Dan Banik speaks with Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett about state capture and development. Together, they explore how corruption moves beyond bribes to reshape institutions, weaken accountability, deepen inequality, and allow powerful political and business actors to rewrite the rules in their own favor.
Corruption is often imagined as a bribe paid to speed up a permit, avoid a fine, or gain access to a public service. But some of the most damaging forms of corruption operate at a much higher level, where powerful political and business actors reshape the rules of the game itself. This is the world of state capture: a process through which public institutions are bent away from the public interest and made to serve narrow networks of power, privilege, and private gain.
Dan Banik speaks with Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett, Professor of Governance and Integrity and Director of the Centre for the Study of Corruption at the University of Sussex, about why state capture is one of the most serious threats to democracy, development, and public trust today. Drawing on cases from all around the world, they discuss how corruption can move from isolated transactions to systemic control over laws, public procurement, courts, banks, media, tax authorities, and accountability institutions.
The conversation explores how state capture differs from petty corruption, why democracies are vulnerable to being hollowed out from within, and how powerful actors use strategically divisive narratives to consolidate support. Liz explains why captured systems reward loyalty over merit, connections over competence, and impunity over accountability — with severe consequences for economic growth, inequality, public services, and citizen confidence.
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[Dan Banik]
Liz, wonderful to see you.
Welcome to my show.
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Thanks so much, Dan.
It's great to be here.
[Dan Banik]
I was looking at the latest Transparency International report, the Corruption Perception Index for 2025.
And apparently, you know, things are getting from bad to worse.
It is a global problem.
It's a global threat.
It's a serious threat.
And apparently only 30 countries have made some progress since 2012, I believe.
The rest are falling behind.
And so my first question to you is what's happening?
I mean, why aren't we making greater progress in combating this huge problem of corruption?
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Yeah, it's a great question, Dan.
One of the problems is that we don't really know how much progress we're making.
So it could be to an extent that we understand the problem much better.
We're more sensitive to it.
And I think we have moved on a lot in our understanding of corruption and we've understood a lot more about how pervasive it is.
And so potentially with something like the Transparency International Index, which is based on perceptions, part of the problem might just be that we see more corruption everywhere.
So we don't necessarily have very good measures of it still.
At the same time, I think there are good reasons for thinking that things are getting worse to a large extent in many countries.
And what I would say is happening is we're seeing a lot more of that really quite high-level systemic corruption.
Whereas you might have said that for a couple of decades, we had quite a lot of consensus in the global order about moving towards more democracy, more transparency, more freedom.
We've seen a lot of reversal in that respect.
And that's deeply linked to corruption and particularly this kind of systemic corruption.
[Dan Banik]
People usually say, you know, there's corruption everywhere.
And they're often alluding to this petty form of corruption, bribes, policemen taking a bribe for looking the other way.
Or, you know, you get your license permit for a driver's license or whatever.
You could use money to fast track your application process.
And there I feel often that one tends to complain about corruption in society without perhaps reflecting on one's own role as providing that bribe.
And I'm generalizing.
There's often this tendency I notice where people say, everybody else is corrupt, but I'm not corrupt.
But if you ask them, but weren't you the one to first pay the bribe?
And they would say, yes, but I was forced to because that's the only way I can survive.
So it's not my fault.
And so I want you to please help my listeners understand, Liz, how does that form of, say, petty corruption at the official level differ from these more systemic, broader forms of corruption that I know you've been working on for a long time, the term that has been used is state capture.
So what are the links between these different forms of corruption?
You have petty on the one hand, grand corruption on the other, and then you have a lot of stuff in between, right?
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Yeah, sure.
So that petty corruption we tend to think of as about individual one-off transactions.
So you need something, you need a license or a passport or some kind of bureaucratic service, and the bureaucrat might exploit their position to extract a bribe from you in exchange for providing that service that they should be providing anyway, or providing it a bit faster.
So that kind of petty corruption, it is pretty pervasive.
Although I think to an extent, we have also developed much better tools for understanding the dynamics of that and being able to tackle that if we want to tackle it.
