Are emerging technologies helping win the fight against corruption? A review of the state of evidence

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) is often thought of as a uniformly positive tool making governments more transparent, accountable, and less corrupt. However, the evidence on it is mixed and often misunderstood. Hence, this article carries out a systematic stocktaking of ICT tools’ impact on corruption, offering a nuanced and context-dependent assessment. The tools reviewed include digital public services, crowdsourcing platforms, whistleblowing tools, transparency portals, big data, distributed ledger technology (DLT), and artificial intelligence (AI). We scrutinise the evidence both on ICTs’ anticorruption effectiveness and misuse for corruption. Drawing on the commonalities across technologies, we find that ICT can support genuinely support anti-corruption by enabling reporting on corruption, promoting transparency and accountability, facilitating citizen participation and government-citizen interactions. However, ICT can also provide new corruption opportunities related to the dark web, cryptocurrencies, or simply through the misuse of well-intended technologies such as digital public services and centralised databases. Our findings underline that ICT is not per se a panacea against corruption, and it can also play into the hands of corrupt officials. Importantly, the existence of ICT tools does not automatically translate into anticorruption outcomes. Rather, impact hinges on the matching between ICT tools and the local context, including support for and skills in using technology.