A continuing struggle for donors

It is clear that the donor contribution to anti-corruption has made limited headway. This study has been commissioned by the U4 donor group to reconsider donor ways of working as a possible route to improving outcomes.

Corruption has a pernicious effect on donors. Its persistence has created challenges to the ‘case for aid’, with donors coming under increasing pressure from sceptical taxpayers. Hence donors find themselves pushed to demonstrate success by concentrating on more visible and more immediate ‘results’ from aid. Perversely for anti-corruption practitioners, retreating to types of activity primarily because they can be more easily measured tends to block off routes that must be travelled if corruption is really to be tackled.

Donors have also been challenged by the changing nature of their relationship with recipients of their assistance. ‘Traditional’ providers of aid no longer have the predominance they once had, which gave them (at least by their own assessment) high leverage with a host government. In recent years, donors have struggled to re-cast their thinking on how to gain influence with authorities when alternative sources of assistance are much more plentiful.

The nature of corruption has evolved too. Globalisation has brought new opportunities for the corrupt to move their illicit gains rapidly between jurisdictions and exploit new technologies. Addressing these new forms of corruption tends to involve activities – such as law enforcement, financial and criminal intelligence, and cross-border legal collaboration – that lie well outside donors’ traditional areas of expertise.

A reminder: change is possible and has happened

Notwithstanding these obstacles, it should be remembered that much has changed in the donor perspective since the start of their efforts 20 years ago. The table below compares attitudes then with the norms donors accept now. In many ways, these reflect dramatic shifts in perspective.

However, while much might have shifted in attitudes, donor practice has been remarkably static. It continues to follow largely the same rules, procedures, and methods as at the beginning. It is this dimension that this U4 Issue suggests needs to change.

Can donors find new pathways?

The premise of this studyc32fc2958ea0 is that donor ways of working themselves may be obstructing progress. It will identify potential changes to practice and the challenges that donors would need to overcome to adopt them. It proposes practical first steps to realising the change. A concluding section attempts to classify the proposals according to their estimated feasibility for adoption.

The U4 Issue examines donor practice through four lenses. Each, it is contended, fundamentally shapes the ways in which programming unfolds. The following four sections look at how donors:

• conceptualise the corruption problem (Lens A)
• organise themselves in tackling it (Lens B)
• respond to it when it confronts them; (Lens C) and
• skill their staff (Lens D).

Lens A – thinking: how donors conceptualise the corruption problem

Technocracy rules

Critiques of donor methods for tackling corruption are not new. The earliest and most consistent theme in such critiques has been that their focus on supplying technical solutions to state institutions ignores ‘real world’ conditions, which cannot be reached through such responses.

Despite increasing rhetoric that ‘politics matters’, the shape of the donor response has been remarkably unchanging. It concentrates on training and ‘capacity development’, activities that centre on the transfer of knowledge and skills to fill a perceived gap. The assumption underpinning this orthodoxy is that the problem with corruption is the lack of know-how to combat it. A review of good practice in donors’ anti-corruption strategiesd62a9008446d shows almost all donor anti-corruption strategies to be technocratic in approach.

Corruption, anti-corruption efforts and aid: do donors have the right approach?2d5311abb150 finds that donors ‘focus on technical reform to formal institutions, paying too little attention to the interests, incentives and informal interactions of implementing parties’. The classic critique, An upside down view of governance,c97989ff9625 contends that donors end up focusing on the wrong target. Their attention to formal institutional reform misses other dimensions crucial to corruption. ‘Instead of prioritising reform of formal institutions, [donors] should look at the structures, relationships, interests and incentives that underpin them’. This implies a shift in how donors see their role, ‘from being experts with responsibility for “delivering” … to at best being effective facilitators of local political processes’.

The U4’s Theories of change in anti-corruption workd2bdc4fba200 shows how projects ‘involve a leap of faith that assumes that by building awareness of rights among right [sic] holders, or by strengthening the capacity for responsiveness amongst duty-bearers, there will be an automatic change of behaviour and power relations that will lead the project seamlessly into an improved set of outcomes’.

This is confirmed by a formal evaluation of donor programmes in 2011. A literature review for this study concludes that donor failure is ‘largely a result of the mismatch between the technocratic approaches and the political nature of the issue’. The donor approach ‘does not take into account the systemic yet specific nature of corruption in partner countries. The assumption is often that corruption happens because of individual choice, weaknesses in the institutional and legal frameworks, or lack of capacity to enforce existing rules and regulations. Consequently, institutional and legal reforms and capacity building are seen as appropriate responses’.