But the thing about that kind of corruption is that it's sort of one-off.
So maybe you pay your bribe, you get your service, but it doesn't necessarily largely affect how things operate for everybody else after that.
The big difference with state capture is that this is influence that occurs at a much earlier stage of the policymaking process.
So it's narrow interest groups, sometimes that's business groups, sometimes it's political parties or organised crime groups.
They manage to get involved at a much earlier stage and they actually shape the whole policy and institutions in ways that give them privileges and unfair advantages.
And so if you just sort of think about the difference between those two things, in the case of state capture, you've really rigged the system in a way that makes it very difficult for other people who are not those captor groups, as I might call them, really difficult for them to get on and flourish and be able to achieve anything in society.
So that has very long-term harms.
It's not to say that the petty corruption is not damaging.
Often it is part of a kind of a system.
If you've got bureaucrats who are able to benefit from these rent-seeking opportunities, there's not much incentive to change the system and they might actually make things worse and make the system work worse in order to be able to keep extracting rents.
But at the same time, it's still not this big changing the rules of the game that we get with state capture.
[Dan Banik]
Yeah, I was thinking of some of the old work on corruption.
I think Pranab Bardhan was involved.
I was telling you that he was on my show and I've been inspired by a lot of his work.
And I think one of the arguments he made many, many years ago was that what is important is the centralization of corruption.
That petty corruption, yes, can exist and it is bad, but it is when it is controlled by elites.
And I think he was referring to, you know, the Asian crisis, Indonesia, when you had people right at the top, basically taking the bribes.
That also could be beneficial in many ways, in the sense that if you were providing the bribe, giving it to somebody of importance who can actually change things, rules and regulations, fast-track development projects that were lagging behind or somebody was dragging their feet, that could be beneficial rather than paying it at the lowest level.
But that's another story, and there's a whole bunch of literature on the benefits of corruption.
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Yeah, I mean, certainly in corrupt systems, insiders often do very well.
Yeah.
I mean, that's part of the problem and why it's so related to increasing inequality as well.
[Dan Banik]
Yeah.
But one of the things I noticed is you use in one of your articles, the term corrupting influence.
And I, and, you know, so I was referring to individuals, but it could be, of course, firms, it could be new firms, I know, the new entrants to a business, a country that are trying to figure out what to do.
They may be more interested.
And then, of course, political parties, politicians.
Now, help us understand this term state capture.
You've already mentioned some parts of it.
I was reading a few days ago the Hellman Kaufmann piece in Finance and Development in the IMF.
This is a publication, 2001, where they were defining state capture as not just corruption in relation to policy implementation, but it had to do with agencies or agents and actors trying to control the formation of rules and policy.
Is that also how you see state capture?
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Yeah, so that was a really important distinction that they introduced, and they were essentially observing this phenomenon quite a lot, particularly in Russia, Ukraine, other parts of the former Soviet Union, in those kind of early years of the post-communist transition.
And so something that they associated with oligarchs.
So these sort of few powerful business interests who would get in and manage to change the policy in ways that then gave them long-term advantages.
So that was a really important distinction.
I still recognise that as very much a part of state capture, that influencing the policy formation process.
But what we've seen, I think, in the last 15 to 20 years is that often the capture will be led by political groups.
So we've talked about political parties or a particular individual and a few people around that individual.
And what we see when it's led by the politicians is that it can expand out into a couple of other areas.
So it still means that they're changing the rules of the game, the formation of policy, often doing it through quite big things like changing the constitution, or changing things like the electoral system and things like that.
But in addition, if you think about it, if you're a political actor trying to do this, you've also got this power of patronage.
So you can appoint people to state institutions and you can appoint your cronies if you want, not necessarily people who've got the qualifications or expertise for the job.
And so these political captors will often really abuse that power of patronage to put in place their loyal allies in the heads of state agencies, ministries, state-owned enterprises, etc.
And that then allows you to control the implementation of policy too.
So there's that second pillar.
Of course, if you're also doing this in a democracy, then there's a risk to you that your behaviour is being scrutinised, monitored by certain accountability institutions.
