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Corruption and AntiCorruption in Africa
Paul Jackson, Heather Marquette and Caryn Peiffer
Zambezi News Minister for Impending
Projects
Why worry about
corruption?
1. Cost of corruption:
• Decreases GDP by 1%/yr (UN)
• Bribery alone $1 trillion/yr (World
Bank)
• 3-5% world GDP (World Bank & IMF)
2. Corruption wastes development
resources
3. Major impediment to development
(MDGs and SDGs)
4. Significant contributor to conflict &
impacts on state-building activities
5. In the ‘Age of Austerity’ less tolerated by
donors?
Definitions of corruption
• No one, generally accepted definition and varies according to
political context
• Legal: What is illegal is corrupt; what is legal is not corrupt
• Socio-Economic: Corruption as the result of individual rational
decisions: e.g. ‘The abuse of public office for private gains’
(World Bank)
• Anthropological/Political: The norms, rules, customs &
perceptions of corruption emphasising the importance of
morality and trust issues as well as forms and organisation of
powers
• Robert Klitgaard: “Corruption is more pronounced in
systems characterised by the formula C=M+D-A
[Corruption = Monopoly + Discretion - Accountability].”
Typologies of corruption
•
Bureaucratic vs Political
•
Petty vs Grand
•
Need vs Greed
•
Active vs Passive
•
Incidental vs Systemic
•
Quiet Corruption
Forms of Corruption
3 Generations of Anti-Corruption?
•1st Generation – supply
side
•C=M+D-A
•Building institutions
•ICAC model =
Prevention, Punishment,
Education
•E.g., Ombudsman,
ACAs, judicial reform etc
•2nd Generation – demand
side
•Support for civil society
•Citizen ‘voice’
•E.g., citizen report
cards, media training,
civic education etc
So why a 3rd generation of anti-corruption?
Basically because several years of anticorruption strategies have had little effect
according to the evidence.
So why are we on the ‘3rd generation’?
•Universalist assumptions have
hampered anti-corruption efforts
•Corruption is a contextual
phenomenon
•The international drivers of
corruption are poorly understood
& often undermine 1st & 2nd
generation reforms
•Assessing corruption and
monitoring anti-corruption efforts
are difficult (and dangerous!)…they
don’t call it ‘fighting corruption’ for
nothing!
New research on corruption & collective
action (DLP/UoB/U4 – www.dlprog.org )
Dissatisfaction with anti-corruption work at many levels; increasing pressure
for donors, policy-makers and practitioners to ‘show results’
• Systematic review (Hanna et al 2011); evidence paper (Johnson, Taxell &
Zaum 2012); U4 & DFID Proxy Challenge
http://www.u4.no/assets/themes/evaluation/Proxy-ChallengeCompetition.pdf
• Both ‘supply-side’ and ‘demand-side’ approaches are failing to deliver
• Increasingly, critics point to a ‘mischaracterisation’ of the problem;
corruption isn’t a principal-agent problem but is instead a collective action
problem; no ‘principled principals’ (Bauhr & Nasiritousi 2011; Booth 2012;
Marquette 2012; Mungiu-Pippidi 2011; Persson, Rothstein & Teorell
2012; Rothstein 2011)
• Inherently logical analysis, but has had the effect of swooping the rug out
from under practitioners with no real sense of the practical implications
The problem with a principal agent
theory of corruption
PA theory comes from
shareholders and
managers
What if there are no
principled principals?
Who is the principal?
The public? The
public servants?
How can we think differently about
corruption?
 Is corruption actually a collective action
problem? i.e. in an environment where
everyone is perceived to be corrupt then
there is no incentive not to be corrupt
 CA is really about why some people act in a
way that is against the interests of the
group
 It is an approach linked to the free rider
problem – if a person cannot be excluded
from a benefit then their incentive is to free
ride.
More controversial…
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Is corruption always a bad thing?
Prison gangs in the US function
because of a lack of institutional
protection
Weak institutions lead to
patrimonialism meaning that access
to services may be reliant on ‘our’
corrupt politician
‘Doing the wrong thing for the right
reasons’
Is getting some corrupt provision
better than no provision at all?
What does this mean in practice?
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Co-ordination of activities and construction of
anti-corruption coalitions
If political will to reduce corruption is lacking this
may be because corruption solves some
problems. The answer to this is to find out which
problems and how to solve them legitimately
We also need to recognise that corruption and
anti-corruption are political, not technical issues
Implication is that anti-corruption should be seen
in a broader context instead of just looking at
individual incentives