Anti-Corruption Efforts Increase Risk of War: Conditionality

Anti-Corruption Efforts Increase Risk of War: Conditionality

Madalene O’Donnell, NYU Center on International Cooperation, 2006, Post-conflict Corruption: A Rule of Law Agenda?, Draft Chapter for International Peace Academy, Civil War and the Rule of Law, [http://www.worldbank.org.ezp1.harvard.edu/wbi/governance/pdf/corruption_conflict_and_rule_of_law.pdf], p. 21

Influential research by Burnside and Dollar in the late 1990s argued that aid was less effective in environments of high corruption (as well as bad policies and weak institutions). This left policymakers struggling with the dilemma of how to design aid programs to address corruption if corruption itself undermined the effectiveness of aid. The result was a heavy emphasis on conditionality and “selectivity” that would create incentives for states to reduce corruption and improve governance. The Monterrey Consensus was a “grand bargain” in which donors promised more aid in exchange for better governance. The US Millennium Challenge Corporation will soon offer supplemental aid for “good performers,” and it is not a coincidence that the program singles out corruption as the initial performance indicator. The World Bank has beefed up governance criteria in its country allocation formulas. The primary objective is to make their own aid more effective, but the hope is that these financial “carrots” will also make good governance a more attractive and financially viable option for leaders. In post-conflict environments, however, conditionality is very problematic. Where international actors often have large forces deployed on the ground, “walking away” is not an option and could destabilize the transition.

Anti-Corruption Efforts Imperialist

Michael Johnston, Political Science Professor, Colgate, 1986, Comparative Politics, 18(4): 459–477, p. 460

A more stable and precise standard is the law or formal regulations. Laws change, but. unless we seek a single ultimate standard, this is an advantage, not a problem: contrasts or changes in laws allow us to compare the political processes and value conflicts involved in setting rules of behavior. Hence, the definition I will employ is based upon formal-legal norms and was formulated by J. S. Nye. Corruption is "behavior which deviates from the formal duties of a public role (elective or appointive) because of private-regarding (personal. close family, private clique) wealth or status gains: or (which) violates rules against the exercise of certain types of private-regarding influence."

Definitions such as Nye's have at times been criticized as being culturally biased, particularly when applied to nations where laws and institutions have been imposed or left behind by outsiders. Indeed;'westem condescensions" and biases have been blamed both for outsiders' emphasizing corruption in developing nations" and for their ignoring it.

In one sense, definitions such as Nye's are culturally biased only if we assume from the outset that corruption is a bad thing. In that case, to identify an action as corrupt is to condemn it as well. If we avoid such prejudgments, the formal-legal definition directs our attention to critical contrasts between official and social norms. At the same time, however, we cannot deny that conflicting conceptions of right and wrong are, in large part, what make corruption politically significant in the first place. How best, then, to include this cultural dimension in the study of corruption?

Morris Szeftel, Politics and International Studies-University of Leeds, 2000, Review of African Political Economy 84: 287–306, p. 291-3

Some 35 years ago, Colin Leys suggested that corruption could frequently be understood as an expression of particular political conflicts and that it was important to ask again who was calling who corrupt and what was being described as corrupt. It is now appropriate to ask who determines prevailing views about what is acceptable and what is not. An important indication of the answer to this question can be found in the annual Corruption Perception Index (CPI), published by Transparency International in collaboration with the Center for Corruption Research at the University of Gottingen. This provides an index score and rank for countries according to their perceived levels of corruption. Although the Index has no official status, it influences the way countries are perceived internationally. A poor CPI score is unlikely to be helpful to governments seeking aid, debt relief, or approval of their progress on adjustment. It has come to be cited regularly by media and by policy-makers alike and is thus significant in creating an international anti-corruption climate and in influencing how various countries are perceived in terms of corruption. The 1999 CPI ranks 99 countries from the most honest (Denmark) to the most corrupt (Cameroon worst and Nigeria next). The CPI rankings confirm (despite a few notable exceptions) widespread perceptions that corruption is worst in developing countries, authoritarian regimes and the former communist states and least troublesome in the most developed economies. To this extent, the Index reinforces the traditional view that corruption is a “phenomenon characteristic of developing countries, authoritarian regimes or, at the outside, ‘Mediterranean’ societies in which the value system favored clientelism, vertical relationships or neopatrimonialism.”