That's partly the judiciary, also the media, audit institutions.
So if you're a political captor doing this in a democracy, it's also very important to disable those accountability institutions.
So I've been arguing that state capture today has these three pillars.
Still the original one, influencing policy formation, rules of the game.
Then a second one, controlling the implementation of policy.
That's about how resources are allocated, contracts, etc.
And then a third one, disabling the accountability institutions so that basically no one stops you or challenges you with this capture project.
[Dan Banik]
But you also introduced this term strategically divisive narratives that these captors, state captors use.
What are they?
What are these SDNs?
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Yeah.
So sort of in observing this over the years, I've noticed that, again, sort of particularly in a democratic setting, of course, the captor group has got to bring the public with them to some extent.
They've got to get support for what they're doing.
And what we see is that they're typically doing that through using narratives that deliberately try to polarise the electorate.
And so there's this term of strategically divisive narratives.
So using framings and narratives and rhetoric that seeks to talk about us and them, to very much blame outsiders for the problems of the country and try to bring together their own kind of in-group in often stirring up sort of fear of the out-group or the outsiders.
And that serves to kind of distract, actually, often from the corruption and perpetuate this kind of narrative of blaming others.
So, I mean, if you look at Viktor Orbán, of course, in Hungary, he's just lost power.
But for years, he's been blaming different groups for the country's problems.
And initially it was sort of against communists, and then it was against the EU as an intervening power.
It was against migrants during the refugee crisis.
It was against LGBTQ groups.
In the latest election, it was against Ukraine.
And trying to really demonize Ukraine.
So I think the thing about how quickly that changes and how much they're looking for different demons all the time suggests to me this is not really an ideological project.
This is all about stirring up fear and making people feel worried.
And that tends to mean that people are so polarized that they actually put their preference for a party before their commitment to democratic principles.
And there's plenty of interesting political science research showing that this is what happens.
When a society is really polarized, then people become much more partisan, but they also kind of stop caring about those democratic principles.
[Dan Banik]
It turns out this has a long history.
I was thinking about colonialism, divide and rule that the British were very good at.
There's nothing better than to get people to fight among themselves.
And if you look around the world today, Liz, I mean, there are presidents starting wars to distract folks from attention on certain matters that they don't want attention on.
I know you've been working also on South Africa.
I mean, racial tensions.
You can always blame migrants, xenophobic attacks against migrants in some parts of the world.
But even in Europe, we see the rise of far-right parties.
It's always blaming someone.
It is deflecting, right, from the major sort of flaws, their own flaws, their own underperformance.
In many parts of the African continent where I do work, it is often global institutions, the World Bank and IMF.
I mean, it may be blamed for a lot of things, but it just seems to be very common to say it's either the previous regime or somebody else.
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Yeah.
And I mean, what's really disturbing about that in South Africa is that so the big period of state capture under Jacob Zuma, where he was colluding with the Gupta family to capture the Zuptas.
[Dan Banik]
Yes, exactly.
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
So they were merged together into Zuptas.
So, I mean, they really hijacked that black empowerment agenda.
I mean, obviously, in South Africa, there were decades of institutionalized racism there.
And when you're trying to undo a historic injustice like that, it's a very difficult thing.
And so there was a movement to say, how can we empower more black businesses and get more of a proportionate black role in the economy?
And Zuma and the Guptas really took on the narrative of that, but then started to actually turn it into this very negative narrative around everything could be blamed on white monopoly capital, as they called it.
The sad thing is that if you look at what happened under Zuma, it was not actually a period that empowered black businesses.
So they were using and abusing that narrative.
They weren't actually pursuing this kind of ideological agenda.
They were just sort of abusing it to cover up for their own abuses.
And so that is, I think, pretty despicable behavior.
[Dan Banik]
I searched for state capture in different continents.
It turns out, you know, there's a state capture in Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, also in our parts of the world, in Europe, in Hungary, Serbia.
