Indira M. Carr

Corruption, the Southern African Development Community Anti-Corruption Protocol and the Principal-Agent-Client Model

Since the 1990s a number of anti-corruption conventions have been adopted due to pressure from international financial institutions, donor countries and governments of major industrialised nations. One of these conventions is the Anti-Corruption Protocol adopted by the Southern African Development Community. This article examines this Convention against the backdrop of the principal-agent-client (PAC) model which influences much of the current anti-corruption measures ranging from legal and civil service reform through to privatisation of the public sector. In focusing on the efforts to fight and prevent corruption through legal and public sector reform this paper highlights the limitations of externally imposed solutions largely driven by donors. Using Tanzania, a country that has seen extensive technical input from donor agencies in reforming the law and bureaucratic structures, as an illustration, this article argues that the limited success of such donor driven anti-corruption strategies is attributable to a number of reasons ranging from reform policies of donors and paternalistic attitudes to political shifts and antipathy towards external demands for reforms that are fuelled by the colonial past. This paper recommends that for a recipient country to take ownership of the anti-corruption strategies it is important to tailor the PAC model to the cultural, social and political context of the recipient country so that the solutions are seen as an indigenous initiative thus enabling sustainable change in attitudes and behaviour.

Corruption, legal solutions and limits of law

Since the mid-1990s there has been intense activity in terms of anti-corruption initiatives. Section 1 of this paper (Regulatory measures: the conventions) focuses on the frameworks of these conventions and in the course of their assessment argues (a) that the lack of a unified approach is unlikely to further the fight against corruption in any meaningful way, (b) that regulation is unlikely to be effective in terms of results unless there are robust enforcement mechanisms in place, and (c) that anti-corruption legislation provides only a partial answer and that we need to engage in what I call a process of re-socialisation. Section 2 (Enforcement and informers) highlights the difficulties associated with enforcing the conventions and explores whether the antiquated qui tam action might serve a useful purpose in addressing the problem of enforcement deficit. Section 3 (Fighting corruption through re-socialisation) asks whether greater social awareness through education provides a possible solution. Guided by a humanistic philosophy of society the view is put forward that part of the answer for effectively tackling corruption lies in making people aware of its long-term effects.

Corruption, Development, Financial Institutions and Politically Exposed Persons

The United Nations Millennium Declaration of 2000 was translated into a roadmap, setting out measurable goals such as the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) to be achieved by 2015. The first goal was to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger by reducing “by half the proportion of people whose income is less than

NGOs Fighting Corruption: Theory and Practice

1 a day”, achieving “full and productive employment and decent work for all, including women and young people”, and reducing “by half the proportion of people who suffer from hunger”. Due to lack of progress towards the goal set by the MDG the target date for the elimination of poverty was extended to 2030 by the UN Sustainable Development Goals in 2015. Development, seen as a key factor for poverty eradication, is marred by corruption on the part of the bureaucratic and political elite (often termed politically exposed persons or PEPS). This chapter examines the links between development, corruption and money laundering and the measures adopted to prevent money laundering by the PEPS.

Controlling corruption through corporate social responsibility and corporate governance: theory and practice

Since the last decade of the twentieth century corruption has caught the attention of international community which has resulted in the adoption and wide acceptance regional and international anti-corruption treaties. Many of these treaties expect non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to play an important role in combating corruption. As yet, there is no empirical study, to our knowledge, on the strategies adopted by the various NGOs in respect of the anti-corruption drive or the nature of their interaction with other stakeholders such as the public, businesses and the state and their contribution to policy-making and the drafting of codes of conduct. In order to address this gap the authors used a postal questionnaire to provide, as part of a larger project on corruption in international business, an insight into the ways in which NGOs operate, both with respect to their strategies and stakeholder engagement and their views on the various anti-corruption regulatory approaches. This article, the main aim of which is to provide the findings of the survey, consists of three sections. Section I briefly discusses the conceptual differences between civil society and NGOs, the different forms of NGOs and the roles envisaged for them in relation to anti-corruption by the various anti-corruption toolkits in order to provide a backdrop for the survey. Section II provides the survey results and Section III concludes with a discussion and suggestions for future research.