Community-driven development is a strategy for empowering people to choose their own priorities, project leaders, and monitoring. Many believe that this model results in lower corruption rates. We look at what happened in the Arid Lands Project in Kenya and a community-development project in Indonesia. These projects had strikingly different corruption rates, even though the countries had similar corruption perception rates at project startup. Find out which design elements may account for the differences in corruption.

Many information technology initiatives have emerged in recent years with the aim of improving natural resource management. These take a variety of technological forms designed either to directly curb corruption in resource extraction and production, or to enhance information flows, facilitate citizen participation, and hold specific actors accountable. Donors can play a role in connecting the divide between development practitioners, technologists, and researchers by supporting the use of tools in programs and evaluations.

Corruption is a continuing feature of the Philippines’ natural resource sectors. Given keen interest in the country’s REDD+ potential, it is useful to consider corruption risks related to REDD+ from a political economy perspective. This U4 Issue draws on fieldwork from two REDD+ pilot sites to assess current governance and anti-corruption safeguards related to benefit-sharing, land tenure rights for indigenous peoples, and private sector involvement. Many anti-corruption actions are in place in the pilot sites, but they are weakly embedded in social relations at the local level.