a practicable, effective and sustainable means is available to deal with corruption from preventative, investigative and reform perspectives.

This article builds on a Transparency International (TI)-sponsored research study funded by the Dutch Government into the National Integrity System (NIS) in practice. The NIS is a framework approach developed by TI that proposes assessing corruption and reform holistically. The NIS not only looks at separate institutions or separate areas of activity or separate rules and practices, but also bases its perspective on institutional and other inter-relationships, inter-dependence and combined effectiveness. The study involved 18 countries, using in-country researchers and an overview report. This article assesses the findings of the study to consider how the approach can work in practice, and what the approach can reveal about the causes and nature of corruption as well as the implications for reform. THE NIS APPROACHThe NIS is proposed as a set of objectives (such as 'an open, genuinely competitive and transparent system of public procurement') which is supported by key strategies or approaches (termed elements; for example, 'identification of government activities that are most prone to corruption and a review of both substantive law and administrative procedures') and is delivered by or through relevant institutions, sectors or specific activities (the pillars, such as 'the Auditor-General'). The NIS development was very much a response to the issue of reform within a matrix of country specificity but looking to the use of common core components as vehicles for reform. As the initial paper proposing the NIS noted:This paper does not suggest that there are easy solutions or models that can be applied in the fight against corruption; nor does it suggest that any country has yet designed an ideal model, or indeed that such an ideal model exists. What this paper does argue is that while each country or region is unique in its own history and culture, its political systems, and its stage of economic and social development, similarities do exist and that experience and lessons are often transferable. A 'national integrity system' is proposed as a comprehensive method of fighting corruption. It comprises eight pillars (public awareness, public anti-corruption strategies, public participation, 'watchdog' agencies, the judiciary, the media, the private sector, and international cooperation) which are interdependent. Establishing and strengthening such an integrity system requires identifying opportunities for reinforcing and utilizing each of these pillars in the fight against corruption (Langseth et al., 1997).

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