beyond integrity Reading the field — informal governance, impunity, and reconstruction

Where informality runs deep, corruption is not a malfunction of administration but part of how governance works: access, protection, and impunity are unevenly distributed, and the law is not simply broken — it is selectively activated, enforced against some and suspended for others.
To understand structural corruption, or to contain it, the first question is therefore not who is guilty but which configuration decides who is shielded and who is exposed. This research focus examines how such configurations form, withstand reform, and reproduce themselves — and what follows from that for reform, investment, and reconstruction.
A clean audit can simply mean that the leakage sits where the audit does not look. This is not negligence on the part of the instruments but a consequence of their design — they test compliance, while what matters plays out one level above, in how the formal procedures themselves are built.

A 2026 assessment of business integrity in Ukraine found that 37% of formally compliant, ethically committed firms had lost competitiveness to rivals who used informal practices — and that the institutions created to protect honest firms ranked among the least useful. The construction industry, the sector most central to reconstruction, sits in the lowest segment. The standard reading is a capacity gap, to be closed with more training and compliance tools. The instinct is to add compliance. But more compliance tilts the field further — it burdens the honest and leaves the asymmetry untouched.
A donor can do everything right on paper and still feed the problem. In high-informality settings, conventional tools — perception indices, compliance checklists, beneficial-owner registers — certify the form while the risk sits in the configuration they do not capture. The result is a recurring pattern: institutions are built, audits come back clean, and capture continues one level up. The reconstruction of Ukraine sharpens the stakes, because the largest flows of the decade are moving fast into exactly the positions most prone to capture. Whether a given flow changes that configuration or entrenches it is not a moral question but a programming one — and answering it before the money moves is cheaper than discovering the answer afterward.

The conceptual basis appears as a book trilogy by Michael Derrer with Peter Lang Academic Publishers (2026):

• Redefining Corruption (300 pages) sets out the analytical framework: corruption as a social field organised around access, protection, and impunity. At its core is the Corruption Dynamics and Resilience Framework, a vocabulary of twelve concepts whose unit of comparison is not the country score but the configuration — which keeps it applicable across sectors and regions.
• Corruption, Extortion, and Power in Russia and Ukraine (300 pages) traces the mechanics: selective enforcement, rent extraction, and networked protection — and why such arrangements outlast cycles of reform rather than breaking under them.
• Shifting Dynamics of Corruption (300 pages) provides the empirical basis: 55 interviews conducted in Moscow and Kyiv.

The trilogy has been endorsed by leading governance practitioners and scholars, among which:

• Peter Maurer — President of the Basel Institute on Governance; former President of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
• Thomas Greminger — Executive Director, Geneva Centre for Security Policy; former OSCE Secretary General
• Alena Ledeneva — social anthropologist, University College London; founder of the Global Informality Project
• John W. Meyer — sociologist, Stanford University; founder of world-society theory
• Ivan Krastev — political scientist, Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Vienna
• Bálint Magyar — political scientist; former Hungarian Minister of Education

Prof. Derrer has been invited to present this work internationally, including at:

• Elliott School of International Relations, George Washington University, Washington
• Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales, Paris
• Universidad Complutense de Madrid
• Sapienza Università di Roma
• Uniwersytet Warszawski, Instytut Studiów Społecznych im. Roberta Zajonca
• Universit of Geneva, Research Center for Corruption Studies
• SASE Annual Conference, Bordeaux (The Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics)
• Cracow, ECPR General Conference (European Consortium for Political Research)
• Stanford University (October 2026)

In November 2022, HSLU hosted a two-day conference, initiated by Prof. Derrer, on the reforms needed for Ukraine's integration into the European community — with the participation of the Swiss FDFA Special Envoy for the 2022 Ukraine Recovery Conference and leading scholars of the field.

_{https://www.hslu.ch/en/lucerne-school-of-business/calendar/events/2022/11/16/ibr-social-change-ukraine/}

This research has given rise to an applied approach — a configuration diagnostic that shows donors, institutions, and firms operating in difficult environments what audits and indices miss: where funds enter capturable positions, who really controls enforcement, who is exposed, and where conditionality would be met on paper only.

It does not replace existing oversight and M&E systems; it complements them where they do not look. The unit of analysis is the configuration, not the country, so the approach transfers. A first application can be set up quickly as a pilot, with scope and form defined case by case.

Three questions decide the outcome. Each is simple to pose and hard to answer from outside:

• Who controls impunity? Who benefits from the current distribution of protection in the sectors the programme targets — and does the design change that distribution or work within it?

• Where is the resource lock-in? Which access points — contracts, licences, administrative interpretation — are controlled by actors outside the enforcement mechanisms the programme introduces?
• How will the reform be absorbed? Which displacement, capture, and weaponisation pathways are specific to this context — and has the design anticipated them?

A policy note — When Compliance Does Not Protect (June 2026) — develops this argument and is available on request.

Prof. Dr. Michael Derrer bridges scholarship and practice. Alongside his academic work, he has spent three decades working across Central and Eastern Europe — as a consultant, company director, and certified judicial interpreter — and works in more than ten languages, among them Ukrainian, Russian, Polish, and Romanian. The analysis is grounded not only in research but in direct experience of the institutions it describes.
His work in the region includes a SECO-funded knowhow transfer programme (University of Fribourg, 1997–2007), consulting for some fifty Swiss companies, and advisory work for the SDC (Brașov dual VET, 2022–24); he holds a PhD from the University of Warsaw (2024).

Full profile: https://www.hslu.ch/de-ch/hochschule-luzern/ueber-uns/personensuche/profile/?pid=1768
www.michaelderrer.info

_{Note: 
Analysis treats anticorruption discourse as an object of study, not a political verdict. 
The Corruption Dynamics and Resilience Framework was developed by Michael Derrer.}