Vienna Principles

The Vienna Principles, formally the Vienna Principles Towards a Global Framework for the Measurement of Corruption, are a set of fifteen guiding principles adopted in 2023 by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and the International Anti-Corruption Academy (IACA). The principles emerged from the Global Conference on Harnessing Data to Improve Corruption Measurement, held in Vienna from 31 August to 1 September 2023, and represent the most significant attempt to date to establish shared international standards for how corruption should be measured, directly addressing the methodological pluralism described in Measuring Corruption.

1 Origin

The Vienna Principles were developed in response to the persistent fragmentation of corruption measurement approaches across international organizations, national statistical offices, and civil society, a fragmentation documented throughout the broader literature reviewed in Measuring Corruption. The 2023 Vienna conference brought together statisticians, anti-corruption practitioners, and academics with the explicit aim of harnessing improved data sources, including administrative and digital data, to strengthen the evidentiary basis for corruption measurement, and the fifteen principles adopted there were intended as a shared reference framework that international bodies, national governments, and researchers could use when designing or evaluating new corruption metrics. ^[1]

2 The fifteen principles

The fifteen Vienna Principles cover the full lifecycle of corruption metric design, from stakeholder engagement through ethical deployment. They are: (1) a multi-stakeholder approach, calling for the involvement of government, civil society, academia, and the private sector in designing measurement efforts; (2) comprehensiveness, calling for measurement to capture the full range of corruption's manifestations rather than a single narrow form; (3) relevance and usefulness, requiring that metrics be designed to serve identifiable policy or research needs; (4) transparency and accountability in how metrics are constructed and reported; (5) integration and alignment with existing international standards and frameworks, to avoid duplicative or incompatible metrics; (6) prioritization, recognizing that limited resources require measurement efforts to be sequenced and targeted rather than universal; (7) confidentiality, privacy, and the principle of doing no harm to respondents, sources, or vulnerable individuals involved in data collection; (8) international and national coordination among bodies collecting or using corruption data; (9) data quality and openness, favoring open, verifiable data practices; (10) reliability and validity of underlying sources, requiring metrics to be built on sources that can withstand methodological scrutiny; (11) objective treatment of administrative and emerging data sources, avoiding both uncritical acceptance and unwarranted dismissal of newer data types; (12) adherence to best practice in survey design and implementation; (13) a focus on effectiveness in assessing anti-corruption efforts specifically, not only on corruption prevalence; (14) objectivity in the use of expert judgment, guarding against undisclosed bias in expert-based assessments; and (15) ethical use of technology, data analytics, and artificial intelligence in corruption measurement, anticipating the growing role of tools discussed in AI and Machine Learning in Anti-Corruption. ^[1]

3 The UNODC Statistical Framework

Running alongside the Vienna Principles is a related, more technical instrument, the UNODC Statistical Framework to Measure Corruption, developed through a longer institutional process. Its origins trace to a 2013 United Nations roadmap for strengthening crime and corruption statistics, and the process was formally accelerated in 2019 when the Conference of the States Parties (CoSP) to the United Nations Convention against Corruption adopted Resolution 8/10, mandating UNODC to lead development of a dedicated statistical framework. UNODC submitted a first draft of the framework in January 2023, and following further revision, CoSP formally adopted the framework through Resolution 10/4 at its tenth session in December 2023. ^[2]

The finalized framework comprises 146 indicators, down from 153 in an earlier draft version, organized in a two-dimensional matrix structure. One axis of the matrix classifies indicators by type of corruption and governance component being measured, while the other axis classifies them by mode of measurement, distinguishing direct or observable measures, perception-based measures, risk-based measures, and response-based measures (such as enforcement or institutional response data). This matrix structure operationalizes, in a single technical instrument, the same core distinctions, between outcome and capacity metrics and among the six knowledge-source categories, set out in the broader conceptual discussion in Measuring Corruption, and it is intended to give national statistical offices a common template for building nationally comparable corruption statistics compatible with the Vienna Principles.

See also: Measuring Corruption, UNODC, UNCAC, and GlobE, Corruption Measurement Tools.

References

1. UNODC, UNDP, OECD, and IACA, "Vienna Principles Towards a Global Framework for the Measurement of Corruption," adopted at the Global Conference on Harnessing Data to Improve Corruption Measurement, Vienna, 31 August-1 September 2023.
2. UNODC, "Statistical Framework to Measure Corruption," developed pursuant to CoSP Resolution 8/10 (2019) and adopted via CoSP Resolution 10/4 at the tenth session of the Conference of the States Parties to UNCAC, December 2023.