This evaluation and a review of donor approaches in Uganda6d0ab32b1b76 illustrates how, in choosing their approach, donors are mainly influenced (and constrained) by their own operational culture and the tools they possess: ‘Weaknesses of an institutional or legal character are tangible issues that donors can address with familiar reforms and capacity building programmes. Systemic corruption … is much more difficult to tackle’. Programming tools to hand reinforce ‘the tendency to focus on capacity building interventions, whereas the political dimensions of the corruption problem are being avoided’.

As a counterpoint, U4’s review of how a number of countries reformed in the early 2000s shows that in most, it was citizen-led pressure that pushed the authorities into action. Donors, by contrast, were seen as being complicit in allowing the authorities to adopt superficial responses that did not impact on underlying issues. Khan, in anti-corruption in adverse contexts,c618eaee81f5 emphasises how this makes donors’ efforts not just ineffectual, but often counterproductive.

Thinking beyond the technocratic

The classic study of the ‘theatre’ of the Malawi budget process, which showed how informal processes subverted the surface formalities, illustrates the problem for donors.A study of informal processes suggests that anti-corruption approaches must be better at both uncovering ‘hidden agendas’ and tackling the ‘habits of corruption’. A manual for donors on social norms approaches for anti-corruption also points in this direction. How a more politically astute approach can work in practice is shown in an Albania case example. This defines steps to find the ‘smart space’ for action, by looking at distributions of political and economic power. The multifaceted nature of the task is highlighted in a review of innovative donor interventions by ECDPM.e0e7497a02c9

Khan et al. in their adverse contexts review and Mungiu-Pippidi in a road map for donors to control corruption both suggest methods that are based on understanding, and using, in the latter’s phrase, ‘the human agency with a vested interest in changing the status quo’. This means designing actions around the particular incentives and norms for specific groups. The common thread here is that the foundations of action shift from transferring knowledge and skills to acting on incentives for change.

A review of ‘success stories’6a8426266a07 emphasises that contextual factors tend to be more decisive than the technical quality of controls themselves. A donor discovers this to its cost when it ‘detaches apparently successful controls from the processes that brought them into being and from the enabling conditions, events and trends that engendered those processes (and explains why some controls fail in different circumstances)’. The success of ‘virtuous circles’ that have built resistance to corruption in society at large comes from factors currently not addressed by the donor toolbox.301b312eb801

Whether donors should tackle corruption directly or ‘indirectly’ is a running theme. The IMF cautioned early in Look before you leap that ‘because corruption is itself a symptom of fundamental governance failure, the higher the incidence of corruption, the less an anticorruption strategy should include tactics that are narrowly targeted at corrupt behaviour and the more it should focus on the broad underlying features of the governance environment’. Nevertheless, donors have tended to spend vast amounts precisely focusing on specific corrupt behaviour.0ca6b788d505

Recent studies have also placed importance on the mutual reinforcement of influencers, drawing on the theory of the sandwich approach which evolved in civic action in post-Soviet Eastern Europe. An illustration from Guatemaladb885d72eebc of the combination effect of vertical and horizontal pressures shows how youth mobilisation linked with a key reformist state institution (and aided by the unique internationally-staffed CICIG [International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala]) led to high-level change. This case has important insights on the power of social media and suggests a role for donors in supporting social mobilisation.

An historical reviewdf6dda88c66c of anti-corruption national experiences identifies several lessons for donors, including the importance of efforts to prepare the ground: ‘Just as Louis Pasteur said in matters of scientific observation, “chance favours the prepared mind”. In fighting corruption, chance is likely to favour the prepared alliance’.

Pathways to improve

How might donors reposition themselves in light of these findings? To avoid any doubt, we should not conclude that strong institutions do not matter. It is rather the route by which donors have tried to bring about strong institutions that appears to have been misconceived. This is particularly given the unrealistic premise that corrupt regimes are likely to reform willingly. Expecting transformations to occur only through giving training, knowledge, and skills is the issue to be addressed.

