Bottom-up initiatives and anti-corruption technologies: how citizens use ICTs to fight corruption

Descripción del proyecto

Arrojar luz sobre el papel de la tecnología en la lucha contra la corrupción

Las tecnologías emergentes, utilizadas de forma ascendente por las organizaciones de la sociedad civil, están ayudando a luchar contra la corrupción. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos BIT-ACT investigará tecnologías anticorrupción (ACT, por sus siglas en inglés) y estudiará cómo se comprometen con ellas las organizaciones de la sociedad civil para luchar contra la corrupción. También evaluará la forma en que las ACT permiten cruzar esfuerzos ascendentes y descendentes y cómo se mezclan con la dimensión transnacional contra la corrupción. La labor del proyecto desvelará el impacto de las ACT en la relación entre los ciudadanos y las instituciones democráticas, lo que proporcionará a las partes interesadas clave información sobre cómo utilizarlas mejor de forma ascendente. Asimismo, contribuirá al debate anticorrupción con conceptos y modelos contrastados para explicar las ACT.

Objetivo

Corruption is a global challenge that affects the lives of millions of citizens. In the past decade, Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become indispensable tools in the fight to reduce corruption, especially when employed from the bottom-up by civil society organizations. While pioneering initiatives in this direction have flourished, to date we only have unsystematic and descriptive evidence regarding how they work and the associated consequences. With the objective of significantly advancing knowledge on this topic, BIT-ACT will open a new line of inquiry by investigating what I call anti-corruption technologies (ACTs) to: (1) assess how civil society organizations engage with ACTs to counter corruption, (2) appraise how ACTs enable intersections between bottom-up and top-down efforts against corruption, and (3) evaluate how ACTs blend with the transnational dimension in the struggle against corruption. Based on an interdisciplinary framework that combines corruption studies, science and technology studies and social movement studies, BIT-ACT will use the constructivist grounded theory method to analyze a combination of textual and visual data in a comparative and transnational research design including nine countries – Algeria, Bangladesh, Brazil, Estonia, India, Italy, Spain, Ukraine, Uruguay. BIT-ACT will be groundbreaking in three ways. At the theoretical level, it will expand the debate on anti-corruption providing grounded concepts and models to explain ACTs; at the empirical level, it will advance knowledge on how the usage of ACTs is changing the relationship between citizens and democratic institutions; at the methodological level, it will innovate in the use of grounded theory assessing a new standard for cross-national comparative grounded theory. Finally, BIT-ACT will produce sound and useful knowledge for the stakeholders involved in the fight against corruption worldwide by suggesting how to best employ ICTs from the bottom-up.