How can ethics help curb corruption in the public sector? This section of a teaching compendium from the Chr. Michelsen Institute examines a combination of standard-setting, legal regulation and institutional reform (‘the ethics infrastructure’) that can help prevent misconduct in the public sector. While there are many ways of setting ethical standards, the necessary reforms will depend on the kind of corruption problem in each country.
Ethics refers to principles by which to evaluate behaviour as right or wrong, good or bad. Public sector ethics emanates from several different sources. These sources range from the private ethical character of the individual public servant, via the agency-internal regulations and culture of the agency and national legislation, to international conventions with written standards and codes of conduct.
The most efficient ethics regime is when these three sources work in the same direction, in parallel. There are many possible ways of setting ethical standards and of creating an ethics infrastructure or ethics regime. For example:
- A large number of international agencies have developed Codes of Ethics or Codes of Conduct for their employees and for public servants in general. These ethical standards can be important sources of national legislation and regulation, when properly implemented into the national ethics regime.
- A second source of public sector ethics is democratic standards and principles. Democratic principles are partly codified in the political human rights, and partly expressed as an ideal form of government.
- Administrative traditions can vary depending on a country’s culture, but there are generally shared views as to how public servants should fulfil their duties – democratically with accountability; transparently with integrity; fairly, honestly and effectively.
- Other methods for creating an ethics infrastructure include introducing measures to curb political and administrative corruption and measures for managing conflicts of interest.
The actual reforms that are necessary to create an ethics infrastructure will depend on the kind of corruption problem in each country and the kind of deficiencies that exists in the integrity system of each country.
- There is no one easy solution. The establishment of an efficient and working ethics infrastructure takes time.
- Each element is dependent on the others. Reformers need to be aware of the functional dependencies and organisational linkages among the various components of the ethics infrastructure. An integrated and coordinated approach to reforms is required.
- Central to the argument of much of the most recent discussion on ethics in the public sector is that it must be seen primarily in institutional and organisational terms. Individual ethics and ethical behaviour is largely a construct, dependent on the political environment and the cultural ethos of the public administration.
