In Conversation: Rob Gillanders discusses his research on Anti-Corruption

What was the primary focus of your research this summer?
A lot of my time this summer was spent working on three main things (in no particular order). 1) Advancing our research line on sexual corruption. We have two wonderful postdocs at ARC, Dr Doris Aja-Eke and Dr Fernando Forattini, working on really ground-breaking projects in this space and have put forward several grant applications to do more work. Including a grant from JPAL that we won over the summer to do a pilot study for an anti sexual corruption intervention in Burkina Faso that we hope will support female entrepreneurs and help keep them safe from sexual corruption. This will hopefully lead to a full scale RCT in the near future. 2) I have signed a contract with Routledge to co-edit a volume called Corruption and the Sustainable Development Goals. This will explore how corruption undermines progress towards each of the SDGs. 3) I presented a paper at Oxford that Vincent and I are writing called “Corruption Kills Some People Faster than Others”. We should have a paper soon. It does exactly what it says on the tin and shows that corruption causes increased inequalities in the length of life within countries. These are the main things but I have a to-do list that will keep me busy with research papers right through next year and beyond.

Can you summarise the main objectives or hypotheses of your study?
To provide precise and novel evidence on the consequences of corruption and highlight how corruption is economic and social poison.

What was or is your motivation for this research?
We don’t know enough about sexual corruption. Corruption is so harmful to the SDGs and policy making in general but we don’t have a go to reference for this corpus of knowledge. Also, the relationship between corruption and some SDGs has a lot of knowledge gaps that we are going to highlight to hopefully drive forward a new wave of corruption research.

Did you collaborate with other researchers or institutions? If so, who were your key partners?
We continue to work closely with Universite Norbert Zongo in Burkina Faso on the sexual corruption work. Dr Oana Borcan of University of East Anglia who visited us this year has joined the sexual corruption line and was key to getting the funding for the pilot study. Dr Chandan Jha of Le Moyne College in the US is co editing the SDG book with me.

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