What function(s) is corruption filling in this situation?
Some of the most influential ways to think about corruption and anticorruption have failed to take into account the range of motivations for why people might seek or create such corrupt opportunities, and/or why some people might be willing to take bigger risks than others to engage in corruption. For thinking about countering corruption, trying to get at underlying motivations and degrees of drive for engaging in corruption is important. We can try to implement harsh punishments, for example, as a way to counter corruption, but if people have very strong motivations for engaging in corruption, a harsh punishment may not prove to be an effective enough deterrent.
The classic example given to illustrate this point is: what happens when a parent seeks medical care for their ill child and is asked to pay a bribe to receive treatment. Even if that parent feels strongly that corruption is morally wrong, and even if they fear getting arrested for paying a bribe, they very may well pay anyway, given their desperate position and strong motivation for getting medical attention.
In resource scarce environments, there are rarely such morally black and white scenarios. The health workers demanding a bribe may be poorly paid, with few options other than to ask for or accept bribes to top up their salaries enough to afford basic needs like food, water and housing. Meanwhile, a patient seeking treatment when there are not enough doctors, nurses, beds, machines or medicine may offer a bribe, or pay one if asked, to access essential treatment.
Failure to pay a bribe means that children die unnecessarily; however, the problem isn’t the bribe. The problem is the resource scarcity and vulnerability. Parents of ill children in more resilient contexts where resources are not scarce do not face this same dilemma.
A corruption functionality perspective emphasizes that many people engage in corruption because they think that it is the best way, or perhaps the only way, for them to solve the problems or dilemmas that they face. Through this lens, corruption is a means to an end, rather than an end in itself. Once the means are better understood, the question then becomes whether that function must be filled and, if so, whether or not it can realistically be filled a different way.
Two more examples can help to illustrate what this means in reality.
Bribery and road safety in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)
Road safety is a serious problem in the DRC where the estimated road traffic death rate in 2016 was 33.7 per 100,000 population, compared to Ghana at 24.9 or Norway at 2.7.[6] An anti-corruption drive aimed at improving road safety by tackling traffic police bribery involved the arrest of officers who were caught collecting bribes from motorists. However, many motorists resisted the intervention and defended the system, because it let them pay small bribes to police in order to avoid having to pay much larger (and often unrealistic) official fines. In the DRC, many motorists have to drive to make their living and can’t afford to register or service their cars up to road-worthy standard. Rather than resenting bribery, the system was generally perceived to be mutually beneficial: allowing drivers earn a living while also supplementing road police officers’ income, known to be inadequate and unreliable (Malukisa, 2017: 113-114).
In this example, corruption serves two functions: it keeps drivers on the road so they can make a living, and it tops up inadequate police salaries. However, it also helps to keep unsafe, unregistered vehicles on the road leading to a high number of unnecessary deaths. If the ultimate goal is improving road safety, and the type of corruption is road traffic police bribery, a functionality approach means thinking about things like how to make registration of vehicles and repairs more affordable; how to improve public transportation to give workers alternatives to cars; and how to increase police salaries – alongside methods to discourage officers from accepting bribes.
Questions
- Is corruption being used by the actors involved to fulfil a particular need? In other words, does this type of corruption fill a function? If so, what is this?
- Why are these specific actors engaging in these patterns of behaviour?
- What do you understand about their motivations?
- How do you understand this – e.g., what’s your evidence for this rather than just your assumptions?
- What barriers are there, if any, for actors to fulfil these functions through other/legal means?
- Are there any other ways they can find necessary resources?
- Would something bad or dangerous happen to them if they didn’t engage in corruption?
- Would they suffer from recrimination from their family, friends or colleagues if they didn’t engage in corruption?
- How could these barriers realistically be overcome?
- Do you have the resources you need to fill these functions in other ways– e.g., sufficient budget, the right technical inputs, the right people in the room etc?
- Is there evidence to suggest that there will be political will to support such an intervention? If not, how will you overcome this?
- Are you likely to have public support for such an intervention? If not, how will you overcome this?
- Have you given enough thought to potential unintended consequences? Are you confident that the potential costs are known and that the benefits outweigh these costs?
Some sub-questions to get you started: