Moving from Concept to Action: The need for practical guidance to implement collective action as a strategy for change

By Cheyanne Scharbatke-Church, Co-Director, CJL & Peter Woodrow, Senior Advisor, CJL

We’ve all seen it: People chase their own gain, even when teaming up would make everyone better off. That's the essence of a collective action problem.

The anti-corruption field has expanded their understanding of endemic corruption to include collective action over the past decade. Practitioners no longer view corruption as simply a principal-agent problem: ‘If only the boss/leader/Minister…would adhere to high standards and hold their underlings to account, then all would be well.’ Rather, endemic corruption is seen as a collective action problem because in places where abuse of power for personal gain is the norm at all levels and sectors, individuals have an incentive to act selfishly to maximize their immediate, personal gain. Personal gain trumps acting together for the benefit of the larger society.

However, the conceptual understanding of endemic corruption as a collective action problem does not mean the field has mastered how to pursue collective action as an effective strategy for change.

Our recent experience coaching anti-corruption specialists in developing and implementing collective action projects has revealed two key challenges.   

First, practitioners need to grasp the distinction between collective action as a conceptual understanding of a problem and collective action as an action strategy. One is an analytic or conceptual lens; the other is a strategy for action. The concept explains why a problem exists and persists over time—and analysis provides insights into how it functions. But collective action as a strategy for change requires a theory of change and coordinated and targeted steps to make a difference.

Second, at the programming level, anti-corruption specialists need to have the skills for implementing effective collective action programs.

This requires skillful coalition-building across diverse social groups with differing interests and agendas.

At first glance, a collective action strategy may seem straightforward: convene a group of like-minded actors around a common goal. But anti-corruption collective action demands more than that. It involves building coalitions across diverse groups and levels in society, each with distinct interests. And the challenges in pursuing a common strategy lie in the very nature of the problem itself, including conflicting agendas and strong incentives for corrupt activities to continue among those who benefit from them.

In our experience, many anti-corruption specialists haven't had the chance to build the necessary practical skills. These include bringing together diverse groups around common goals, undertaking shared analysis, creating mutual accountability, and working through differences. They involve competencies in organizing, negotiation, facilitation, systems thinking, and co-designing programs.

There are guides for collective action strategies, but what are they lacking?

There are existing guides (see here, here or here), mainly targeting the private sector. However, when we systematically reviewed the materials from literature reviews in 2022 and 2024 against our collective background in community organizing, mediation, negotiation, peacebuilding, and adapting the collective impact framework, we found them lacking. They were particularly thin on practical implementation.

"The conceptual understanding of endemic corruption as a collective action problem, does not mean the field has mastered how to pursue collective action as an effective strategy for change."

This became acutely apparent over the past three years while we served as core instructors for the IACA Anti-Corruption Collective Action certificate program. We taught the fundamental skills of systems analysis of corruption, stakeholder analysis, and theory of change thinking. We also provided individual coaching to course participants (all seasoned professionals in their own right) as they worked to implement a collective action effort.

Effective collective action strategies require skillful tactics.

Most students quickly grasped the frameworks, yet the coaching revealed that there were common challenges involving specific tactics that impeded their progress. They raised questions such as:

• How do we get people from opposing political parties to join forces in anti-corruption?

• How do we get a meeting with corporate executives in the private sector—we can guess at their incentives for participating, but how do we convince them to meet with us?

• How do we convince people to talk openly in meetings of potential collective action partners?

The available materials did little to help them answer these essential questions, and we found ourselves drawing on our own experiences with strategic action. After seeing the same issues come up repeatedly, we concluded that these tactical implementation competencies are in fact the ‘secret sauce’ of effective collective action.

A closer look  

Let’s look more closely at a few of the recurring issues that the IACA students raised. 

Are the conditions favorable for a collective action campaign? You may be working on a classic collective action problem, but the best response is not automatically a collective action effort. Scanning the environment to assess the ‘ripeness’ for collective action is an important step. For instance, it is important to explore a few key questions.

• Are there sufficient groups with credibility or responsibility in this arena who are willing to work together?

• Do we have access to resources that can sustain action? (Collective action projects can take years to deliver results so short-term funding will be insufficient.)

• Do all the necessary stakeholders view the status quo as a problem? (Or will it be necessary to generate interest or commitment?)

