Exploring corruption practices in public procurement of infrastructural projects in Ghana

A paper by Osei-Tutu et al. (2010). A couple of quotations from the abstract give the flavour:
Purpose – While corruption has long been recognized as a destructive social problem, the subject has not yet been given much attention in the literature of the management of procurement of infrastructure projects in Ghana. The purpose of this paper is to explore and discuss corruption practices inherent in public procurement of infrastructural projects in Ghana with the aim of identifying corruption related challenges that must be addressed in order to actualize the expected economic gains of infrastructural projects.
Practical implications – Implementation of sound procurement performance measurements would be imperative in the bid to curb corruption practices. The paper suggested a number of business approaches to combat corrupt practices in Ghana, which are explained in terms of political, psychological, technical, operational and retaliatory measures. In this paper, it is proposed that knowledge about and debating corruption related issues is just as important to the modern public procurement as are the abilities to creatively and logically introduce monitoring systems when planning, executing and completing projects.

OSEI-TUTU, E., BADU, E. & OWUSU-MANU, D. 2010. Exploring corruption practices in public procurement of infrastructural projects in Ghana. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 3, 236-256.

Management per result: an approach to international development project design

Ika and Lytvynov (2011) argue that “results-based management (RBM) has proved to be a valuable tool for international development project management; however, there are some inconsistencies that limit the use of RBM at the design phase to manage for results. This article presents a “management-per-result” approach to reinforcing the project design function of RBM and illustrates its application to a real-life project. Shying away from a technocratic approach, it emphasizes a “quick-and-dirty” approach and proposes an updated version of the logical framework to include success criteria and factors and very rough estimates for both project costs and benefits for targeted project results for different types of projects (infrastructure development, “process” type of project, and so forth).

IKA, L. A. & LYTVYNOV, V. 2011. The “management‐per‐result” approach to international development project design. Project Management Journal.