Contextualising conceptions of corruption: challenges for the international anti-corruption campaign

In the recent past, international organisations, governments,non-governmental organisations and academics have been paying increasing attention to corruption. There was initially consensus that corruption has negative effects on development, macroeconomics, rule of law anddemocracy, and on social expenditure. Since then, numerous criticisms of anti?corruption activities and research have been generated. This paper highlights these critiques.

While broad consensus exists that corruption needs to be fought, so faranti-corruption efforts remain largely unsuccessful. Anti-corruption strategies, and the studies associated with them have been critiqued forthe following problems:

• the difficulty in defining a sufficient universal definition of corruption
• problems in measuring corruption and the poor academic quality of corruption studies
• the tendency to view corruption in liberal-rationalist terms,emphasising utility and economic analyses, ignoring questions ofpolitics and the fact of the normative concept of corruption
• the imposition of anti-corruption standards on societies which have not been included in the process of formulating them, by countries and institutions themselves deficient in democratic legitimacy
• a one-sided causal analysis which fails to understand which interests are pursued by the actors involved
• insufficient understanding of how global governance structures in the anti?corruption domain have ultimately emerged.

The paper argues that contextualisation should be enabled with respectto the culturally shaped conception of the division between the public and the private;local understandings of corruption, that is, what is actually meant when talking about 'corruption'; and an awareness of how low socioeconomic development levels in some countries do not permit theabsence of corruption.

The critique regarding the measurement of corruption is closely related to the question of how to delimit the phenomenon through a definition.Some anti?corruption concepts are not democratically legitimate,and the concept of corruption and ideas on the proper functioning of political systems are socially and culturally specific. This makes the anti?corruption consensus problematic.The analysis suggests that:

• Since many studies focus on concrete projects resulting in thedanger of an imprecise generalised condemnation of the anti?corruption campaign, the term 'corruption' has to be defined in a tangible way to avoid condemning important social practices in local contexts of the global South.
• The topic of corruption should not be connected with problems of norm implementation and norm enforcement.
• It is necessary to learn more about the ambiguities of the term in its local translations and the anti?corruption campaign must contextualisethe concept.