And also, you know, people accuse the U.S. of having gone through something similar, but it turns out most of the attention is actually focused on the Gupta brothers, the Zuptas and their unholy alliance with Jacob Zuma for, was it almost a decade that he was in power?
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Yeah, absolutely.
[Dan Banik]
And the more I read about that story over the years, Liz, the more fascinated I became.
And even today when I was Googling the Gupta brothers, apparently they're still in the UAE or something in Dubai and they haven't been extradited to South Africa previously.
But it's just mind boggling how effective these brothers were who came from small town India, had not much, you know, going for them, except the fact that they were going out to pursue new business interests.
And by chance, apparently they met Zuma at some function and they cultivated these ties.
And suddenly they were appointing ministers.
They were appointing key officials.
They were subverting key institutions.
This is unprecedented.
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Yeah, absolutely.
And it shows how damaging this state capture is because it is just that principle.
It's about who your friends are.
It's about having the right political connections and all of these good systems that we set up around trying to recruit people into government on the basis of their skills and skills.
You know, trying to make sure that contracts are rewarded on the basis of who's offering you the best value for money and is the most reliable supplier.
All of those great systems that are actually really designed to make sure that government works in the public interest, they get subverted in a second, as you say, by essentially pushing through on the basis of cronyism and loyalty and giving jobs and contracts to your friends and allowing them to come in and control the system.
So that's why it's so very damaging, I think.
It's really undermining all of these principles that are important for having a healthy economy and society.
[Dan Banik]
But one of the many things that fascinates me about that story is that it's almost like they had a cunning plan.
You know, they came into the country.
They had a strategy buying newspapers, you know, controlling media houses, controlling the narrative, creating this kind of division by using strategically divisive narratives, hiring PR firms to promote that kind of division.
It was a very sophisticated operation.
And I'm quite stunned as to how a democracy, and this is where I want to also bring in the democratic system.
You would think that in a democracy, this is harder to achieve.
But in South Africa, the democratic guardrail somehow fell off.
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because in many of these cases, there is a sort of using a facade of democratic institutions to pursue the capture or sort of turning back and saying, oh, well, you know, we were elected and therefore anything we do is legitimate.
So you often hear this sort of abuse of that electoral principle.
Of course, democracy is about much more than just being elected.
And then you're not then allowed a free pass or a blank check to do whatever you like.
Democracy is all about allowing democratic institutions to come along and check your power and that kind of thing.
But definitely it is something that can very easily take hold.
It took hold in South Africa, took hold in Hungary, which was one of the front runners of the transition to democracy in Europe, part of the EU.
We see, I think, these patterns at the moment in the US.
The country that we often saw was absolutely the standard for democracy.
So I don't think any country is immune from this.
And it's really important that we look out for the warning signs of it and try to arrest it.
The other thing I would say about South Africa, though, is I also use it often as my positive example, because there was a lot of resistance from the judiciary, from academia, from the media, from this great institution of the public protector.
[Dan Banik]
The ombudsman, right?
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Exactly.
Yeah.
So it's a fascinating example.
And then, of course, South Africa had this Zondo Commission, which again, it's very unusual for a country to open up and examine what has happened in that kind of level of painstaking detail.
And I think that's a really positive thing because it's only if we understand exactly how it happened that we can really design a good system to try and undo the capture and make sure it doesn't happen again.
And with that kind of thousands and thousands of pages of evidence that the Zondo Commission collected, we do have a good chance of then understanding what went wrong and how we can try and prevent that.
[Dan Banik]
You're right, because for many years there were the rumors and it wasn't just that one event where I think the Guptas got a wedding party, a private plane landed in a military base that really set, you know, alarm bells going.
So the rumors are going and apparently I think he survived many no confidence votes, Zuma.
Yeah.
But what I also think is positive there, and this relates to what happened in South Africa, but also more recently in Hungary, is elections.
In South Africa, of course, it was the party that decided now it's time to move on.
But I'm still intrigued, you know, what was that threshold that was reached before the party revolted and said, we don't want our leader anymore.
We want a new leader.
In Hungary, of course, it was the people who spoke and said, we don't want Orbán.
We want to go in a new direction.
