Lawrence Lessig, who heads the Safra Center and hosted the event,
started by defining institutional corruption as:
A situation where influences within an economy of influence tend to
weaken the effectiveness of an institution, especially by weakening
public trust of the institution.
This is an academic definition. What's important to take from it is
(1) the fact that institutional corruption is a situation rather
than an act (and it is hard to deal with IC situations...
On Saturday, I attended a one-day conference on Institutional
Corruption sponsored by the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard
University (videos
of it will eventually appear here). Although local government
was scarcely mentioned (there was one image of a painting that
portrayed the 1930s machine in Kansas City, MO), many ideas that
were discussed are applicable to local government ethics.
City Ethics' Carla Miller attended an international conference on public administration to present a paper on public corruption entitled "Ethics, Elephants and Enigmas" Shown here with panelists that Ms. Miller moderated on day 1 - October 23. The panel was themed: "Management Issues" with panel members from Bucharest, Romania, Bejing (2) and Shenyang, China.
The International City/County Management Association (the city, county,
and town manager professional organization) is holding a 90-minute
audioconference on local government ethics on January 29. I do not
know the details of the program, and I am not endorsing it, but it
sounds like a very inexpensive way for local government managers and
employees to share a professional presentation on local government
ethics...