That donors are experiencing reduced leverage adds to the challenge. Reluctant authorities can more easily avoid engagement on corruption issues. This makes it necessary for donors to rethink their main target. They need to move beyond hardware (equipment and infrastructure) and software (knowledge and skills). And they need to think more about ‘wetware’ – the human dimension driving behaviours and motivations. Focusing here opens up new possibilities of intervention, exploiting incentives and other influences for change. By refocusing towards fostering underlying drivers of change, which often lie outside the government itself, these targets are also likely to be a better fit for donors in light of their evolving relationship with their hosts.

This evidence suggests that three shifts of emphasis could improve the donor response:

• From the focus on transferring knowledge and skills to attention to contextual influences.
• From the presumption of ‘partnership’ with government officials to mobilising incentives for those actors to change behaviour.
• From primarily ‘helping governments’ to more attention to helping citizens in their relationship to their government.

Lens B – organising: how donors operate against corruption

Despite accumulating evidence of ineffectiveness, donor ways of working have not substantially changed. Anti-corruption programmes are designed, structured, and delivered in exactly the same way as other interventions.

Donors’ short time perspectives and inflexible standard operating procedures need to be replaced with longer time horizons and more agility on implementation. They need to immerse themselves in the local specifics, and for longer. It is particularly important that they create the ability to respond to unexpected windows of opportunity.

Donor methods

Donors currently see that most of their capacity-building projects have barely affected the realities of corruption in a majority of their partner countries. This is despite supplying extraordinary levels of aid for these efforts over decades. While the evidence constantly emphasises the diversity of corruption, donor ways of working have solidified around a narrow set of approaches and instruments – training/capacity building; equipment provision; and guidance manuals – delivered in projectised ‘slices’.

The problem created for donors is clearest in how the Logical Framework (‘LogFrame’) Approach can limit responses through its inherent rigidities. The linear view of change it implies, as well as the requirement to choose indicators in advance (which tend to be selected primarily for their ease of quantification), and, more recently, annual milestones, are all seen to be squeezing out scope for dealing with unexpected events.

A 2002 review criticises this straitjacketing, likening the approach to ‘a production engineering model … grounded in the idea that all inputs must be foreseen [in advance] and that every input should lead to a measurable outcome’. This approach is ill-suited to development programming, still more so for anti-corruption. A U4 paper on adaptive approaches57ecb07126f2 notes that the standard donor method ‘is not well set up to deal with the surprises and complexities involved in tackling corruption. It is then perhaps to be expected that anti-corruption interventions may be overwhelmed by realities on the ground, undermined by political pushback, or damaged by unintended consequences’.

In dealing with corruption, risks and uncertainty will always be high. Donors need to find ways to manage uncertainty, not try to design it out.

The LogFrame has, perhaps, a more insidious effect. Its demands have led to a common feature of the donor way of working, across all disciplines, being a disproportionate preoccupation with the design stage of interventions. Since new projects are always being developed, staff focus tends to remain concentrated in planning. Less attention is paid to the implementation of existing activities.

The LogFrame reinforces this effect by becoming a convenient checklist that allows formal obligations for ‘monitoring’ to be (relatively) easily complied with. The overall effect on donors is to reduce the opportunity or incentive to engage more deeply with activities that are under way. This is likely to mean donors miss potentially valuable insights into how change is actually happening.

Donor coordination

Lack of coordination among donors is a notorious shortcoming. It has allowed governments to easily play donors off against each other and minimise pressure on themselves. Problems range from prosaic issues such as variable funding cycles and priority differences to the pathological: instinctive bureaucratic competition, between donor agencies themselves and with other agencies of each donor’s own administration.

The governance sector suffers worse than any other in this respect, with an analysis of ‘aid fragmentation and donor proliferation’ showing it to be the most fragmented. In 2009, ‘government and civil society’ on average received aid from more than 13 donors per country, the highest of all sectors.ae2af6003c7f The effects on efficiency are compounded by evidence that greater donor fragmentation contributes to greater corruption.

Although donors formally acknowledge the importance of coordination in the OECD/DAC Principles for Donor Action in Anti-Corruption, practice continues to fall short of requirements. A review of literature on donor coordination structures60b72f9020f4 shows how limited the examples of coordination are in anti-corruption. Three key elements of better coherence are seen to be: i) common arrangements for planning, managing and delivering aid; ii) simplification of idiosyncratic procedures; and iii) information sharing.

