Paper short abstract:

Anti-corruption strategies in adverse contexts have to combine impact with feasibility. Apart from improving the enforcement capacities of critical agencies, the thrust of the strategy has to be to change the incentives and capabilities of the stakeholders directly involved in the corruption.

Paper long abstract:

Developing countries are characterized by political settlements where formal rules are weakly enforced. Anti-corruption strategies in these contexts focusing on the enforcement capacities of the formal state have typically delivered poor results. An alternative approach is to identify anti-corruption activities that are likely to have a high impact and that can be feasible in these contexts.

We suggest an approach for identifying high-impact and feasible anti-corruption strategies from the bottom up. This involves identifying the overlapping processes of corruption that are often simultaneously involved in particular corruption problems. We typically expect to see more than one overlapping set of processes driving corruption in the implementation of particular policies or institutions. By drawing on theories of rents and rent seeking, and of political settlements, we can assess the developmental impact of these corrupt processes and the relative power and capability of the interests driving and sometimes resisting these processes.

We argue that feasible anti-corruption cannot be based only on developing governance capabilities in critical agencies. The latter is only likely to be effective (given the limited gains in enforcement capacity that are plausible) if the interests and capabilities of some of the stakeholders involved in driving or resisting the relevant corruption can also be changed. We examine four related strategies for changing these incentives and capabilities and we argue that this can provide a framework for organizing research on the impact and feasibility of anti-corruption activities in different priority areas in target countries.

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