Corruption and Development: The Anti-Corruption Campaigns

Since the 1990s anti-corruption discourse and policy has become an unquestioned morat crusade but campaigns that focus on eliminating corruption often have negative effects for good governance and political cultures across the developing world. This collection critically examines development assistance policy and practice in the field of corruption and anti-corruption across a range of country and sector-based case studies. Contemporary political reform in the South is reviewed comparatively in relation to the sometimes contradictory and militating context of political development interventions in the area of anti-corruption and good governance.

Exploring the ways that corruption is addressed across Africa Asia, Latin America and East and Central Europe the book argues that a single-minded focus on corruption within the development industry occludes more substantive political programmes, such as democratization, and can contribute to the pathologizing of public policy it examines the encoded and implicit agendas that anti-corruption campaigns serve-including the assumption of Northern supremacy - and places the debate on political corruption in historical perspective, highlighting the racialized framing of the problem. This critical examination and review of various governments' policies on corruption, in relation to the standardized package of measures encouraged through interventionism by the global development industry, also sheds light on the nature of the latter. It illuminates the contemporary political landscape in which strategic and discursive conflict and consensus is negotiated between members of domestic political communities and the institutions and representatives ofthe global development community.

This book includes a Foreword by Deryck Brown, Commonwealth Secretariat, UK.