Despite appearing to be well aware of the self-defeating consequences of poor coordination, these costs have evidently not been severe enough to outweigh the other pressures donors face that inhibit closer working (such as the primacy of agency programming cycles). This means that coordination becomes more than just about the mechanics of creating a collaborative structure.

The Uganda Joint Response to Corruption5778441a047b provides important lessons for success: collective focusing on a limited number of issues; ensuring a balanced perspective between short-term corruption episodes and long-term systemic challenges; the value of a common script that delivers consistent messaging and focus; and the escalation of actions in response to the (lack of) responses of the Ugandan government. Those involved recognised this as a culture shift in their way of working. The key lesson to emerge was that it took significant leadership and effort to keep the process going. (Indeed, the initiative lapsed after its originator moved on.)

Also in Uganda, the seven members86c016f2740a of the Democratic Governance Facility (DGF) have collaborated since 2011 on a suite of governance issues. A 2016 evaluation9cde50b81a4b concluded it was producing more than the sum of its parts. Several issues here are relevant for donors. On the positive side, there is evidence the model helped attract donors who might not otherwise have contributed. The mechanism also reduced administration costs significantly. However, as a ‘change agent’, the model had little impact. By limiting itself to being a fund manager for projects, it did not seek to become a policy influencer. The evaluation saw this as a lost opportunity.

A review of the nine-donoreb63529fa79b Anti-Corruption Fund (ACF) in Nicaragua from 2002 identifies similar issues, although from an opposite perspective. Whereas the DGF was seen as focusing on helping civil society, with limited connections into government systems, the ACF focused on formal institutions, with classic technical support – capacity building, salary supplementation, and paying for running costs and equipment. No attention was given to ‘demand’ side issues. By 2010, six of the nine donors had left Nicaragua for macro-political reasons. Chief among these was lack of commitment by the government, which perhaps illustrates that the programme’s reliance on working solely with government might have been its ‘Achilles heel’.

The seven-donor303611445269 Somalia Stability Fund (SSF) created in 2013 similarly seems to be primarily a vehicle for organising project funding. It appears to have brought benefits in creating a single source of analysis, which helps provide a ‘speaking with one voice’ power for donors. On sensitive issues, this can be a valuable tool, as recognised in the annual review for 2018. This records that ‘the quality of the underlying analysis, scenarios and strategies is very high and is often used as a reference point for donors and in engagement beyond SSF’.

The problems of holding donors together are exemplified by the Partnership for Governance Reform in Indonesia,45fc9b687b1c which eventually fell away as donors lost patience with a collective approach. A review highlighted the lack of incentives donors had for collaboration.

Pooling of resources and administration under multilateral management has been popular, especially in difficult contexts where it helps to reduce the exposure of bilaterals. It is noticeable, however, that such arrangements in anti-corruption have favoured classical technical approaches. The UN Development Programme’s (UNDP) support to Sierra Leone’s National Anti-Corruption Secretariat,5a800fa117c5 the Liberian Anti-Corruption Commission,9ce1289f8e1b and Iraq’s Anti-Corruption Academyd00ff588b22d were mostly vehicles for channelling funds for orthodox public sector capacity building.

There are benefits of joint funds, including reduced transaction costs, the creation of donor ‘critical mass’, the smoothing out of the effects of shifts in individual donor funding levels, and more coherence in activity. The advantages for anti-corruption look especially strong. A joint structure can reduce the exposure of individual donors in sensitive areas and lead to actions that they would not be prepared to undertake alone. The collective pooling of finance for investigations in the Chiluba case in Zambia from 2002, the first example of collective support in a high-profile case, shows these advantages. The fund became a valuable coalescing point for donors and a vehicle for agreeing common positions in rapidly changing conditions.

Donor focus

In programming, donors have largely confined their attention to corruption inside a partner country. This fits with their general aid delivery model. The rise of transnational dimensions, such as illicit financial flows, creates a problem for donors that they have yet to successfully respond to. U4’s note on anti-money laundering and illicit financial flows illustrates the many obstacles for donors.

The result has been a sharp divide in a donor’s allocation of work. In-country programmes are run by the agency’s country office or embassy. Yet efforts on transnational aspects are mostly organised from the agency headquarters (HQ).