So I think that is where the democratic dividend comes in.
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Yeah, absolutely.
But, you know, it's complicated because I think in both cases you can say, well, the evidence had been coming out for a long time.
How much evidence do you need before it starts to translate into action?
But sometimes I think there are other things that come in here.
Maybe you need to see that there is an alternative leader who is a possibility.
Sometimes, well, often it's about economic crisis.
So things were getting worse, much worse in Hungary and South Africa, in Sri Lanka, of course.
Really, the Rajapaksas completely drove the country into a serious economic crisis through state capture.
So the democratic aspect is important, but it is often a confluence of just how bad things have got to and the weight of evidence that has been accumulating, often through journalists doing fantastic investigative work and keeping plodding away at creating the evidence base, even when people might seem not to be listening for years.
[Dan Banik]
Yeah, Sri Lanka is another fascinating case and so is Bangladesh.
So you had very similar that you had these prime ministers, presidents in power for decades being thrown out by a popular revolt of students and citizens.
I still remember vividly some of those pictures and videos coming from Sri Lanka where, you know, people stormed into the presidential palace and went to the bedrooms and bathrooms and the same in Bangladesh.
Could you reflect a bit on the Bangladesh example?
Because what I find fascinating with Bangladesh is that, and I've been talking about this on the show, but also in my writings, it's often portrayed as a successful case of development, you know, from being considered this basket case, fourth world, you had job creation, exports, textiles, you know, this narrative of Bangladesh really rising.
And yet it was only when Sheikh Hasina was removed from power that, oh, I suppose it was also before, but the allegations of state capture, I wasn't aware of the extent of state capture that was taking place in Bangladesh.
Yeah.
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Yeah.
So I think, you know, we did have some awareness of this.
So Mushtaq Khan, of course, had been doing great work on the high-level systemic corruption in the power sector and things like that.
I think one thing that had not really come out was the extent to which the banking sector was captured.
And this absolutely blatant and huge, essentially embezzlement of money.
So people being taken, bank managers being, through political pressure, persuaded to give loans to companies which were never going to be paid back and then to overlook the fact that they defaulted on the loans.
So a massive mechanism of capture in Bangladesh was around abuse of the banking sector.
So, I mean, I get your point.
It was still seen as a success case.
I think the question there is how much more successful might it have been, actually?
And things like capture of the banking sector, that means that good, healthy companies that are producing great products are not able to get credit because actually it's all being sucked out by these crony institutions.
So that's such a missed opportunity in terms of what might have been happening there with the economy and allowing smaller enterprises to flourish and the economy to diversify and become more complex.
[Dan Banik]
When you think about all these examples we're talking about, Liz, does the banking sector, is that a common denominator that one wants to control the financial system, obviously, in addition to the regulatory bodies?
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
I mean, we see a bit of variation in the sort of patterns of what gets captured.
I think things depend a little bit on how advanced the economy is.
So we've been looking at Madagascar recently, and there doesn't seem to be so much focus on capture of the financial sector there because there's not a very developed financial sector.
So I think in countries, they will look at sort of where is the money, where is the potential to influence?
Often it will be around strategic sectors like electricity, water, natural resources, of course.
So the patterns vary to some extent, but it's sort of looking at the process around where is the money flowing out of the state or which other economic institutions can easily be controlled through political pressure.
[Dan Banik]
I was thinking about your three pillars.
The first would be influencing the formation of law and policy by undermining institutions.
The second one is influencing the implementation of policy by controlling who actually implements.
And third, disabling the accountability institutions and the checks on executive abuse of power.
Do you think it happens in that chronological sequence or could you have it in a different set?
Is there like a step-by-step thing?
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
So again, I think this would be a really great topic for some serious research, actually.
My sense is that leaders sort of pick and choose among these mechanisms according to where they see the weak spots.
So if you're in a very more advanced democracy, you probably need to dismantle the accountability institutions first, to an extent, to be able to go and capture the other pillars more easily.
