As early as 2003, PIARC Executive Committee considered that fight against corruption was an important topic that deserved to be analyzed by an ad hoc Technical Committee. Since then, this topic has been studied on a regular basis in the different cycles; in particular, a conceptual model (“cycle of integrity”) and associated Integrity Toolkit were produced during the cycle 2008-2011.

For the current cycle (2016-2019), in consideration of its terms of reference that requested to “link to external organizations that have looked at the issues”, TC A.1 has adopted a specific methodology, consisting in:

·circulating a questionnaire among PIARC members and other entities aiming at investigating and updating the implementation of anti-corruption measures and the development of a culture of transparency;

·inviting speakers from relevant external organizations to participate in key events, mainly committee meetings and seminars: e.g. Transparency International (Spain chapter); CoST (Infrastructure Transparency Initiative), OCP (Open Contracting Partnership);

·taking advantage of the own network of WG3 members to reach out to external organizations.

It was found that fight against corruption is gaining momentum worldwide:

·those countries that have produced the most stringent legal instruments to fight against corruption are OECD countries. These instruments are mainly aimed at preventing their own enterprises and/or public services from engaging into fraudulous or corrupted practices and sanctioning them;

·non-OECD countries are also concerned, either because they have also developed national legislation to fight against corruption, or because legislation passed by individual countries sometimes has extraterritorial effects; in addition, the G-20 Group of countries, which comprises non-OECD countries, is also making great strides in the same direction;

·fight against corruption is also promoted, essentially through sanctions and compliance checks, by International Financing Institutions (notably Multilateral Development Banks - MDBs); regarding the infrastructure works they finance, the main MDBs are in the process of updating their recommended contract forms by adopting the 2017 FIDIC (Fédération Internationale Des Ingénieurs-Conseils / International Federation of Consulting Engineers) suite of contracts, and drafting their own specific Conditions of Particular Application (COPA), which will include clauses related to corrupt or fraudulent practices;

·as a governance issue, fight against corruption is no longer considered in isolation, but more and more associated with other topics, both in the private and public sector. Due diligence processes and management systems are put in place that deal with ethical as well as social, environmental, health and safety issues. This is because the general public expects that transport administrations will behave in a transparent and accountable way, not only as regards ethical issues, but more generally on all above-mentioned issues.