Practical action is supported, for example, through technical assistance programmes for anti-money laundering run by the World Bank and IMF, for asset recovery run by the International Centre for Asset Recovery (ICAR) and the Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative (StAR), and for helping financial intelligence units (FIUs) by the Egmont Centre of FIU Excellence and Leadership (ECOFEL). However, these still tend to be based on country-focused efforts. Other than the network of practitioners for asset recovery (CARIN and its regional offshoots), virtually no mechanisms exist that explicitly bring parties together operationally across borders. One exception is the International Anti-Corruption Coordination Centre (IACCC), created in 2017, which focuses on law enforcement collaboration. But it remains extremely narrow in its participants. A significant gap therefore remains in supporting cross-border collaboration.

Pathways to improve

How might donors reposition themselves in light of these findings? Four shifts that could be useful appear to be:

• From tools emphasising short-term vision and rigidity of execution to those able to accommodate more flexible responses and longer-term perspectives.
• From a focus on activity at the country level to structuring interventions that can have impact on a country’s vulnerability to transnational dimensions of corruption.
• From individualistic donor methods to a default approach premised on donor collectivism.
• From leaving the donor agency alone to address corruption in other countries to an ‘all-of-government’ approach that draws on all the influencing tools available to a donor country.

Lens C – responding: how donors deal with episodes of corruption

The first two lenses constitute the main determinants of a donor ‘footprint’ on the ground. However, donors also have a further, and often significant, effect locally, from the way in which they respond when a corruption episode occurs. This behaviour has often undermined, rather than reinforced, local actions.

This lens looks at the issues that arise from how donors react to instances of corruption. Curiously, these episodes always appear to catch donors unawares, despite the environment in which they operate. Responses regularly have a sense of improvisation. Donors need new pathways so that they can avoid unintended negative consequences and turn episodes into opportunities for reinforcing local efforts.

U4’s review of collective donor responses to corruption cases94e0e3395835 identifies several negative tendencies when donors are confronted by a sudden corruption crisis:

1. Slowness to reach a collective position and to agree actions. Donors do not pre-plan, despite the high predictability that episodes will occur (even if specific timing and location is unforeseeable). This means that actions are chosen in an atmosphere of urgency and pressure.
2. There is no practice of using episodes as a leveraging opportunity. The overriding concern tends to be to agree a plan with the authorities that allows donors to return to ‘business as usual’ as quickly as possible.
3. Donors arm themselves with a limited arsenal of responses – usually around suspending aid flows. Almost universally, they think only in terms of their own funds over other considerations, such as opportunities to use the crisis to induce change.
4. Donors usually fail to open up dialogue with other actors, such as non-governmental organisation (NGO) interest groups, who might have influence. They lose opportunities to strengthen domestic accountability processes, which could take centre stage.
5. Donors tend to have the same response regardless of how an episode of corruption comes to light. A case that results from the effective working of a local control mechanism, such as audit, is treated the same as one arising from a donor discovery. Donors do not seem to worry about the message this sends to local auditors-general.

These problems undermine local systems, as well as losing opportunities for donors to turn these episodes into a spur for remedial action. Adopting different pathways could help turn these occurrences to donors’ advantage, rather than be scored as failings.

A follow-up analysis of these examples gives recommendations for new practice,b5d188dace14 based on being better prepared, improving the consistency and predictability of responses, and involving a broader range of interests. This includes, it should be added, how to accommodate indigenous systems that have worked.

Be consistent, and thus predictable

Donors would improve their own prospects by treating predictability as the most important behaviour trait. With too many examples of variable responses, governments are tempted to just ride out each corruption event. Donors adhering to ‘fire instructions’ would help produce greater commonality in the immediate period after an episode has broken. As everyday fire instructions do, establishing a pre-agreed plan for an unexpected event avoids having to make one up during the crisis itself.

Donors need to connect the immediacy of an episode and its resolution with a longer-term reform path. Currently, there is too much focus on resolving the aid implications of the case (often with the view to resuming disbursement as quickly as possible). This is rather than considering the opportunity the case may have for addressing underlying issues. Donors often see episodes as obstacles in the road to be got around, not holes in the road they have fallen into which require some form of change to repair.

Widen stakeholders

Corruption in a public service body is a concern for citizens, not just for external donors. Yet donors tend to address episodes behind closed doors. They treat the issue almost exclusively as an aid disbursement problem. They engage with government quietly, when much more impetus could be generated by involving other interest groups, such as parliament, CSOs, and the media.