• Are there other dynamics in the political/economic/social environment that would impede a collective action effort? (An impending election, political impasse in government, rival factions weaponizing anti-corruption….)

  
  

Of course, if the answer to these questions (or most of them) is “no,” then the discussion must shift to interim strategies that help create the necessary conditions for collective action.

Given who I am (my position and organization/agency), what am I able to do? What you can do depends on where you sit. The head of a civil society organization, the Minister of Justice, a lower-level civil servant, and the local representative of a trade association all have different roles to play in a collective effort. Your role in the society, degree of power (informal and formal), and perceived and actual relationships or connections all affect what you can or cannot do and will affect all aspects of setting up a collective action effort.

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Particularly at the beginning stages of a campaign, the ability to bring key parties together is crucial. Mediators call this ‘convening authority’—the ability of a person or organization to invite people to the table with the likelihood that they will respond positively. This does not mean that only the powerful can initiate a collective action anti-corruption effort. Rather, someone with relatively less power will have to follow a different pathway, most likely involving the creation of strong alliances.

How do I go about building dedication among coalition partners? Organizers of collective action need to make intentional efforts to build relationships. Effective collective action depends on relationships of trust and a nuanced understanding of each group’s motivations and capacities. Building these relationships is not an automatic byproduct of time spent together in meetings or workshops, especially in coalitions built across political, ethnic or socio-economic divides. The strength of the coalition may derive from that diversity, but the disparate goals and interests also present a challenge that requires structured and intentional efforts to develop trust-based relationships.

For instance, coalition partners can construct a shared analysis of how the corrupt behavior of concern functions and how the system in which it flourishes operates. This process can create a common understanding of the problem—which offers a basis for respectful discussions. In our experience supporting a collective action effort in the judiciary in DRC, we found that it was equally important to spend informal time together. Lunches, informal discussions, and even hiking together generated critical trust-based relationships that superseded traditional hierarchies in the judicial sector.

A final word 

These are but a few of the challenges encountered by anti-corruption practitioners in the attempt to implement collective action as a strategy. We see this as a critical gap in anti-corruption practice, undermining the potential and effectiveness of collective action. We are eager to connect with those interested in exploring this issue further and/or sharing their own experiences.

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Cheyanne Scharbatke-Church is a practitioner-scholar with a lifelong interest in governance processes that have run amok. She has significant experience in peacebuilding, governance, anti-corruption, evaluation and learning across the Balkans, West and East Africa. She currently serves as the Executive Director of Besa Global, where she also co-leads the Corruption, Justice & Legitimacy (CJL) Program. In this capacity she has pioneered the application of systems thinking to corruption analysis and the role of social norms as a driver of corrupt practices. Cheyanne taught on the intersection of conflict and corruption as well as program design, monitoring and evaluation in fragile contexts at the Fletcher School, Tufts University for 15 years. Prior to this, as the first Director of Evaluation for Search for Common Ground she developed the organization’s initial strategy to institutionalize an evidence and learning culture and practice. Her interest in understanding peacebuilding effectiveness started during her role as the Director of Policy & Evaluation at INCORE, University of Ulster. She has had the privilege of working in an advisory capacity with a range of organizations such as ABA/ROLI, CDA, ICRC, IDRC, UN Peacebuilding Fund and the US State Department. She can be commonly found in the Canadian Rockies with her fierce daughters and gem of a husband.

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Peter Woodrow serves as a Senior Advisor to the Corruption, Justice and Legitimacy Program at Besa Global. He has been a leading thinker in the application of systems thinking concepts and tools to context analysis and program design in peacebuilding and anti-corruption. Woodrow was the Executive Director of CDA Collaborative Learning Projects from 2013 to 2017 and the Co-Director of CDA’s Reflecting on Peace Practice Program (RPP) from 2003 to 2013. In 2018, with co-author Diana Chigas, he published Adding Up to Peace, the result of ten years of RPP research on how peacebuilding efforts create momentum towards peace. Prior to joining CDA, Peter was a Partner at the mediation organization CDR Associates in Boulder, Colorado. He is an experienced mediator, facilitator, and conflict resolution trainer, and holds a Masters in Public Administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, and a BA from Oberlin College.