Corruption in sport - a new field for public policy

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Media reporting of corruption: policy implications

“The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10611-015-9595-1"Are policy responses related to experiences or perceptions of corruption? This article examines newspaper reporting of corruption in an Australian jurisdiction and compares these with perceptions of corruption and experiences of corruption in the community. The policy challenge is to understand the gaps between media reporting about corruption, the perceptions of corruption they help generate and peoples concrete experiences of corruption. Research cited in this article shows that corruption tends to be perceived at a higher level than the evidence would suggest in both high income and low income countries. Such perceptions have policy relevance as they can shape the structure of national integrity systems. This leads to our research question: how does the media portray corruption and asks whether policy responses are related to experiences or perceptions of corruption? The lessons here can be applied in other jurisdictions

Corruption in sport: From the playing field to the field of policy

How is corruption in sport evolving into a global public policy issue? In the past century, four trends have affected sport according to Paoli and Donati (2013) - de-amateurisation at the turn of the twentieth century, medicalisation since the 1960s, politicisation and commercialisation to the point where sport is now a business worth more than US$141 billion annually. Each of these trends had a corrupting effect on what is generally perceived as a past 'golden age' of sport. In the twenty-first century more public funding is being directed into sport in the developed and developing world. As a result this paper will argue organised sport has entered a fifth evolutionary trend - criminalisation. In this latest phase, public policy needs to grapple with what constitutes corruption in what has historically been a private market

Global public-private partnerships : different perspectives

Global public-private partnerships are part of the global governance framework and influence our daily lives - yet our understanding of them is incomplete. Research has attributed the existence of these partnerships between state, market and civil society actors variously to the influence of leaders, new management ideas, resource deficits and the proliferation of issues beyond the ability of any single sector to manage. Yet explorations of these themes primarily focuses on the United Nations core agencies, and overlooks the technical international government organizations; organizations which facilitate a multitude of transactions in various policy areas between nation-states, their agencies and administrations. Personal experience with such an organization - Interpol - indicated the answer to the puzzle was incomplete. Therefore, this study was undertaken to further explore the question of why international government organizations participate in global public-private partnerships. Using case studies, this research set out to discover a better explanation for the phenomena of global public-private partnerships. Research was conducted with the International Telecommunication Union, the International Criminal Police Organization and the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property. Between them, they represented a diverse section of international policy fields - communication; police cooperation and cultural conservation. This research found that beyond the themes in the literature, global public-private partnerships are shaped by the dominant professional culture of an international government organization, and the organizational culture also uniquely inherent in each. The use of theories of professional and organizational culture has therefore filled a gap in our knowledge about this global phenomenon. Furthermore, these cultural factors also influence how the other factors are perceived and then acted upon. The end results are partnerships that comfortably fit with the beliefs, values, norms and assumptions common the respective professional and organizational culture

Regenerating Integrity and Trust in Australian Institutions: Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia Annual Symposium 2018

Report of the proceedings of the 2018 Annual Symposium of the Academy of Social Sciences in AustraliaThis report was commisioned by Academy of the Social Sciences in Australi

Inquiry into the Education and Prevention Functions of Victoria's Integrity Agencies

This item was commisioned by Parliament of Victori

Making Corruption Disappear in Local Government

“This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Public Integrity on 9 Dec 2015, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/10999922.2015.1093400”. This author accepted manuscript is made available following 18 month embargo from date of publication (9 Dec 2015) in accordance with the publisher's copyright policy.Local government corruption is a phenomenon across the world. This article draws upon survey work in Victoria, Australia, to show that citizens believe that corruption exists in local government and experience it, but rarely report it to an anti-corruption agency or elsewhere. Even when reported, tracing the outcome from state-level authorities to the local government becomes an exercise in futility, because the corrupt act is dealt with in policy frameworks that make it effectively disappear. As a result, corruption as perceived or experienced in the everyday life of citizens is different from what is defined in law and dealt with by public bodies. While the data here are Australian, the lessons and principles can be applied in many other countries

Legionella pneumophila strain 130b evades macrophage cell death independent of the effector SidF in the absence of flagellin

International audienceThe human pathogen Legionella pneumophila must evade host cell death signaling to enable replication in lung macrophages and to cause disease. After bacterial growth, however, L. pneumophila is thought to induce apoptosis during egress from macrophages. The bacterial effector protein, SidF, has been shown to control host cell survival and death by inhibiting pro-apoptotic BNIP3 and BCL-RAMBO signaling. Using live-cell imaging to follow the L. pneumophila-macrophage interaction, we now demonstrate that L. pneumophila evades host cell apoptosis independent of SidF. In the absence of SidF, L. pneumophila was able to replicate, cause loss of mitochondria membrane potential, kill macrophages, and establish infections in lungs of mice. Consistent with this, deletion of BNIP3 and BCL-RAMBO did not affect intracellular L. pneumophila replication, macrophage death rates, and in vivo bacterial virulence. Abrogating mitochondrial cell death by genetic deletion of the effectors of intrinsic apoptosis, BAX, and BAK, or the regulator of mitochondrial permeability transition pore formation, cyclophilin-D, did not affect bacterial growth or the initial killing of macrophages. Loss of BAX and BAK only marginally limited the ability of L. pneumophila to efficiently kill all macrophages over extended periods. L. pneumophila induced killing of macrophages was delayed in the absence of capsase-11 mediated pyroptosis. Together, our data demonstrate that L. pneumophila evades host cell death responses independently of SidF during replication and can induce pyroptosis to kill macrophages in a timely manner

The proposed Caroline ESA M3 mission to a Main Belt Comet

We describe Caroline, a mission proposal submitted to the European Space Agency in 2010 in response to the Cosmic Visions M3 call for medium-sized missions. Caroline would have travelled to a Main Belt Comet (MBC), characterizing the object during a flyby, and capturing dust from its tenuous coma for return to Earth. MBCs are suspected to be transition objects straddling the traditional boundary between volatile–poor rocky asteroids and volatile–rich comets. The weak cometary activity exhibited by these objects indicates the presence of water ice, and may represent the primary type of object that delivered water to the early Earth. The Caroline mission would have employed aerogel as a medium for the capture of dust grains, as successfully used by the NASA Stardust mission to Comet 81P/Wild 2. We describe the proposed mission design, primary elements of the spacecraft, and provide an overview of the science instruments and their measurement goals. Caroline was ultimately not selected by the European Space Agency during the M3 call; we briefly reflect on the pros and cons of the mission as proposed, and how current and future mission MBC mission proposals such as Castalia could best be approached