(c) Sara Alaica/Flickr.
I am working on a paper on digital technologies and corruption in procurement (or rather, trying to work on it in the midst of a challenging start of term). While researching this topic, I have come across this very interesting paper: Isabelle Adam and Mihály Fazekas, ‘Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption? A review of the state of evidence’ (2021) Information Economics and Policy, available on pre-print here.
In their paper, Adam & Fazekas carry out a systematic review ‘of the academic and policy literature on the six most commonly discussed types of ICT-based anti-corruption interventions: (i) Digi- tal public services and e-government, (ii) Crowdsourcing platforms, (iii) Whistleblowing tools, (iv) Transparency portals and big data, (v) DLT and blockchain, and (vi) AI’ (at 2).
The analysis is clear and accessible and offers good insights on the positive and negative impacts that digital technologies can have for anti-corruption efforts, given that technology ‘is not per se a panacea against corruption, and it can also play into the hands of corrupt officials’ (ibid). The paper is well worth reading in full.
One of their insights I found particularly valuable is that ‘ICTs for anti-corruption operate against the background of given societal divides and power relations which are often supported by corruption. They risk further entrenching these unless their design and implementation take into account corruption and associated power imbalances. Hence, it is arguable that the success of ICT interventions against corruption hinges on their suitability for local contexts and needs, cultural backgrounds and technological experience‘ (at 1).
This directly links with Uta Kohl’s view that digital ‘technologies, whether the internet or blockchain, are tightly and on multiple levels interconnected with existing social orders and those interconnections decide upon the configurational latencies of the technological innovation within concrete settings: who uses the technological innovation in what configuration, for what purposes and against whom’ (see here for details).
To my mind, all of this stresses the need to operationalise a gatekeeping function tasked with the analysis of which digital technologies are adopted by the public sector and for what purpose, and this gatekeeping function needs not only consider downstream ethical implications in terms of impacts on citizens and service users, but also upstream implications concerning the way in which technologies will disrupt, support or entrench existing governance dynamics — and in particular those that the adoption of the technology is seeking to remedy.
Bringing this to procurement, these insights show that the public procurement function — to the extent that the adoption of these technologies is subjected to the regulatory framework of innovation procurement — is de facto playing (or failing to play) such gatekeeping function. More than in other settings, the procurement function needs to closely scrutinise the ‘use case’ of the digital technologies it is tasked with procuring. This is arguably a new regulatory function for procurement, and one that is not yet embedded in procurement theory, regulation or practice. But one that is inescapable nonetheless. So one that is worth thinking about.