If you've not got such strong accountability institutions, then you might start by going straight in and changing the constitution or just funneling money out through that second pillar and getting resources out through contracts, changing regulatory systems so that your crony companies get advantages on trade tariffs and things like that.
So, again, I think there's some interesting work to be done there on the sequencing of that.
Also, if you get things like a privatisation process, that's a really common focus for capture.
So often that's essentially it's transferring assets from the state to private hands anyway.
So people are going to want to come in and capture that process.
So I think there's a bit of variation there.
Also, in a democracy, you might not be able to change the constitution unless you've got a two-thirds majority.
So it's going to be the countries where parties have got that, where they will do the constitutional changes.
[Dan Banik]
Do you think it is easier now with social media, technology, artificial intelligence, all of this advanced tools that we have at our disposal?
Is it easier to promote these divisive narratives than it was before?
Surely.
But we also have tools to detect this.
And so it's not like a one-way street.
But do you think these tools are being used actively for state capture?
I mean, are there any ongoing processes, Liz, at the moment?
You think there's a country that, because it doesn't happen all at once.
It's a slow process, I would imagine, right, of capturing the state.
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Yeah, absolutely.
So in terms of the social media, I do think it makes it a bit easier to divide, actually, because this phenomenon of echo chambers that what we look at is much less broad now.
We tend to only look at the kinds of things that we are fed through the algorithms now.
So it becomes more difficult to stretch out across boundaries, I think.
And you almost see sometimes within that this quite dangerous dynamic, I think, of people sort of policing their communities, almost for people looking out for people who have got a different view or who are not just parroting the same view.
And I think that is really dangerous.
We've got to keep trying to talk across the divides and talk to each other.
In terms of ongoing processes, I mean, sadly, there are many countries where this is still very much happening.
Turkey, we'll be looking at.
I do think there's a lot of evidence of state capture in the United States.
There is also pushback against it, but there's also some really worrying, again, use of these divisive narratives and undermining of the checks and balances, centralisation of power to the executive, making big, important decisions without going to the legislature and getting the approval of parliaments and Congress.
[Dan Banik]
I was making a list of things I thought one could identify in your work, in the literature, but also in my own work on how to combat this trend.
And so the first thing I wrote is the best thing would be to nip it in the bud.
So, you know, if you see the signs of this happening, to call it out.
And for this, you need investigative journalists, you need freedom of the press, but also the state that is not controlling, you know, advertising revenue.
It is often the executive that controls the purse strings, whether it is for the ombudsman's office or the human rights commission or parliament, you can co-opt the legislature.
And it is often this, the control of the purse.
It is saying that if you are critical to me, I'll cut off funding.
And I've seen this in many parts of the world.
So media can suffer because they're not getting advertising revenue from the state, which is a very important source of revenue.
Parliamentarians are not getting their fringe benefits or whatever.
Elections are obviously very important, as was the case in Hungary.
The political party ANC, its role in removing Zuma, even though it was quite late in the process.
But I was also thinking about geopolitical changes and shifting alliances because some of the state capture, at least the regimes that are in power, are often empowered by powerful backers, you know.
And with this change in geopolitics, as we're seeing now, do you see any hope, any optimism that maybe some regimes are not as secure perhaps going forward?
And there would be then more of a push towards democratization because it's not just corruption that is bad.
It's also the fact that the third wave of democratization that we've experienced, that is being reversed.
Some of the recent reports from the V-Dem project shows that, you know, it's a huge democratic recession.
So do you see the geopolitical changes, the tensions, creating more of a sort of a positive narrative that we would be able to combat this kind of state capture?
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
I didn't think you were going to go down the direction of, does this make me optimistic?
[Dan Banik]
I try to be a bit optimistic.
Without hope, we're nothing, right?
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Well, I mean, largely, I think, you know, we've got quite worrying dynamics, particularly, I mean, clearly we've got Russia that is often quite a pernicious force, a quite sort of anti-democracy and anti-Western and liberal values, which is very powerful, right?
I guess, you know, if I'm looking for optimism, then we could say that there are some middle powers which are becoming more important.
And that might mean you've got a bit of a fragmentation going on geopolitically.
