how anti-corruption policy is practised in different sectors and policy 20 Corruption and Development
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areas: Alolo on gender and public management reform in Ghana; Speck on political finance in Mozambique; Bracking on the regulation of devel- opment finance; Heeks on technology transfer and Santiso on assistance to budgetary auditing in Latin America. The chapters variously illustrate two potentially contradictory conclusions: that 1) at the meso and micro policy levels intervention in anti-corruption is harvesting positive results, particularly illustrated within the chapters by Speck, Heeks and Santiso, as long as these are locally owned and initiated; but that 2) flaws in policy implementation are also still in evidence, particularly where anti-corruption policy is fashionable rather than part of a longer process of political reform and democratisation (Alolo, Heeks, and Bracking).
When corruption policy is clumsily attached to other generic policy processes, such as within programmes of gender in public management (Alolo), but not adequately integrated, its implementation is flawed.
These implementation problems derive from various causes, illus- trated here in the work of Alolo and Bracking, as, respectively: due to a fickle pursuit of fashionable trends, such as using gender mainstreaming to ‘carry’ anti-corruption policy (Alolo); and due to contradictory and limited perceptions of who is likely to be corrupt rooted in racialised world- views, such as in pursuing development projects with ineffective regula- tion of Northern consultants (Bracking). These causes have in common the institutional and discursive weaknesses of international develop- ment policy and practice: its rarification and separateness from other policy areas; its spacial and racial divorce from comparable, complimen- tary and catalysing processes sited in the North; and its post-colonial mind- set and pathologising of the ‘Other’. Despite this context, however, the social agency of democratic change still, as in conclusion 1) has chances to breathe, leading to the contradictions of policy negotiation in practice.
Alolo looks in particular at the genealogy of intervention in the African public sector and modes of civil service reform, critically assess- ing the latest fashionable inclusion of ‘gender mainstreaming’ as the panacea for previous failure. In this, women are seen as less prone to cor- rupt behaviour than men, such that their very presence is predicted to reduce corruption. Alolo deconstructs this essentialist association, argu- ing that in fact women are not less prone overall to corrupt behaviour than are men, but that the justification and type of behaviour differs by gender, at least in her case study group of Ghanaian public servants.
Similarly, Heeks provides a model of the inherent problems in transfer- ring policy without consideration to domestic policy context, drawn from e-government interventions, but applicable to anti-corruption initia- tives more generally. These problems of policy transfer and design seem Sarah Bracking 21 9780230_525504_02_cha01.qxp 8/22/2007 5:51 PM Page 21
to severally confound donor implementation, despite evidence that they are ubiquitous and could be tackled.
Meanwhile, Bracking writes of a policy sector, development finance, particularly sensitive to corrupt abuse, where an anti-corruption consid- eration built into generic policy is long overdue. Recent efforts to provide increased oversight of contracts and derivative business within the aid industry share the ‘adjunct’ model of policy transfer, (described above in relation to the chapters by Alolo and Heeks) where anti-corruption over- sight is a poor relation of generic development policy and practice.
Relatedly, Bracking’s chapter illustrates a general myopia about the role of donor intervention itselfin generating opportunities for corruption, which then remain unregulated and separate from other areas of policy.
This exclusivity of anti-corruption policy from other areas of donor inter- vention is not restricted to the aid-generated private sector (as described in Bracking), but has been observed in other donor sectors and policy areas, notably, within poverty measurement and relief programmes in India (see Mukherjee, 2005). For example, research by Mukherjee (2005) has illustrated how a poverty measurement, targeting and relief exercise in West Bengal was pursued singularly and mechanically during 2002, despite evidence of widespread corruption, illustrating donor myopia in relation to the opportunities created by a poverty programme.
Speck, in this volume, reflects on the impact of accountability systems in regulating the political economy of party financing in Mozambique, in contradistinction to much Africanist literature which stresses the pathology of the African state in a generalist manner. Speck’s chapter serves as a reminder that political reform did not start, and nor will it end, with the current phase of anti-corruption reform, and that democ- ratisation of polities in their plural aspects remains the best insurance against corrupt practice. Catalysed at the end of the civil war in 1992 by global best practice in this area, political finance in Mozambique is rela- tively well-regulated, albeit in a political system retaining elements of cronyism. In a similar vein of illustrating institutionalised accountability processes which are established methods of improving government integrity, Santiso then provides a comprehensive overview of donor sup- port to processes of improving fiscal governance in Latin America. He illustrates that development assistance has reflected increasing technical capacity and enhanced analytical capabilities in the area of managing public finances. IFIs here have shown a growing understanding of the importance of parliaments and wider political process, as opposed to merely the ‘adjunct’ external institutions, to enacting accountability.
However, using the example of Nicaragua, he also illustrates how these 22 Corruption and Development
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substantial improvements can be emasculated by adverse political devel- opments. These latter two chapters provide the best evidence to support proposition 1) above, that anti-corruption reform at an institutional and meso-level can produce positive results, and that the perverse effects of the anti-corruption campaign, in 2) above, are sited instead predomin- antly in the implementation of development policy, and more widely within the discursive and ideological framing of political change within global development discourse.