Last week, CISANET had the privilege to attend a Political Economy Analysis (PEA) workshop which brought together all the partners implementing anti-corruption interventions across different districts in Malawi.
Through the workshop, partners gained insights into the intricate relationship between politics and economic processes shaped by social context, how power and resources are distributed in the political context and the need for anti-corruption projects to adopt PEA frameworks, which enables the identification of problems, their causes, and impacts, as well as the development of effective interventions. The PEA framework facilitates adaptive implementation, addresses nested problems, and identifies interests and incentives facing different societal groups, thereby contributing to better results.
The workshop emphasized the need to consider PEA tools such as power, stakeholders, interests, attitudes, relations, and institutions to ensure that our interventions bring the desired change in the communities we are working in. MACCSS partners reflected on the key issues that ignite corruption across key sectors including health, agriculture, mining, construction and infrastructure and campaign financing among others, and conducted a thorough stakeholder analysis to identify stakeholders who are likely to support, reject and those remain undecided to the anti-corruption initiatives implemented in various places.
Additionally, the workshop provided an opportunity to delve into what partners can do to increase the feasibility of success and the impacts of our interventions by exploring the attitude of their stakeholders both allies and the opponents and reflecting the political economy opportunities and risks including unintended consequences driven by the MACCSS interventions.