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Anti-Corruption Efforts Fail: External Pressure Causes Scapegoating
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- Anti-Corruption Efforts Fail: External Pressure Blames the Victim
Anti-Corruption Efforts Fail: External Pressure Causes ScapegoatingEXTERNAL PRESSURE FOR ANTI-CORRUPTION MEASURES LEADS TO SCAPEGOATING 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. 14-5 As it became clear, however, that many of the investigating police, prosecutors and judges were themselves corrupt, efforts were made to establish specialized anti-corruption units. Anti-corruption commissions became de rigueur among donors and governments alike. Many were inspired by the highly successful Hong Kong commission established in 1974 but few ever replicated its success. Conventional wisdom held that it was essential to “fry a few big fish” but governments were often careful not to vest commissions with sufficient resources or authority to do so. More worrisome, local and international pressure for prosecutions in these weak rule of law environments had led in some cases to scapegoating and politically-targeted investigations. A World Bank report on Pakistan expresses some of the typical frustrations associated with an emphasis on law enforcement and anti-corruption agencies: Corruption is a pervasive, deep-seated problem in Pakistan, affecting the civil service as well as most other institutions. There are twelve laws to deal with corruption, apart from the disabling provisions in the Constitution. The number of agencies to deal with corruption cases has expanded in recent years as politicians have made public commitments to stem it and bring corrupt employees to justice. Yet the record is bleak. Very few corrupt officials are convicted. With little or no power to investigate and prosecute, new institutions such as the Ehtesab (accountability) Commission established to fight corruption have in effect added other non-functioning layers to the bureaucracy… Anti-corruption commissions, by themselves can accomplish little in the absence of other fundamental accompanying actions (e.g. regulatory procedures, strengthening judicial institutions) and broader efforts to improve civil servants' accountability to the public.
Robin Theobald, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Polytechnic of Central London, 1990, Corruption, Development and Underdevelopment, p. 139 In sum, one-off purges and campaigns seem to have extremely limited impact on the level of corruption in a given polity. On the contrary in so far as such measures promote an atmosphere of mistrust and paranoia they may be held to encourage bureaucratic pathologies such as cronyism, factionalism and excessive politicization, if not actual corruption. The main function of these exercises seems to be to discreet and possibly eliminate opponents whilst at the same time whipping up popular support by means of a political “show” of “doing something” (on the importance of the show in politics see Nettl, 1967, p. 264-5).
Elizabeth Harrison, Anthropology Lecturer University of Sussex, 2004, Between Morality and the Law: corruption, anthropology, and comparative society, ed. I. Pardo, p. 138-9 Donor priorities of good governance are another factor. The good governance agenda is partly a response to the manifest failure of structural adjustment solutions to economic crisis. It reflects an appreciation of the fact that understanding of politics and political institutions has often been lacking. A concern with governance and corruption also roots the problem in “their” government and society, rather than international relationships. Chabal (1996) argues that both of these factors are part of a crisis of identity in the West, in which the wish to re-assert a belief in the processes of democratization is central. According to him, simplifying and pathologizing narratives about corruption join others about “the African crisis” (violence and conflict, AIDS, economic decline). Chabal suggests that this reflects a need to make sense of what the “failure” of a whole continent can mean for own “civilization.” “The expectation that colonial Africa would make good progress has been confounded and we are grappling with the consequences of such failure at a time when we are beginning to doubt the notion of identity which has underpinned our own (over)confident march into modernity and comfort.” (Chabal 1996, p. 36) CHARACTERIZING CORRUPTION AS A PROBLEM OF DEVELOPING COUNTRIES UNFAIRLY CASTS THEM AS MORALLY BLAMEWORTHY Mlada Bukovansky, Professor of Government, Smith College, 2002, ‘Corruption is bad: normative dimensions of the anti-corruption movement’, Australian National University Working Paper, 2002/5, p. 23-4 These considerations make clear that both the economic rationale for curbing corruption, and its institutional complements, are incomplete; such rationales at best harbor unexamined and potentially contradictory assumptions; and at worst can be misleading. By linking the problem of corruption to the problem of under-development, advanced industrial countries unjustifiably take the high ground for themselves, and ascribe to the “developing world” the status of the moral reprobate while simultaneously making rather vague and possibly unworkable governance demands on development country governments and societies. Pitching the discourse in this way also absolves those living in liberal capitalist states from scrutinizing their own polities in terms of the discourse of corruption. But there is a long history in political thought of engaging in just such scrutiny, and there is little reason to believe that self-scrutiny regarding the health of the modern liberal polity is no longer warranted.
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