What specific type of corruption are you concerned with?
Most corruption researchers and practitioners recognise that ‘corruption’ isn’t a very useful term to use in practice, because it simultaneously refers to a wide range of behaviours and actions in the abstract. It also has strong moral connotations that can make understanding trade-offs, variable levels of harm and the everyday choices that people are forced to make in resource-scarce contexts very difficult.
It’s easy to understand in theory, for example, that asking for a small bribe to let someone cut the queue at the passport office is very different to a political leader funnelling billions of dollars from state budgets to their offshore accounts. But most anti-corruption laws, strategies, interventions and even research consider corruption only in the abstract. Heywood writes that many of the most ‘influential analyses of corruption make no reference to any such attempt to distinguish between different types – nor even to identify what is understood by corruption itself’ (2017: 30). This isn’t just an academic problem for researchers: it has made it very hard to set priorities for interventions, let alone to understand why corruption persists.[4]
If the aim of Step One was to gain clarity about the problem, Step Two is about moving from the abstract to the specific when it comes to corruption: what is the specific type(s) of corruption stopping you from achieving your ultimate goal? And, where is this type(s) of corruption occurring?
By ‘where’, this doesn’t just mean the country context, but also whether it occurs at the national, sub-national, and/or transnational levels, in a physical or a virtual location and in which sectors. Many anti-corruption interventions aren’t clear on what they are specifically targeting. Without greater clarity, interventions are all too often ill-equipped to tackle what are almost always specific problems.
Getting specific about the type(s), and the context(s) within which it occurs will help you map out the specific set of actors, relationships and networks to consider. This is because ‘there are important differences, for instance, between kleptocracy, bribery, influence-peddling, and so forth, not just in how they operate, but also in which actors and what kinds of resource exchange are involved’ (Heywood, 2017: 46). Collusion, for example, features highly in some types of corruption, but not all types. In addition, tackling collusion requires a different approach if the problem is collusion between political and business elites looking to capture state contracts or collusion between border control officers targeting informal traders for bribes.
The use of ‘corruption’ also hides another important element that needs to be taken into account: visibility. Some types of corruption are easier to track than others, either because people can see some aspect of the behaviour or its impact, or because the transactions involved leave some sort of paper trail behind. Others are more easily hidden but may be just as pervasive or as harmful. Better understanding visibility as a factor to be taken into account is important, but so too is recognising that the impacts of anti-corruption interventions also have different levels of visibility: being clear about motivation (Step One) is one way to protect against the temptation to design interventions based on what’s more visible (and possibly easier to tackle).
Finally, evidence shows that public concerns about corruption are also more differentiated than we might think, with some types of corruption, in some contexts, condemned more strongly than others. Walton (2013), for example, shows that in Papua New Guinea certain corrupt acts generate considerable sympathy because it is believed they might provide the poor with some benefit such as access to limited state services. In their comparative study of everyday corruption in Benin, Niger and Senegal, Blundo and Olivier de Sardan (2013) explore how favouritism and nepotism are broadly considered legitimate by the public while a ‘toll’ or extortion – where payment is demanded but no service is supplied – is seen as being illegitimate. Better understanding the importance of corruption type and the social norms around it may help in anticipating where the public might support some anti-corruption interventions while resisting or even undermining anti-corruption efforts elsewhere.
Effective interventions will be those that target efforts onto the specific corruption dynamics that are most relevant to the specific problem. Interventions that fight corruption in the ‘abstract’ often struggle to adapt to the simple fact that corruption takes many shapes and so are often too broad to take into account important contextual factors.
This is not to say that better targeting will make fighting corruption simpler. It is likely that several types of corruption contribute to the problem(s) you wish to solve. However, better targeted anti-corruption efforts are likely to be those that first identify which type(s) of corruption matter most and where corruption happens.
So what do we mean by ‘types’ of corruption?[5] Different authors classify types of corruption in different ways, which matters for analysis more than identification. We’ve chosen to be agnostic here and simply list a number of possible corruption acts to avoid narrowing the choices unnecessarily. We also don’t differentiate between public sector and private sector corruption, as many of these apply to both (though not all).
- Abuse of discretion
- Access money/’cash for access’
- Bribery
- Collusion
- Cronyism
- Embezzlement
- Excess gift or hospitality
- Extortion
- Favouritism
- Fraud
- Influence peddling
- Insider trading
- Kickbacks
- Misappropriation of property
- Nepotism
- Patronage
- Protection money
- Rent-seeking
- Sextortion
Questions
- What type(s) of corruption matter?
- What is the dominant type(s) of corruption undermining the outcome you identified in Step One (e.g., of primary concern where you know you won’t achieve your desired outcome unless you do something about this)?
- What other types of corruption also matter for your outcome (e.g., of secondary concern but still relevant)?
- How do these types of corruption interact with each other, and if so, how?
- If one type of corrupt behaviour was eliminated, would your aim be easier to achieve, or would other forms of corruption still pose a significant barrier to achieving your aims? In other words, do you really need to try to tackle them all right now?
- Which contextual factors matter?
- Sector: what sector(s) does this type of corruption impact (e.g., health, education, local government, oil, wildlife conservation and so on)?
- Place: where specifically does this corruption type take place? For example:
- Is it limited to a specific organisation(s) or setting? If so, which one?
- Does it only happen in only a single country, or only a certain part of this country? If so, where?
- Is it transnational? If so, which countries are involved? What are the interactions?
- Visibility: How visible is this type of corruption? Are its impacts and patterns easily tracked?
- Public attitudes: To what extent is tackling this type of corruption important to the public?
- Which actors are likely to be involved?
If you’ve identified several types of corruption that matter:
In the first question, you identified the specific corruption types that are the most important for your desired outcome. This second question aims at getting specific about where this type of corruption happens – i.e., the context. The following questions should be answered with respect to each of the type(s) of corruption that you have identified in question 1.
Now that you know what you’re looking at and where, it is time to think about who – i.e., the actors. The following questions should be answered with respect to each of the type(s) of corruption that you have identified in question 1 and the context(s) you have identified in question 2.
- Who are the principal actors most likely to be involved in this type of corruption and in this context?
- What do the relationships, networks and scale of collusion amongst these actors look like? Are you able to map these out?
- What types and levels of power do these actors have? Are you able to access them or influence them?
- Which actors stand to lose if you achieve your objectives?
- Do any actors have the power to undermine your efforts? If so, how?
- Is organised crime involved? Are there other actors that pose a risk to your safety, or to the safety of those involved?