Paper short abstract:

Legal dimensions of anti-corruption policy (institutions, rules and procedures) form a reciprocally conditioning system with targeted background informal norms . The resulting complex normative topography for anti-corruption policy (int’l and national) is studied in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan.

Paper long abstract:

Anti-corruption discourse and practice have both been dominated by a narrow set of analytic approaches and policy responses. The specifically legal entailments of anti-corruption policy, at the level both of international donor interventions and of national implementation measures, are often taken for granted and have only rarely come in for focussed critique. Whether in the form of anti-corruption institutions or substantive and procedural rules (legislation and regulations), they have typically proved formulaic and mechanical and rarely reflect any socio-legal sophistication or reckoning with local context. From a broader informal governance perspective (rather than a narrower anti-corruption focus), the operation of formal anti-corruption rules and institutions (and changes to them) must be understood as both conditioned by and themselves conditioning informal systems (which also consist of rules albeit tacit and institutions albeit unchartered) in a complex interdependence in its own right. This paper will examine the 'normative topography' (formal and informal rules and institutions) for anti-corruption in contemporary Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan) and address donor policies/recommendations and national responses/initiatives. This is not simply a matter of the complexity of gauging the incentives and disincentives shaping certain (problematic) patterns of behaviour and practices but of coming to terms with their social, cultural and normative embeddedness and the manner in which changes to the formal norms can produce compensatory adjustments in the informal norms. Moreover it means reconceptualising the informal repertoire (and governing norms) not as the default target of policy interventions but as their context and even potential instrument.