Region: Global
Country: Global / Non-Specific
Topic: Procurement
Keywords: Knowledge Lab, Anti-corruption, Procurement
Document Link(s):
Document(s):
Document Summary:
Objectives
The overall objectives of the Standard are the following:
(a) Provide a voluntary set of principles and conditions that governments could incorporate in their regulations or policies in undertaking PfPPP procurement in compliance with the SDGs.
(b) Assist governments desiring to improve the implementation of PPPs in ways that mobilise their potential and reduce risk and complexity while improving the regulatory response to corruption in PPPs.
(c) Inform and educate all parties, including civil society, on how PPPs may be entered and operated that are of high quality and not compromised by unethical behaviour and defects caused by the lack of integrity or corruption.
Document Details:
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) come with a huge price tag. Recent reports have estimated that global infrastructure will need USD 3.3 trillion of investment per year just to keep pace with projected growth. This massive sum will need to be mobilized from many sources, including from the private sector. And governments scaling up investment and infrastructure development of this magnitude will need to make a strong commitment to transparency and integrity and in particular implement plans to fight corruption, in order to attract the requisite investment, efficiently and effectively partner with the private sector, and accelerate their initiatives to meet the SDGs.
While the potential of public private partnerships (PPPs) to fill the development gap is great, and the SDGs call on governments and officials to rise up to this challenge, corruption continues to pull governments down.
In developed and developing countries around the world, there are compromised public processes, bribes being paid for basic public services, friends and relatives of officials being awarded contracts, and other abuses where public authority is leveraged for personal gain.
And the damage is not only monetary. Corruption slows the provision of public services, impairs economic activity and growth, and undermines the time, energy and resources applied by those attempting to provide actual good governance and public services.
Governments embracing the UN SDGs, however, in particular those seeking robust development programmes that include PPPs, should not measure corruption simply on the toll that it takes, or how it undermines their efforts; instead, governments should measure corruption by what they have to gain in successfully combating it and implementing a zero tolerance approach. How much could be saved? How many more people could be served? How would the world look with far less corruption?
Updated: April 12, 2022