The Global Risks Forum (GRF)
Capture happens when a public body, regulator, standard setter or council comes to serve the interests it should oversee or the sponsors that fund it. Integrity is the set of safeguards that keeps decisions oriented to their public or institutional purpose. This page sets out how conflicts of interest, sponsor dependence, lobbying and revolving doors erode independence, how integrity can be read from records rather than reputation, and which bodies hold the decisions that protect it.
GRF · Established · service level R0
Regulatory capture is the situation in which a public body, regulator, standard setter or council comes to serve the interests it should oversee or the sponsors that fund it. Integrity safeguards keep decisions oriented to their public purpose: interest declarations, lobbying registers, cooling-off rules, recorded recusals and independent funding.
For anti capture and integrity, in GRF's situational-awareness reading, the map opens on population density, night lights and flood water with place names and borders from NASA GIBS, framed on Asia; every other NASA layer, live feed and forecast waits in the layer list.
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For anti capture and integrity, in GRF's situational-awareness reading, the map opens on population density, night lights and flood water with place names and borders from NASA GIBS, framed on Asia; every other NASA layer, live feed and forecast waits in the layer list.Satellite and model products as NASA publishes them, each with its own date; indicators, not assessments of any place; claim ceiling INTEGRATED.
Layers and dates
The working screen behind this subject: its structure, terms and states. Names are placeholders and values illustrative.
Anti-capture safeguards and integrity · Council A · Meeting 18
| Risk appetite statement | P-596 | Approve | None | Discussing |
| New member admission | P-550 | Approve | Declared | Next |
| Safeguards annual review | P-265 | Note | None | Next |
| Data charter | P-255 | Consult | None | Done |
in place, of 12
Conflicts, sponsor independence and influence. The dossier below sets out how the risk develops, what is measured, where the data come from, how it is modelled and who decides.
Funding, staff, data or legitimacy supplied by a regulated party or a dominant sponsor create quiet pressure. No instruction is needed: agendas, framings and the questions not asked shift toward the provider.
Well-resourced interests attend more consultations, meet officials more often and supply more of the evidence. Without disclosure and balanced participation, the record of a decision reflects who had access rather than the range of interests affected.
Movement between regulators and regulated firms brings expertise but also shared outlooks and expectations of future employment. Cooling-off rules and recusal records decide whether the benefit outweighs the risk.
Undeclared interests, informal gifts and unminuted meetings that pass without consequence set the norm for larger ones. Integrity failures compound until an investigation exposes a pattern that was visible in the records all along.
Each term as this page uses it. Where a standard-setting body defines the term, the wording follows that body.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Revolving door | Movement of people between regulatory roles and the industries they regulate. |
| Cooling-off period | A set time before a former official may take a role with an organization they regulated. |
| Lobbying register | A public record of who lobbies officials, on what and with what resources. |
Each indicator carries its unit, its cadence, the kind of source behind it and the evidence label a value would carry. No values are shown: a programme supplies them under its own authority.
| Indicator | Unit | Cadence | Source type | Label |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corruption Perceptions Index score | perception score on a zero to one hundred scale, with standard error | annual | Composite of expert and business perception surveys | ESTIMATED |
| Control of corruption estimate | standardised score with standard error | annual | Worldwide Governance Indicators composite | ESTIMATED |
| Asset and interest declaration coverage | share of covered officials with filed and published declarations | annual | Integrity agency registers | OFFICIAL |
| Lobbying register in force | yes or no; categories of lobbyist covered | per change | Legislation and OECD public integrity data | OFFICIAL |
| Post-employment cooling-off rules for regulators | length and scope of restriction | per change | Legislation and codes of conduct | OFFICIAL |
| Recusals recorded in decision minutes | count per body per year | annual | Board and committee minutes | REPORTED |
| Funding from regulated or interested parties | share of income by source category | annual | Financial statements of the body | DECLARED |
| UNCAC implementation review status | review cycle and stage completed | per review cycle | UNODC country review reports | OFFICIAL |
The topic as a computational graph: named sources feed the methods, an evidence review gates the outputs, and the decisions stay with the authorities that hold them.
Fig. 02Nodes carry their type, two metric rows and a state; connectors show what feeds what; dashed frames name the owners; the timeline is the cadence. Design of the pipeline, not a record of a run.
Named public datasets and institutional records, each with its licence class. Sources by agreement are used only under their terms and never republished.
| Source | What it gives | Licence class |
|---|---|---|
| Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index | Annual perception-based scores of public sector corruption, with methodology and source surveys | Free, attribution, no derivatives (CC BY-ND 4.0) |
| World Bank Worldwide Governance Indicators | Control of corruption and voice and accountability estimates with standard errors | Free and open, CC BY 4.0 |
| OECD Public Integrity Indicators | Comparative data on integrity frameworks, lobbying, conflict-of-interest and political finance rules | Free and open, attribution (OECD terms) |
| UNCAC Implementation Review Mechanism country reports | Peer reviews of states' implementation of the Convention against Corruption | Public records, UN terms |
| Council of Europe GRECO evaluation reports | Evaluations of anti-corruption measures, including for parliamentarians, judges and prosecutors | Public records, Council of Europe terms |
| EU Transparency Register | Declared interest representatives, their clients and their spending on EU lobbying | Free reuse, attribution (EU open data terms) |
| V-Dem dataset | Expert-coded indicators on executive, legislative and judicial corruption, with measurement models | Free and open, CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Governance Nexus prepares evidence. The decisions below are taken by the authorities named, under their own rules, and never by the platform.
| Who decides | The question | Evidence this page serves |
|---|---|---|
| Legislatures | Whether lobbying, declaration and cooling-off rules are adequate and enforced | Comparative integrity frameworks, GRECO and UNCAC review findings, case evidence |
| Anti-corruption and integrity agencies | Which sectors and offices to prioritise for prevention and investigation | Declaration coverage, recusal records, influence maps from public registers |
| Boards of regulators and standard setters | Whether funding, staffing and consultation arrangements protect independence | Funding-source breakdowns, sponsor-independence checklists, comparable cases |
| Sponsors and funders of councils and research bodies | What conditions on funding preserve the recipient's independence | Ethics guidance, firewall arrangements in comparable bodies |
Regulatory capture theory describes how agencies can come to favour the industries they regulate, through concentrated industry interest, information asymmetry and career incentives. Cognitive capture is subtler: when regulators and regulated share training, networks and assumptions, they may see problems the same way without any improper act. Similar dynamics affect standard-setters, research funders, multistakeholder initiatives and forums.
For convening institutions, sponsorship and hosting create obvious risks. A sponsor may seek to influence speakers, agendas or conclusions; a host may expect favourable treatment. The integrity of the forum depends on rules that separate support from editorial control and on transparency about who supports what.
Integrity failures are often gradual. Small accommodations, such as a preferred speaker or a softened conclusion, can accumulate into systematic bias. Strong institutions treat integrity as a design problem rather than a matter of individual virtue.
Diversity of participation is itself a safeguard. Forums that include affected communities, independent experts and critics, and that publish who took part, are harder to capture than closed groups of like-minded insiders, though inclusion must be meaningful rather than token to have this effect.
Declared interests for staff, reviewers and speakers; effectiveness depends on enforcement.
Separating funding, programming and editorial decisions.
Publishing funders, hosts and their roles; disclosure alone does not remove influence.
Limits: capture is difficult to prove, because influence often leaves no trace, and evidence often relies on patterns rather than specific acts.
The current service level is R0: information and enquiries. An enquiry receives a reference and names the next step; applications, payments, compute allocations and registrations open only when their team, terms and review capacity exist.