So rather than us just having a sort of polarized world order, maybe where we'll end up is with something that is more multipolar and that could potentially be a good thing.
But I think we have to wait and see how that plays out.
At the moment, we often see that there are quite negative geopolitical interests at play when there is a state that is captured, there might well be competition among different powers to get in and try and influence that state and to benefit from it.
So if you think about Russia, Putin having a quite close relationship with Orbán, that gave him a key player in the EU who was able to block EU funds going to Ukraine, for example.
So that relationship is one that was cultivated partly through investment and funding relationship.
And the EU set against that, somewhat trying to keep Orbán on a democratic path.
But actually, often EU funds being subverted by Orbán and allies.
So you're not clear that it necessarily exercised very strong influence there in terms of that.
[Dan Banik]
You've already identified Hungary, because that is the positive news in our part of the world.
I think everybody, including the EU, is heaving a huge sigh of relief.
You could also say that the EU has not been consistent in its support for democratic principles.
And the more I speak with my colleagues in Serbia, they say that the EU has been more interested in stability or stabilocracy or something of that sort, not democracy, you know.
But I wanted to end our conversation just focusing on one thing, Liz, that has been an important part of my season six of the show, which is this declining, this huge decline in foreign aid and how this is affecting development across the world.
As you know, in many countries where, you know, the UK or Norway or Sweden are all big sort of aid donors, one of the first things I noticed when I arrived in that country is a billboard with the president's face on it saying, we will combat corruption.
There is this rhetoric that we all are interested in promoting good governance.
The donors want it.
They want corruption control.
And apparently there's a lot of lip service paid by local politicians.
Now, if you were to give some advice, Liz, to European donors, to FCDO, to Norwegian NORAD, Swedish Sida.
Given that we have less money available in the aid budgets going forward, are you worried that any anti-corruption efforts that we're undergoing is going to be threatened?
The other thing is, where would you really put the limited funds that we have?
What really works in your view in combating corruption?
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Yeah, sure.
Definitely the anti-corruption great work that has been going on in the last sort of 10, 20 years is really under threat because of the cuts in aid.
So, you know, we have learned things about what works.
I'm also director of a programme called the GI ACE programme, which specifically is funding research groups to try and understand better what works in anti-corruption and there's been quite a lot of progress made in the field and a lot of that was feeding through into some good aid-funded projects.
So there's definitely a big hit.
In terms of what to focus on, I sort of tend to think about what are the areas where we know that we can get sort of relatively reliable results and where there is a lot of corruption.
And so things like focusing on public procurement, where all around the world it's very vulnerable to corruption.
At the same time, we know that we can improve on that by identifying what the red flags are.
We can improve a lot by making that process very transparent and empowering people to ask questions about where the money's going and who's winning contracts and how.
So things like that, I think, remain a really good place to devote resources, scarce resources.
Also, actually, the judiciary.
So if we look at some of the cases where there's been good pushback against state capture, often the judiciary is really important.
I think some of your work actually is around the role of the judiciary as a sort of bulwark against this kind of thing.
So I would also think just encouraging and facilitating that judicial independence and capacity as much as possible is a good area.
[Dan Banik]
I just recently wrote a piece about something that happened in Malawi in 2019 with the elections that were nullified.
And to cut a long story short, the judges in the constitutional court were offered a huge bribe, which they turned down.
Yeah, which is impressive.
Yes, indeed.
And, you know, even though the jury still had people, you know, not really sure whether perhaps the judiciary overreached, and this was too much.
They should not have nullified.
The evidence perhaps wasn't as clear cut.
For me, one of the most optimistic takes on this is the fact that the judges were brave, they were bold, and they did not allow themselves to be co-opted.
We can perhaps end on that optimistic note.
There's a lot of important, brave journalists doing work on this, risking their lives, judges.
There's a whole bunch of people.
But I've been so impressed with the work you're doing.
And thank you very much.
I really enjoyed this conversation.
Thanks for coming on my show today.
[Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett]
Me too.
It's a great pleasure.
Thank you very much, Dan.