The Digitalisation of Anti-Corruption in Brazil: Scandals, Reforms, and Innovation (Routledge Corruption and Anti-Corruption Studies)

This book investigates how digital technologies, such as social media and artificial intelligence, can contribute to combatting corruption in Brazil.

Brazil, with its long history of scandals and abundant empirical data on digital media usage, serves as a perfect case study to trace the development of bottom-up and top-down digital anti-corruption technologies and their main features. This book highlights the connections between anti-corruption reforms and the rapid implementation of innovative solutions, primarily developed by tech-savvy public officials and citizens committed to anti-corruption efforts. The book draws on interviews with experts, activists and civil servants, as well as open-source materials and social media data to identify key actors, their practices, challenges and limitations of anti-corruption technologies. The result is a thorough analysis of the process of digitalisation of anti-corruption in Brazil, with a theoretical framework which can also be applied to other countries. The book introduces the concept of “integrity techies” to encompass social and political actors who develop and facilitate anti-corruption technologies, and discusses different outcomes and issues associated with digital innovation in anti-corruption.

This book will be a key resource for students, researchers and practitioners interested in technologies and development in Brazil and Latin America, as well as corruption and anti-corruption studies more broadly.

Fernanda Odilla holds a PhD in Social Science and Public Policy and a MA in Criminology from King’s College London. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow for the BIT-ACT (Bottom-Up Initiatives and Anti-Corruption Technologies) project conducted at the Department of Political and Social Sciences at the University of Bologna. Her research interests are control of corruption, accountability, and new technologies in the context of anti-corruption, integrity, and quality of government. Odilla is the co-founder of the King’s College London Global (Anti)corruption Studies research group and the Brazilian Interdisciplinary Corruption Research Network. Before her academic career, she worked as a multimedia producer for the Brazilian desk at the BBC World Service in London and as a reporter for daily newspapers in Brazil, where she had been dedicated to investigating and exposing corruption. https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2229-986X