Neoliberal Reform, Governance and Corruption in the South: Assessing the International Anti‐Corruption Crusade

Abstract

This paper presents a critique of current thinking on the causes and impacts of corruption and the measures designed to combat it. It begins by exploring the evolution of the current preoccupation with corruption and traces the growth in international initiatives designed to tackle the issue. It then moves on to consider the assumptions underlying the dominant schools of thought on corruption and alternative definitions of the phenomenon. The limitations of the dominant neoliberal perspective are explored in detail, focusing particularly on its blindness to the complex interplay between economic liberalisation, political power and institutional reform. An alternative framework that locates corruption at the systemic level is proposed. The paper concludes with some thoughts on potential directions for future geographical research on the topic.

Transnational Business Governance and the Management of Natural Resources

“…iv Two years later, member states negotiated the OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, which some heralded as the impetus to changes in attitudes towards corruption worldwide. (Brown and Cloke 2004;McCoy 2001;George, Lacey, and Birmele 2000) By the middle of the decade, the norms about corruption had changed in significant ways.…”

Good governance in the Pacific? Ambivalence and possibility

“…For many of the agents of this agenda, the term is narrowly focused. For example, The World Bank's approach has aligned with the ''anti-corruption crusade'' (Brown and Cloke, 2004;Larmour, 1997) and a basic focus on ''building the climate for investment'' (see Wolfowitz, 2006;World Bank, 2005a). The UNDP's people-centered approach has been sidelined by a governance agenda focused on business-friendly financial and economic management (UNDP, 2005, p. 49;Choudry, 2002).…”

“…Moore, 2002). Geopolitically, the frequent invocation of poor, bad, or weak governance to diagnose the ills of poorer countries is allied to an increased emphasis on corruption (Brown and Cloke, 2004) and draws meaning from related descriptors such as 'failed' or 'failing states', and 'fragile states' (Leftwich, 2005). Such terms are now ''widely deployed to identify parts of the world outside the congress of global liberalism, states whose failures must be corrected if the global jigsaw puzzle of liberal democracy is to be completed'' (Smith, 2005, p. 194).…”

People power and anti-corruption; demystifying citizen-centred approaches

“…Or, if wants to be even more charitable, it can take a long time, and involve innumerable set-backs before change really does become evident; where it has emerged, in other words, effective corruption control came about "over generations or centuries" and not the electoral or administrative cycles against which many public policies are measured now (Johnston, 2014: 2). For the less charitable, the reasons for failure are much more malign, as an 'anti-corruption industry' seeks to secure the next contract and with that the next pay-cheque, more or less regardless of whether the advice given has any qualitatively positive impacts (Brown and Cloke, 2004;Bukovansky, 2006;Sampson 2008Sampson , 2010Walton, 2013).…”