The sustainable development goals SDG movement has stated the critical importance of fighting corruption in order to sustain more equitable, just and peaceful societies. To achieve the sustainable development goals corruption at all levels should be drastically reduced. Specifically, the goal 16 of the SDG's specifies the objective to promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies to reach sustainable development stating the importance of building effective and accountable institutions at the different local, regional and global levels. To achieve this goal becomes more important and critical in those societies that have negotiated and solved long enduring social and armed conflicts like in the case of Colombia. Once the negotiation process has ended with armed groups an important effort of reconstruction of sustainable peace should be developed. One prerequisite of this process is to fight and reduce corruption.On the other hand corruption is an elusive phenomena that permeates the political, economic and social institutions of a given country. It is a concept that has been proven difficult to measure and its conceptual approach through perceptual measures, as in the case of the country Index proposed by Transparency International, entails the problem that the index variation in time and between and within countries cannot be explained by a particular causal model that links different independent factors to the existence of corruption. This model is particularly important for different regions within a country. That is why I propose the concept of integrity, as the opposite of corruption, as a multidimensional, multilevel concept that can be worked out as the dependent variable to understand the phenomena and design a strategy that acts on the different dimensions of integrity, understood also as good governance at the territorial level. In this conceptual paper, I explore and develop the idea of constructing integrity indexes at the regional level for the different post-conflict regions in Colombia. In this conceptual paper I propose a multicausal model of an integrity indexes that provides the conceptual tools to construct a base line at the regional level to measure and monitor institutional risks that can prevent the advances of reconciliation, state construction and normalization and rehabilitation of regions. Proposing specific variables and its corresponding indicators to be monitores in time can create specific alarms to the central government to take decisions and intervene in those regions where critical institutional risks exist that can prevent the success of a sustainable post-conflict strategy that should be pursued by the different governments in the country. Variables will cover institutional risks, political risks, emergence of armed groups, social variables and preservation of strategic ecosystems and its associated biodiversity.
Key words: corruption, sustainable development, integrity, post-conflict regions, Colombia
9a. Peace and security