Not surprisingly, this rough divide between an honest North and corrupt South is largely how those who were surveyed (and whose views were aggregated in the Index) see it. The CPI presents an index score which calculates how corrupt each country is perceived to be by influential individuals. They are overwhelmingly the perceptions of western business executives, politicians and media correspondents. The 1999 CPI, for instance, was calculated from 17 surveys of corruption by 11 organizations. In all but two cases, those surveyed fall into one of the following categories: expatriate business executives, business analysts in Europe and the US, US academic experts, top and middle level management in foreign and domestic companies, senior business leaders, expert staff, foreign and domestic businesses executives. The two exceptions were a 1997 Gallup survey (which asked some 34,000 people in 44 countries how honest they thought their officials were) and a 1997 International Crime Victims Survey (which collected attitudes about how people felt they were treated by the police and other officials.) The index thus represents the views of a narrow, privileged elite as far as political corruption goes and a slightly wider public as far as administrative performance is concerned. The values by which corruption and honesty are judged are those of the people who manage the globalization process, who lend money, reschedule debts, and conduct business and diplomatic activities. Even the political and business elites in developing countries are poorly represented in the sample surveyed. Donor attitudes about the nature of corruption in African states thus reflect a narrow, if extremely influential, stratum.

Robin Theobald, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Polytechnic of Central London, 1990, Corruption, Development and Underdevelopment, p. 3-4

However the public office perspective on corruption has not gone unchallenged, having for a number of writers certain important limitations. The most important of these are described below.

The first objection maintains that the notion of public office originally emerged in European societies and is essentially a western concept. In underdeveloped countries (UDCs) public office as an institution and the ethos that goes with it are not well established. In such countries nepotism, patronage and minor forms of bribery embodied in gift-giving, far from attracting opprobrium, are often socially approved. Therefore a definition which is based on the notion of public office imposes on many if not most of the countries in the world a conception and related norms of behavior which are quite alien to them.

A second objection argues that to make public office central to definitions of corruption requires that we accept the standards of a government which defines the norms and procedures of the public offices within its jurisdiction. This may involve implicitly condoning a regime which is extremely repressive and which regularly abuses the most basic of human liberties. Some governments, for example, have publicly justified the use of torture against “enemies of the state.” Do we regard, therefore, the action of a policeman who takes a bribe not to torture a suspect or to torture him/her less severely, as an example of corruption? The moral and conceptual dilemmas thrown up by such questions, together with the implicit endorsement of obnoxious or unacceptable behavior, are seen as major shortcomings of the public office conception of corruption.

A third objection submits that the idea of public office which typically underpins definitions is imbued with a spurious precision. That is to say bureaucratic roles are commonly conceived in terms of sets of rules and procedures which are precisely formulated so that non-compliance is immediately and unequivocally apparent. In fact the fast body of literature on formal organizations, both public and private, clearly demonstrates that the performance of all bureaucratic roles involves an element of discretion or some degree of flexibility in the interpretation of rules and procedures. Indeed many writers have argued that without this area of discretion bureaucracies could not function; rigid adherence to the rules would rapidly bring administration to a standstill. Therefore to base one’s conception of corruption on deviations from the norms of public office when such deviations are usual, if not necessary, is to invite confusion.

Elizabeth Harrison, Anthropology Lecturer University of Sussex, 2004, Between Morality and the Law: corruption, anthropology, and comparative society, ed. I. Pardo, p. 139-40