For example, more could be done by working with parliament if this gives opportunities to win broader allies for change. This would particularly be relevant where the episode has come to light from the work of the formal audit system; then the Public Accounts Committee could play a strong follow-up role. Working with civil society to monitor follow-up, or widen scrutiny, can maximise the demonstration effect of an episode and how it is remedied. An event in one location in a country where corruption is widespread is unlikely to be unique, so broader scrutiny could bring other similar problems to light. The media can also play a role in longer-term follow-up.

These small shifts in approach to handling can turn a single corruption episode into a systemic issue and help to continue pressure for change. This is especially so once the immediate dust has settled from the outbreak of a scandal.

Support, not undermine, local systems

Donors’ default methods should shift to ones that support, not undermine, local systems. Where these have worked, the donor response should be to recognise that achievement and help to ensure that cases are seen through to their conclusion. The implications of this are that donors need to be flexible, nimble, and innovative in being able to support activity (such as investigation and prosecuting capacity, activities that are often not in the usual donor tool bag).

Pathways to improve

How might donors reposition themselves in light of these findings? Two key shifts in operating norms appear useful:

• From a stance that focuses exclusively on safeguarding donor funds to one that centres on how donor support and influence can help the investigation and resolution of the case.
• From short-term, reaction-based responses to individual episodes to longer-term perspectives that seek to use each episode to strengthen oversight mechanisms.

Lens D – human capital: how donors skill themselves to combat corruption

There is little or no treatment in the literature of the impacts on anti-corruption effectiveness from how donors manage and arrange their human capital. This lens looks at how donors create and deploy the expertise they believe is required. It reveals a number of unintended shortcomings that may be affecting the chances of donor success. These centre on (i) an overly constricted approach to marshalling knowledge, which leads to (ii) a narrowing of programming perspectives, and (iii) a foreshortening of potential horizons.

These limitations have tended to come about not from the intrinsic character of the problem, but as a result of the choices agencies make in deciding how to organise their staff.

Constricted knowledge

For most anti-corruption programmes, a donor’s technical lead will be a governance specialist. This reflects the orthodox interpretation of the problem that sees corruption mostly being an issue of the administration and operation of institutions, their resources, and the ways in which decisions relating to public and private interests are reached. Even though corruption takes very different shapes in different sectors, in all donor agencies it has been the lot of the governance cadre to be thrust into the lead to grapple with the problem.

Centring a donor agency’s embarkation point on governance is not difficult to understand. However, this has had unhelpful consequences. A common criticism of ’governance’ among development practitioners is that it is an abstract and amorphous concept when it comes to identifying practical action. Other sector specialists in disciplines with a far greater sense of practical certainties – for instance, delivering health or education services – can regard governance as an add-on to their core technical questions. A governance adviser’s contribution could be viewed as secondary in practical importance. It is rarely seen by sector specialists as fundamental to success.

This, along with other incentives we have already seen that push programmers to value disbursement of funds over most other considerations, makes it difficult for corruption perspectives to achieve traction.

These barriers are further heightened by the way agencies structure themselves to supply technical expertise. The creation of distinct and separately managed cadres for each discipline reinforces compartmentalised thinking and inhibits perspectives that cross these boundaries. Cadres tend to form strong group identities inside agencies, which each group sees as important for maintaining and advancing sector interests in the internal competition for policy attention and resources.

A review of donor approaches to health sector corruption points to the disjuncture between health and governance teams and the need to promote and incentivise closer cooperation between them. Health is not unique. Practitioner experience shows an uphill struggle to get anti-corruption internalised within agencies. Three factors seem important for a discipline to gain prominence within the agency. The precision of the subject matter (in technical terms), the quality of the evidence base (for how success is to be achieved), and how central the discipline is seen to be to the agency’s core mission. Anti-corruption is way behind other disciplines on each of these attributes.

A further hindrance to generating a strong corruption policy perspective is the disproportionate attention an agency will almost always give to protecting its own funds from corruption, as distinct from the wider effects of corruption beyond its own programming. When ‘anti-corruption’ is raised as an issue, sector specialists think mostly about self-protection. Their instinctive perspective on corruption narrows to the stewardship of programme funding. Corruption issues that are broader than this get less attention – they are regarded as wider systemic issues and something for governance advisers, not them, to worry about.

