Combating Corruption Encouraging Ethics

Ethical foundations : virtue, consequence, principle -- Responsibility and accountability -- Twenty-first century challenges : global dimensions/changing boundaries -- Understanding fraud, waste, and corrupt practices -- Graft, bribery, and conflict of interest -- Lying, cheating, and deception -- Privacy, secrecy, and confidentiality -- Abuse of authority and "administrative evil"--Establishing expectations, providing guidelines, and building trust -- Transparency, whistle blowing, and dissent -- Compliance, oversight, and sanctions -- Leadership and individual responsibility : encouraging ethics.

Encouraging Ethics and Preventing Corruption brings theory and practice together in addressing the question: How are we to be ethical in public life and through public institutions? It is a major contribution to public sector ethics within Australia and internationally because it provides an exhaustive analysis of reform across a decade in one jurisdiction, Queensland, and then proceeds to itemise a best practice integrity system or ethics regime. Drawing on the extensive research of two of Australia's leading practical ethicists, this text is essential reading for all students and practitioners of applied and professional ethics in the public sphere. Part A of the text provides a preferred theoretical and conceptual framework which both justifies and guides the development of a public sector ethics regime. Part B examines the place of the individual within a world of institutional ethics. Part C outlines the Queensland governance reforms introduced since 1989 following the Fitzgerald Inquiry which exposed corruption in the police and ministry. The final chapter, the 'Epilogue', gathers the insights of earlier chapters and suggests a more explicitly ethics-centred approach to governance reform that may take us 'beyond best practice'. Clearly, while it is the Australian context we have in mind, we are confident that this is a text which addresses the quest for integrity and ethics in government wherever society is committed to social and liberal democratic ideals.

This timely Handbook unpacks the underlying common factors that give rise to corrupting environments. Investigating opportunities to deliver ethical public policy, it explores global trends in public administration and its vulnerability to corruption today, as well as proposing strategies for building integrity and diminishing corruption in public sectors around the globe.

Immoral, unethical conduct of politicians and public officials is a global scourge of the present day. The South African government is leading the battle against corruption in the public sector, and it must be supported by officials educated to recognise, and enabled to combat, every appearance of this pestilence. Ethics and Professionalism is essential equipment for such education. Having been constructed on the principles of knowledge progression and outcomes-based education, it sets out explaining the meaning of ethics and its importance for public officials.

Although social scientists generally do not discuss "evil" in an academic setting, there is no denying that it has existed in public administration throughout human history. Hundreds of millions of human beings have died as a direct or indirect consequence of state-sponsored violence. The authors argue that administrative evil, or destructiveness, is part of the identity of all modern public administration (as it is part of psychoanalytic study at the individual level). It goes beyond a superficial critique of public administration and lays the groundwork for a more effective and humane profession.

Understanding and responding to corruption is a worldwide challenge. This book offers a general overview of the nature, pattern, anddiffering perspectives on political and economic corruption. Providing detail and depth, the book examines and compares corruption infour countries: the United States, Israel, Russia, and India. Each country chapter explores how corruption is defined and understood in that country and provides case material illustrating corrupt practice and responses to it. The country chapters also cover whistleblowing activities, their prevalence, importance, and impact. A comparative analysis presents the most prominent factors contributing to a reduced level of corruption and the factors that lead to whistleblower success.

This volume establishes a foundation for a uniform code of professional ethics for public administrators in the United States. Public Administration Ethics for the 21st Century lays the ethical foundations for a uniform professional code of ethics for public administrators, civil servants, and non-profit administrators in the US. Martinez synthesizes five disparate schools of ethical thought as to how public administrators can come to know the good and behave in ways that advance the values of citizenship, equity, and public interest within their respective organizations. Using case studies, he teaches American administrators how to combine the approaches of all five schools to evaluate and resolve complex ethical dilemmas within the constraints of the U.S. democratic values set. Martinez enunciates the common ethical principles that guide public administrators in their practice within the specific ethical parameters and organizational cultures of a myriad entities at the federal, state, and local levels of government in the United States, as well as in non-profit organizations. Along the way, Martinez addresses a number of crucial issues, including personal gain, conflict of interest, transparency, democratic impartiality, hiring, hierarchical discipline, media relations, partisan pressure, appointments by elected officials, and whistle-blowing. The striking, high-profile case studies—Nathan Bedford Forrest, Adolph Eichmann, Lieutenant William Calley, and Mary Ann Wright—illustrate ethical dilemmas where, for better or worse, the individual was at odds with the organization.