A Sourcebook - UN-Water

PREFACE
In 1996, then World Bank President James Wolfensohn appealed to the international development
community to fight the “cancer of corruption”, bringing corruption to the fore of the World Bank’s
agenda. A year later, in 1997, the Executive Board endorsed the paper Helping Countries Combat
Corruption: the Role of the World Bank, which “fundamentally reformed the way the World Bank thinks
about and acts against corruption”, and set policies for how the World Bank would tackle corruption.
In March 2007, the Executive Board unanimously endorsed a new strategy and set of policies to improve
governance and fight corruption: Strengthening World Bank Group Engagement on Governance
and Corruption. The strategy essentially confirmed the 1997 commitment to fight corruption,
but with an important difference in emphasis: “reducing corruption by strengthening governance”
rather than simply “stopping corruption”.
Six months later, in September 2007, the World Bank finalized the Implementation Plan for the strategy.
A key element of the Implementation Plan is to develop sector-level diagnostics and interventions,
specifically signaling the need to “mainstream governance and anticorruption [activities] in sectors …
where opportunities for interventions are often more immediate”.
This Sourcebook is part of a broader program of work on governance and corruption in the water supply
and sanitation sector. The Sourcebook is meant as a resource to assist water and sanitation sector
practitioners to assess the extent and risks of corruption in the sector and to improve governance
in ways that reduce corruption. As this is an emerging field, the sourcebook is not intended to be a
manual, nor a set of directives but rather to organize and illustrate approaches and tools which sector
practitioners may find useful.
The work program on governance and corruption of which these sourcebooks are a part includes an
extensive database of academic and operational literature on governance and anti-corruption, a
review of global knowledge and of World Bank practice that was presented and reviewed by sector
and governance specialists.
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