This reserach explores politically feasible security sector reform approaches to tackling serious organised crime, drawing on lessons of success from Georgia, Colombia and South Africa.

The harms on economies and societies are significant when proceeds of crime and corruption are moved unimpeded through the global financial and trade systems. As policymakers are looking to identify ways to respond better to illicit financial flows (IFFs), this research project seeks to better understand what enables IFFs, if there is political will to address IFFs and what interventions have been successful in addressing IFFs as part of a politically sensitive approach. The overarching conclusion of the initial research was that the line between business, politics and crime has never been more blurred. The research proposes a framework, the so-called ‘IFFs pyramid’, to explain the three dominant means by which IFFs are enabled, moved and held: financial flows, trade flows and informal flows. In its second phase, the research project is testing the use and applicability of this framework in East and Southern Africa and the Mekong region. 

This research project will test an innovative new approach - the Corruption Functionality Framework - to developing more effective and politically feasible anti-corruption strategies and approaches in a way that brings together serious organised crime and corruption in specific sectors and/or contexts. The team will work with policymakers to test the approach in multi-agency settings, focusing on specific problems in specific locations. The approach combines facilitated workshops with country and sector experts followed by semi-structured interviews to assess whether participants found the CFF useful for triggering new thinking and potential strategic and/or operational approaches. The research will also help to develop more granular understanding of how functionality works in specific contexts that could, in future research, be developed into a series of comparative case studies. Insights from the research will also be used to adapt the CFF to help ensure it is as useful as possible.