Ethical Leadership: Lessons from Ethics Training in the Global South

Description: In this session Jan Meyer-Sahling discusses his work exploring ethical leadership training as a tool to combat corruption, drawing on evidence from Nepal and Bangladesh. The findings demonstrate that ethics training, often overlooked in the Global South, can drive behaviour change, reshape attitudes, and support the modernisation and professionalisation of public services. Much of this work was developed through research projects funded by GI ACE. ‘Civil Service Reform and Anti-Corruption Project’ (funded under Phase 1 of the ACE programme) sought to identify which civil service management practices are effective in reducing corruption in the civil service. To shed light on this question, the project conducted civil service surveys in ten countries in four developing regions. With 23.000 participants, it produced the largest cross-country survey of bureaucrats in developing countries ever conducted. Among other findings, the survey showed that one common management practice—ethics training—does not correlate with lower corruption or more ethical behaviour of civil servants. In response, several governments asked for guidance on how to design effective ethics trainings for civil servants. A subsequent phase of the project provided evidence of the effects of such trainings, surveying corruption and (un)ethical behaviour of 1,200 civil servants in Nepal and Bangladesh over time while providing state-of-the-art ethics training.

SPEAKERS

Paul M. Heywood, Programme Director at GI ACE and Sir Francis Hill Chair of Politics, University of Nottingham

Jan Meyer-Sahling, Professor of Political Science, University of Nottingham

Willeke Slingerland, Professor of (Applied Research) Resilient Democracy at Saxion University of Applied Sciences

Watch here: https://youtu.be/MIeo9MZwrB0