Conference: Conflict of Interest

interdisciplinary conference organised by the Basel Institute on Governance

Conflict of interest is an important governance problem on all levels of governance, ranging from local to global, both in the public and the corporate sphere. Such conflict can influence decision making in the management of corporations, town councils, parliaments, national and international courts and tribunals, and in international conferences and organisations.

The law faculty of the University of Basel and the Basel Institute on Governance seek to explore this problem in corporate, public, and global governance, from a legal, political scientific, economic and sociological perspective, and from both a theoretical and practical angle. The conference and the publication which will arise out of it are dedicated to seeing how conflicts of interest are defined and dealt with in theory and practice. They also have the ambition of provoking the debate around a topic which can be value-laden, but on which factual evidence is, to some extent, lacking.

The objective is to develop an interdisciplinary and empirically grounded conceptual framework that links specific legal, social, political and economic tools to understand better how conflicts of interest can be defined, regulated, how they work in practice, at which level of governance they are most critical, and how they can be solved. The conference is aimed at being a mutual learning exercise for all participants.

Papers will be presented which have been selected from submissions to an international call for papers, and by invited keynote speakers from various disciplines who have already published in the field. All papers will be discussed, reviewed and edited so as to complement and respond to each other. The outcome of the learning process should be a coherent, interdisciplinary scholarly volume which will be proposed to Cambridge University Press for publication.

Speakers include:

- Kocra Assoua: Socio-Political Crisis, Conflicts of Interest and the Reconfiguration of Political Order in Cote d’Ivoire;
- Gregor Dobler: Self-Interested Actions by Administrators and their Institutional Framing: A Namibian Case Study;
- John Onyeukwu: The Conflict of Interest Explanation of Nigeria’s Chequered History of Anticorruption;
- Jan Christoph Richter: Conflicts of Interests of Heads of State: The Example of Madagascar

Download: programme (pdf)

For further information contact: lic. phil. Daniel Hoegger, MA: daniel.hoegger-at-unibas.ch

Venue:
Juristische Fakultät
Peter Merian-Weg 8
4052 Basel

Info & Registration:
www.baselgovernance.org

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