Session 6: Round Table – What Academics, Activists, and the Media Can Do

Drawing from the Session 6 round table and panel sessions insights, the following recommendations outline possible steps to rebuild public trust and drive meaningful reform across sectors and borders. These proposals reflect reasonable solutions advanced by scholars, advocates, and journalists with deep experience confronting corruption and promoting structural change. Academics, activists and the media are by themselves unable to bring about the changes advocated below, but by concerted effort, can play a critical role in pressuring the holders of power to implement these suggestions.

Strengthen Institutional Capacity

• Redesign incentive structures with clear oversight to reward truthfulness and penalize misconduct.
• Empower internal legal departments to independently report and resist unethical decisions.
• Encourage engagements across academic silos and institutions of democracy and knowledge-production (academia, media).
• Protect whistleblowers and encourage transparency across all institutions. 

Reform Legal and Corporate Structures

• Address legal loopholes and gray zones that enable misconduct under a facade of compliance.
• Enforce ongoing compliance review processes instead of one-time post-scandal fixes.
• Reassess limited liability protections to better understand how they operate and minimize their utility in shielding bad actors from consequences.
• Encourage a hybrid enforcement model that addresses both individual wrongdoing and systemic flaws.
• Reform U.S. laws to outlaw anonymous ownership through LLCs, as current legal structures enable the concealment of ownership. Journalists and the public cannot trace beneficial owners due to legal opacity.
• End subsidies of corporate debt which creates distortions and helps to shield corporations, shareholders and managers from liability and accountability.
• Consider lowering the bar for criminal liability. 

Rewire the Culture of Compliance

• Integrate behavioral science to design realistic, effective governance and compliance systems.
• Shift from relying on “trust” to building trustworthiness structurally into law, governance, and policy.
• Use social stigma and public shaming to hold elites accountable when formal systems fail.

Align Global and Domestic Standards

• Improve transparency in ownership and asset tracing in sovereign and corruption-related litigation.
• Model domestic accountability at the same level expected of international partners.
• Push for greater transparency and data access to support research, oversight, and public engagement.
• Condition international aid and lending on anti-corruption benchmarks and enforcement commitments.

Empower Citizens and Civil Society

• Promote citizen enforcement of anti-corruption laws through international mechanisms like Article 35 of the United Nations Convention against Corruption.
• Invest in civil society, independent media, and investigative journalism as core accountability tools.
• Reform the wealth management industry, recognizing that a relatively small number of elite wealth managers enable much of the global offshore system by helping clients hide assets, evade taxes, and fund authoritarian actors. Increased scrutiny, regulation, and accountability for this professional class could severely disrupt illicit financial flows.
• Establish public interest law clinics and watchdog organizations to support rule of law enforcement.