A review of mainstreaming anti-corruption within donor agenciesb2dd1040fd28 reinforces this view. It documents the difficulties programming staff have in linking project design to reducing opportunities for corruption. This is largely because agencies’ incentive systems do not encourage staff to do so. It points to the ‘resistance and biases of sector specialists who are more focussed on the project’s other technical aspects’.

A 2014 digest of seven lessons from OECD DAC peer reviews on mainstreaming confirms many of these internal barriers. A central finding is that ‘a common approach has been to overly rely on the easy changes that do not threaten existing patterns and styles of working, at the expense of the others that are more difficult to implement … leaders have to go beyond advocacy and technical fixes and develop clear organisational linkages between policy, resources, incentives and accountability systems’.

The absence of genuine systems that do this explains the limited success in mainstreaming generally. Donors are judged not to allocate enough financial resources or people to supporting real organisational change. The outcome has tended to be superficial technical fixes – such as screening checklists or mandatory training courses – rather than deeper changes in organisational culture and practice.

Narrowing of programming perspectives

Donor agencies find themselves at the fore among the departments of their government to take responsibility for dealing with corruption in other countries. As has been argued earlier, their technocratic approach has narrowed perspectives for programming into largely transactional interventions, managed by programmatic vehicles that tend to be rigid in terms of objectives and time boundaries. The space for other forms of possible impact – such as the less tangible influencing that diplomatic practice brings – gets designed out. The expertise looked for in advisers is almost all about delivery of projects. This leads not only to deficiencies in styles of working but also in the breadth of content.

Foreshortened horizons

Donors’ well-defined sectoral boxes for structuring and nurturing their human capital make it difficult to inject other issues, such as corruption, that are more amorphous. This has artificially foreshortened opportunities and has been deeply undermining for anti-corruption. The ‘shoehorning’ of anti-corruption into standard operating procedures has all but neutered donor impact. This has made it extraordinary difficult for agencies to embrace ‘non-traditional’ perspectives (for example, drawing on the known correlation between high internet coverage and reduced corruption), since these do not fit into a standard sectoral lens. Donors have unwittingly limited their own capacity for creative thinking. The undue focus that projects place on quantitative indicators has also helped to exclude approaches that cannot be as readily measured (for example, those involving difficult-to-gauge behaviour change).

New dividends are clearly possible if donors can develop fresh ways of collectively organising their operations, and secure economies of scale from better coordination.

Pathways to improve

How might donors reposition themselves in light of these findings? Three key shifts should be considered:

• From centring an agency’s corruption response in the governance cadre as a ‘governance’ problem to envisioning corruption as an internal issue for all disciplines.
• From a highly segmented sectoral structure for organising skills in an agency to one less compartmentalised and better able to accommodate ‘non-traditional’ perspectives.
• From nationally structured donor presences in-country to pooled approaches maximising coherence (conceptually and operationally), economies of scale, and impact.

Prospects for change

The extent of deviation from standard operating procedures that many of these shifts represent is not to be underestimated. Some shifts can be made within the governance/anti-corruption discipline and applied specifically for anti-corruption, while not affecting the rest of the agency. But many others will require an overhaul of thinking and practice across a wider spectrum.

One way of promoting this wider change is for anti-corruption practitioners to be much better equipped, and inclined, to demonstrate how central a part corruption plays in undermining their agency’s core objectives.

Fashioning an argument for giving greater attention to corruption that can gain support from other technical disciplines within the agency could enlarge the body of opinion within the agency willing to consider these shifts. It would need to avoid creating concerns that doing so will disrupt programming. Such a larger weight of view would have greater prospects for persuading those in the agency in charge of processes and systems to be more amenable to changing procedures.

The table that follows attempts to assess the ease by which these shifts could be introduced, as well as the potential significance of the change in helping to transform dynamics in the recipient country. Needless to say, many of these shifts overlap. Most rely on one or more of the others. None by itself is a silver bullet.

Note

Scores for feasibility are allocated on a five-point scale:

1. Very weak
2. Weak
3. Medium
4. Strong
5. Very strong

Colour codes:
Green: 10-15
Amber: 5-9
Red: below 5

Scores for transformational importance are allocated on a ten-point scale for greater differentiation.

Colour codes:
Green: 8 and above
Amber: 4-7
Red: below 4