In a blog post for Corruption Justice Legitimacy, Alex Ralph, writing instructor and teaching professor at the Ford School, outlined how anti-corruption practitioners and researchers have struggled to communicate most effectively why their work matters. As a result, Ralph details two suggestions for how anti-corruption reporting experts can more effectively communicate.
Ralph first proposes that anti-corruption researchers could better reframe their success stories. “[These success stories] are not, after all, just about diminishing corruption,” Ralph writes. “The successes are also about how your anti-corruption intervention helped enable a development or peace objective that could tangibly improve people’s futures.”
His second suggestion is to shift some attention away from describing the corruption systems and highlight more effectively the individuals at play. “Yes, you’re working on systems,” Ralph writes. “But systems are made and navigated by people. So what are the stories of courage and fortitude and venality of those involved in anti-corruption work in endemically corrupt contexts?”
Read the full post: “An Editor’s Three Provocations for the Anti-Corruption Field”
