Informal networks: the invisible drivers of corruption and implications for anti-corruption practice Claudia Baez-Camargo, Saba Kassa and Cosimo Stahl The need to rethink conventional anti-corruption Conventional anti-corruption approaches advocate for the adoption of legal and institutional reforms in line with international best practices. Nevertheless, these anti-corruption frameworks are often weakly implemented across the Global South.…

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Eradicating Corruption: You Can’t Just Pin Your Hopes on Democracy Elisabeth Kramer There is a compelling theoretical relationship between democratization and anti-corruption efforts. On the one hand, anti-corruption concerns can be a powerful rallying cry for those who feel disenfranchised from their government, channeling citizen dissatisfaction in ways that can be harnessed to drive democratic…

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Learning to understand corruption as a systemic problem Johannes Tonn The complexity of corruption means simple approaches do not work Practitioners and researchers increasingly recognize that corruption is a systemic and complex problem (e.g. Scharbatke-Church/ Chigas 2016, Marquette/ Peiffer 2015). This means there are no simple, one-dimensional cause and effect relationships that can adequately explain…

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Why re-think corruption? An introduction to the symposium Elizabeth Dávid-Barrett and Paul M. Heywood Introduction It would be hard to argue that the major attention devoted to anti-corruption efforts over the last quarter century has resulted in signal success: according to the most widely-cited measures (for all that they are open to criticism), the global…

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