Corruption and Anti-Corruption 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 resources3. Major impediment to development (MDGs and SDGs) 4. Significant contributor to conflict & impacts on state-building activities5. 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 anti-corruption 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-Challenge- Competition.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 corruptionPA 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… 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? 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