Descrizione del progetto
Chiarire il ruolo della tecnologia nella lotta alla corruzione
Le tecnologie emergenti, impiegate dal basso verso l’alto dalle organizzazioni della società civile, stanno contribuendo alla lotta contro la corruzione. Il progetto BIT-ACT, finanziato dall’UE, esaminerà le tecnologie anticorruzione (ACT, Anti-Corruption Technologies) e come vengono impiegate dalle organizzazioni della società civile per contrastare la corruzione. Inoltre, valuterà il modo in cui le ACT consentono dei punti d’intersezione tra gli sforzi dal basso verso l’alto e quelli dall’alto verso il basso, oltre al modo in cui confluiscono nella dimensione transnazionale contro la corruzione. Il lavoro del progetto porterà alla luce l’impatto delle ACT sul rapporto tra cittadini e istituzioni democratiche, fornendo informazioni sul loro migliore utilizzo dal basso verso l’alto ai principali interlocutori. Inoltre, contribuirà al dibattito sull’anticorruzione per illustrare le ACT con concetti e modelli concreti.
Obiettivo
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.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-STG - Starting GrantIstituzione ospitante
40126 Bologna
Italia