The resources required to deliver high levels of public integrity are huge though, even if it were possible; arguably greater than the resources one could imagine being available.
This is due to the high costs of achieving:
• Strategic doneness (prioritization/sequencing)
• Local legitimacy (polices come with ideological baggage)
• High quality of knowledge to transfer (appropriateness to context)
• Local commitment or buy in
All these play a significant role in the application of pro integrity reforms and are hard to overcome when applying a top down, internationally driven approach to public integrity reform, such as has characterized much policy to date.
Reformers then face the challenge providing high quality knowledge to a large number of people in a sustainable manner to achieve their objectives. Despite the increasingly year evidence of social benefits from high integrity the capacity prerequisites have delivered very little that is developed and sustained within local education and training sectors.
The purpose of education for Integrity is to meet this challenge and to overborne these persists the impediments to pro integrity reform:
1. Unsystematic knowledge
2. Poor quality or poorly adapted knowledge
3. Lack of applied knowledge
4. Dispersed expertise
5. Lack of sustainable dissemination of knowledge
The integrity education provides a framework for the best of international (codified) knowledge to be blended with the tacit or experience based knowledge of local actors to raise capacities that will advance pro integrity reform in countries on a case by case basis.
The goal is to develop and sustain high quality; evidence based learning delivered through major universities and civil service training institutions. Integrity education basic approach is while great value can be derived from learning from experiences internationally, the delivery, adaptation and development of teaching and applied knowledge creation is best conducted with people who are close to the problems the courses address.
The education is guided by an innovative approach to generating knowledge through courses and resources that draws on four mutually supporting dimensions:
• Organizational/ learning: high quality, systematized applied knowledge for reform;
• Scalability: Ability and cost effectiveness of scaling up, respond to demand;
• Sustainability: Demand driven, self sustaining over the short to medium term;
• Measurable: the ability to benchmark, track and scale the quality and improvements of the teaching and learning.
The performance of education is therefore evaluated delivery on all four of these dimensions in a manner that is consistent with achieving its objectives.
Implementing public integrity reform is a considerable strategic public management challenge that requires the mobilization of large numbers of skilled people and resources to succeed.
Despite the diligent efforts of many committed people reform successes remain relatively few and far between, either they are relatively distant historically (the changes in Northern Europe one and two hundred years age) or relatively particular as in the cases of Hong Kong and Singapore.
There is widespread uncertainty about whether the way to achieve improvement in public integrity is currently well understood, even if many of the attributes of high levels of corruption are increasingly clear. The historically favored strategy of implementing international best practice has overwhelmingly been a failure.
At present much of the knowledge creation and impetus for public sector reform is coming largely from international organizations, be they donors or No Governmental Organizations. These organizations have initiated or provided the knowledge for many of the reforms that have been attempted (World Bank, U4, UN and so forth). This supply model has some strength in that it has been able to develop a high quality of material, and a critical set of methodologies.