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This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020

Wednesday, June 19, 2019

The Anti-corruption Industry has been up a Gumtree

My argument in this post is that the West made a major mistake 20 years ago when it encouraged the belief that ex-communist countries could create sustainable systems within a generation. Hundreds of billions of euros have been spent by EC Structural Funds in the past 12-15 years on capacity-building – with virtually no real institutional capacity to show.
Thousands of experts have been employed on global anti-corruption efforts which, in Romania, may have put hundreds of apparently corrupt officials in prison – but has contaminated public trust in the integrity of its prosecution system…     
The momentum of the global anti-corruption brigade has been lost in the past decade. The last significant reports were in 2012 or so. I suspect one of the reasons is that the public in the various countries was insufficiently engaged. Most experts were talking to themselves - using their own rarified language. Another perhaps is that the expected big-fixes were not forthcoming. The process takes longer than people imagined….And other wicked problems have emerged…

How does one talk about government systems which are systemically not “fit for purpose”?
“Corrupt” has generally the connotation of individual acts of transgressing very clear norms – and most of the huge literature on that subject (which had its heyday in the first decade of the new millennium) does adopt an approach which takes "integrity" as the default system….“Transparency” and “naming and shaming” are in the toolbox which comes with most ant-corruption strategies – which have been profoundly influenced by rationalist and economist assumptions and assume away the influence of any wider social norms.    
But, as Italy so well demonstrates, such strategies simply don’t work when the prevailing value system is one which expects people to pay primary allegiance to their family and friends rather than to norms of fairness enshrined in “rational-legal” bureaucracy.

The work of Geert Hofstede, Frans Trompenaars and Ronald Inglehart (of the World Values Survey) has taught us a lot about how informal systems often skew (if not undermine) the behavior of organisations which pay lip service to global norms of equity and fairness…The academic jargon calls this a “particularist value system” which is contrasted with the “universalist” norms which sustain most North European political systems. The influence of the Mafia on the Italian system is only the tip of a much deeper iceberg. Bodies such as Ombudsman, local government and audit grew in their own distinctive ways in western europe but are quickly undermined by the wider social norms when transplanted into "particularist" cultures
    
The literature on anti-corruption is vast; complex; and further confused by the variety of intellectual disciplines which have embraced it. The countries of the world have been sliced and diced into a variety of categories - and a lot of statistical correlations attempted.  
The field desperately needs some “gatekeepers” to sift this material on behalf of the interested public and to summarise what seem to be the most important messages…..

The two obvious candidates for such a task are journalists – and thinktankers. But a quick trawl of my large folder didn’t reveal any contributions from these two sources….Just as an earlier exercise on the public administration literature revealed only a couple of journalistic endeavours.
I have to ask the obvious question – what is it that deters journalists from performing what one would imagine to be one of their basic democratic functions, holding those with power to account? Posing it in this way suggests two immediate answers…they would risk stirring a hornet’s nest….And readers don’t seem to welcome even complex issues being reduced to a few simple guidelines or steps…They would rather enjoy a good scandal. And the public are so fed up hearing about corruption that it now seems actively to discourage them from political involvement 
And few Think Tanks have any credibility left - the scale of their corporate funding sources has demonstrated that they operate as spokesmen for the status quo and will never take up the issues that matter to people...

What is remarkable is how little of the anticorruption literature has bothered to ask some basic questions such as
- how the transformation from “particularism” to “universalism” actually happened in countries such as Denmark, Germany and the UK? Over what period of time? With what landmarks?
- what preconditions and/or sequencing that seems to suggest?
- what that might mean for a realistic strategy for change in countries such as Bulgaria and Romania?  

Historians, of course, have dealt with the first question but have left social scientists to deal with the other two - most of whom lack the historical perspective….
Francis Fukuyama is one of the few who has been able to straddle that great divide – with, for example, his quite brilliant (and accessible) Political Order and Decay (2014); 

Bottom Line
There was a lot of money for academics and consultants to work on this issue in the first decade of the new millennium - producing a lot of verbiage but a few gems. The problem is that noone wants to hear that change takes a century - nor, equally, the quick-fixes haven't worked. 
It's about time people interested in dragging particularist cultures into the modern world used the archives to produce short, sharp strategies which put the particular country's problem in this wider context
My advice to frustrated citizens who want to develop an agenda and constituency for change is to –
-       - commission someone able to trawl the extensive (English-language) literature on the various subjects of “corruption”, “political culture”, “transitology”, “state-building”, “fragile states”, “managing change” etc etc
-       - get them to summarise the key messages
-       - develop a supportive network
-       - develop a communications strategy

Further Reading
Political Order and Political Decay; Francis Fukuyama (2014). The second volume (which can be downloaded in full!!) of Fukuyama’s magnum opus. Its introduction summarises the first volume – and the opening chapters set out his framework showing the link between economic, social and political development and how ideas about legitimacy have shaped our understanding of the three basic building blocks of “modern” government – “the state”, “rule of law” and “democratic accountability” (see the figure at p43)
This first chapter spells out how very different social conditions and traditions in the various continents have affected the shape and integrity of government systems (The sequencing of bureaucracy and challenge to political power is of particular interest)

State Building, Governance and World Order in the 21st Century; Francis Fukuyama (2004) The link gives a critical review of the book. This article by Fukuyama summarises his argument

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