State Capture Estimation and Monitoring of Anticorruption Policies at the Sectoral Level (SceMaps)
“State capture is a process that combines different forms of institutionalised corruption with the aim of securing long-term privileges of certain stakeholders. These state captors interfere in drafting, adopting and enforcing the law at the expense of society and business at large”. (SceMaps)
Founded in 2019, SceMaps is an academic-civil society partnership between theCenter for the Study of Democracy(Bulgaria),Fundación Ciudadana CIVIO(Spain),Asociata Forum(Romania), and theUniversita Degli Studi di Trento(Italy). Its objective is to “contribute to the fight against corruption in the [European Union] by delivering impact on multiple levels and providing for long-term sustainability”.
SceMaps is developing and implementing a novel “integrated risk assessment tool for estimating state capture and monitoring of anti-corruption policies” in high-risk economic sectors though a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods, big data analysis and media content alert system. Designed for easy replication and take-up by EU member states’ public administrations, SceMaps will allow EU authorities to build evolving, risk-responsive instruments to assess and tackle corruption and capture risks in regulatory heavy areas and industries.”
“SceMaps plans to develop and implement its integrated risk assessment tool using:
- Application of State Capture Assessment Diagnosticsmethodology at sectoral level;
- Evaluation of the enforceability and impact of anti-corruption measuresand policies on the level of individual public institutions, relevant to the identified high-risk economic sectors through the application ofMACPI tool (Monitoring Anticorruption Policy Implementation);
- Integration of public procurement and companies’ financial information big data analytics with media content alert system;
- Development of a publicly accessible web-based platformwith interactive analytics, which presents in an integrated way the results of the coherent risk assessment framework.”
The SceMaps methodology consists of athree-dimensional approachfor estimating and monitoring State capture at the sectoral level, as follows:
- “Expert assessments (surveys). Ideally, 60 experts per sector per country will be surveyed about the effectiveness of regulatory and control institutions at national and sectoral level (using the State Capture Assessment Diagnostics (SCAD) methodology). In addition, two institutional surveys per country will examine the effectiveness of institutional anti-corruption policy implementation (based on the MACPI Institutional methodology).”
- Public procurement and business data (big data approach).Companies and contracting entities will be crosschecked with tendering data, such as contract award frequency or number of contracts per government term, to analyse procurement concentration and to detect signs of collusions. The online platform will provide suspicious activity rankings of the individual public procurement buyers and suppliers. It will also include search options and filters by country; industry/sector; companies and institutions; contracts awards frequency; total and average value of contracts, etc. The macro data on the procurement concentration in a country and a sector will also be available for analysis (e.g. showing volume of the procurement market compared to the number of suppliers).”
- “Media articles.‘Red flagging’ articles and media investigations on suspected state capture and corruption cases will provide context and extra information about suspicious companies and contracting entities. The media monitoring will be based on media articles crawling by specialised software, using keywords, which point towards cases of public procurement violations, corruption and state capture by concrete companies.”