THE Director-General of the Nigerian Institute of Social and Economic Research (NISER), Prof Anthonia Simbine, has stated that behavioural change will help reduce corruption and corrupt practices, especially in the public sector through change in behaviour.
Prof. Simbine said this via a webinar programme tagged: Actualising Behaviour Change (ABC) in Abuja on Thursday. She said the program objectives include analysis of the complexities around corrupt behaviour among Nigeria’s varied demographic and socio-economic groups.
Others are: advancing the national and regional frontiers of knowledge on corruption control and creating an institutional hub for warehousing, disseminating and for updating behavioural change knowledge products.
Simbine said NISER’s context for behavioural solution design is primarily focused on Nigeria’s public service institutions.
She said the reason for this is because Nigeria’s administrative frame work is a combination of colonial structures and elements of political offices.
She said the frame work is one that provides for a presidential system of government, even though it still has components of a traditional system.
She noted that all these interact with a rapidly changing and globalised world and that consequently, the system is transforming with time even though it still remains dynamic.
According to her, as a result of all these foundational fault lines, Nigeria’s administrative process, together with its institutions and actors, presented complex challenges, one of which is corrupt behaviour.
“Our research so far, provides us with some understanding of why traditional approaches to stemming corrupt practices, including detection based technical fixes, investigation, prosecution and sanctions have recorded little success.
“We now understand corruption to be a complex-adaptive problem, hence our leaning towards behavioural solutions,’’ the NISER boss said.
Accordingly, Simbine explained that the ABC series is one of the communication and dissemination platforms for their research.
She said their target audience for engagement on the platform includes a wide range of stakeholders in the public and private sectors, policy makers, decision influencers, civil society organizations, academia and development partners.
The NISER director-general said the event would lay the building block for behavioural solutions design, hence it would be an interrogating conceptual and methodological issues in the study and analysis of behaviour.
She further said that the intervention was courtesy of MacArthur Foundation, designed around a three-year cycle running from Sept. 1, 2021 to Aug. 31, 2024.
“Our project work streams are running concurrently and iteratively over the three-year period and include research and capacity building, behavioural solutions design, Institutionalisation of Knowledge as well as communication and dissemination,’’ she said.
Dr Oluwatosin Ilevbare and Dr Oluwafemi Famakinde, both Postdoctoral Research Fellows of NISER, made presentations on: “Individual and Group Dynamics in the Behaviour Process.
They concluded that people don’t change their behaviour unless it makes a difference for them to do so. (NAN)
