Social Networks of Corruption in the Vietnamese and Lao Cross-Border Timber Trade

To, Phuc Xuan; Mahanty, Sango; Dressler, Wolfram

doi:10.1080/00664677.2014.893505

Cited by 25 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…The growing literature on the political ecology of forestry in Laos has focused on themes including elite networks of patronage and illegal logging (e.g. To et al ., ), and agribusiness development as accumulation by dispossession (e.g. Baird, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sparking development or consuming the countryside? Lao charcoal commodity networks in the Mekong Region

Barney

2016

Asia Pacific Viewpoint

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One of the unexpected outcomes of increased regional integration in southern Laos has been a boom in household production and roadside sale of wood charcoal. This paper develops an ethnographically informed analysis of charcoal as a socially embedded market, providing insights into the sociopolitical relations of access, legal and extra-legal regulations, and the distribution of rents that characterise this trade. Contrary to some assumptions about charcoal as a necessarily exploitative commodity, this paper points to some of the advantageous income smoothing opportunities that charcoal presents for many rural Lao households and detail the complex ways in which charcoal production can relate to forest sustainability and degradation. The paper elaborates a perspective of entrepreneurial Lao charcoal communities, energetically utilising locally available natural resources, for direct cash income. Charcoal production networks also connect everyday household livelihoods in Laos to largescale extractive industry, in ways that have been arguably underemphasised previously. At the same time, the charcoal trade highlights the structural limits to notions of smallholder agency and local participation in commodified market relations, within broader political-economic contexts decidedly shaped through uneven development, and accumulation through dispossession.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sparking development or consuming the countryside? Lao charcoal commodity networks in the Mekong Region

Barney

2016

Asia Pacific Viewpoint

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“…Far from being primarily a financial transaction, corruption involve[s] kin‐like relationships, friendships, and the maintenance of trust through social rituals and tributes’. In other words, ‘payments and favours are sustained through a logic of sociality’ (To et al., : 171, 168). To sum up using the words of Polanyi, in pre‐industrial societies bribe economies are wholly ‘ submerged in… social relationships’ (Polanyi, /2001: 65, emphasis added).…”

Section: Patron–client Network and Corruption: Perspectives From Ecomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For instance, the members of the trans‐border corrupt network studied by To et al. () refer to each other with names that echo aspects of the traditional Vietnamese family. Yet, it is material interest rather than traditional deference that oils the wheels of patron–client exchange.…”

Section: Patron–client Network and Corruption: Perspectives From Ecomentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In To et al.’s rich ethnography of a smuggling network in Vietnam, the bribe‐giving businessman refers to the bureaucrat who agrees to broker a bribe payment on his behalf as his ‘elder brother’. In the traditional Vietnamese family, the ‘elder brother’ is expected to protect his siblings from harm, including from business risks (To et al., : 164). In a similar study of cross‐border tax evasion in China, the bribing businessman gives a bureaucrat a tiger pelt as a bribe but casts it as a gift ‘to ward off evil’.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…I should also add that, just as social networks and their rituals enable and facilitate corrupt exchange, the latter constitute a constant ‘investment’ in network relations that nurture and reproduce the existing neo‐patrimonial structures (To et al., ).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Can Institutional Reforms Reduce Corruption? Economic Theory and Patron–Client Politics in Developing Countries

Uberti¹

2015

Development and Change

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The 'anti-corruption consensus' of the dominant development paradigm sees corruption as a governance failure and maintains that graft can be reduced or eradicated through appropriate institutional reforms, such as strengthening the judiciary, designing corruption-proof regulatory regimes, and establishing anti-corruption agencies. This article aims to cast doubt on the theoretical rationale of this family of anti-corruption interventions. The neo-classical paradigm that informs the consensus is based on a set of unsatisfactory idealizations, which undermine the explanatory power of mainstream economic models of corruption. Drawing on insights from economic sociology and anthropology, the article develops an account of the relationship between corruption, cultural norms and patron-client politics in developing countries. This account shows that corruption is embedded in socio-cultural structures that are endemic to the process of transition to industrial capitalism -a transition that all developing countries are arguably undergoing, however haltingly. This insight clarifies the theoretical limitations of mainstream corruption economics and provides a framework for constructing more empirically adequate explanations of corruption levels in specific countries. It also suggests that substantially reducing, let alone eradicating, corruption in the developing world may not be possible without fundamentally rethinking the existing set of anti-corruption strategies and techniques.

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Introduction

Shah¹

2019

Biomedicine, Healing and Modernity in Rural Bangladesh

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Social Networks of Corruption in the Vietnamese and Lao Cross-Border Timber Trade

Cited by 25 publications

References 19 publications

Sparking development or consuming the countryside? Lao charcoal commodity networks in the Mekong Region

Sparking development or consuming the countryside? Lao charcoal commodity networks in the Mekong Region

Can Institutional Reforms Reduce Corruption? Economic Theory and Patron–Client Politics in Developing Countries

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