This year, the Anti-Corruption Research and Education Center (ACREC) hosted the III Summer Intensive “How to Research Corruption. Analytics that impacts anti-corruption policy”, which is an annual concentrated training course aimed at improving the quality of Ukrainian research and analysis in the field of anti-corruption.
The event took place from May 28 to June 3 in an online format.
In 2020, participants in ACREC mentoring support programme “Capacity Building of Regional / Local Anti-Corruption NGOs in Ukraine” were invited to participate in the Intensive. The online training was adapted for two groups with different levels of analytical skills, which allowed to attract a record 35 participants from more than 15 regions of Ukraine.
During the 6 days of training, ACREC experts Oksana Huss and Oleksandra Koidel worked with groups on the importance of approaches to understanding corruption, generalizations as to the highest level of analytics, conceptualization, and operationalization as the relationship between empiricism and theory, and the main stages of research development and the role of theory. After that, the focus was on developing applied research design. Participants also had the opportunity to develop strategies for developing an analytical problem and analytical question, immerse themselves in theoretical assumptions, hypotheses, and theses, and work on the differences and functions of the annotation structure.
In addition, a lot of time was devoted to the topic of comparative research design. In particular, the advantages and limitations of comparison in analytics, the issue of sampling cases for comparison, as well as the ambiguity of the concept of “best practices” were discussed.
Finally, the trainers devoted time to the communication component in the context of writing and layout of the analytical product, namely, told the participants what the structure of the argument, paragraph, section, and the entire analytical document, in general, should look like. The elaboration of the standards of the layout of the analytical document was also important in this topic.
In addition to this topic, participants listened to a lecture on the basics of successful communication with a foreign audience and learned about the main elements of an email, as well as the most common mistakes when communicating with a foreign audience.
ACREC external experts Vitaliy Shabunin and Yaroslav Yurchyshyn were also invited as part of the training to highlight the advocacy component of analytical products. In particular, the participants were told about the planning and course of advocacy campaigns in the conditions of a permanent political crisis with an emphasis on regional specifics.
The online training in the format of a Zoom conference received positive feedback from the participants and was remembered for its flexibility and powerful ability to interact in groups, participate in surveys, draw graphic objects together, and much more.
It will be recalled that the key goal of the ACREC Mentoring Support Program “Capacity Building of Regional / Local Anti-Corruption NGOs in Ukraine” is to strengthen and strengthen the development of institutional, organizational, analytical, and expert capacities of regional and local anti-corruption NGOs in Ukraine.
The project selected 20 most promising NGOs in the field of anti-corruption from cities such as Lviv, Drohobych, Khmelnytsky, Vinnytsia, Dnipro, Kharkiv, Poltava, Mariupol, Severodonetsk, Chernihiv, Kremenchuk, Zhytomyr, Ivano-Frankivsk, Ternopil. , Nikopol, Sumy, Ukrainka, Khmilnyk, as well as Kyiv (city level).
The event was supported by the Open Society Foundations and The Matra Program.