The Centre for the Study of Corruption, based in the School of Law, Politics & Sociology, has successfully secured an additional £1.1 million in funding from the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). This new tranche of funding brings our total investment from FCDO to £4.5 million, into a research programme known as GI ACE (Governance & Integrity Anti-Corruption Evidence). 

The GI ACE research programme is designed to generate actionable evidence that may lead to more effective anti-corruption initiatives. This entails moving away from national-level top-down technical and regulatory approaches towards operationally relevant, problem-driven, rigorous, and actionable research that takes into account specific context and the complexity of corruption.  

In addition to supporting researchers at the University of Sussex, the FCDO funding allows the Centre for the Study of Corruption to make grants to high-quality research projects around the world and work collaboratively with those research teams to achieve policy and operational impact.  The GI ACE Programme is currently funding around a dozen such projects, including - within Sussex - ground-breaking work by Dr Dan Haberly (School of Global Studies) that maps illicit global financial networks. 

An exciting new strand of work under this additional funding, led by Dr Becky Dobson Philips (Department of Politics), will be to support capacity building among early-career researchers in the Global South and emerging economies. 

In addition, Professor Liz David-Barrett, Director of the Centre for the Study of Corruption, will launch a major new research initiative on ‘state capture’, a subject on which she is already recognised as one of the foremost experts worldwide.