Corruption and Development: The Anti-Corruption Campaigns, edited by Sarah Bracking, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007; pp. 310, £60.00 (hb). ISBN 0230525504.
This book interrogates the current orthodoxy ‘that corruption is an anathema to development’, which is the central tenet of the recent anti-corruption campaigns of the International Financial Institutions (IFIs) and other unilateral donors (pp. 7–8). The edited volume is an assemblage of critical examinations of the anti-corruption campaigns, in various locales and sectors. It is enriched by contributions from academic fields including geography, development studies, political science, economics, international relations and law – with yet other contributions from practitioners. This breadth is also echoed in the spread of geographical locations examined, which range from Nigeria, the Philippines, Georgia to Nicaragua and others. Given this wide scope it is not surprising that the book emphasises the plurality of anti-corruption experiences, and argues that the effects of the anti-corruption campaigns need to be understood within the political and cultural context in which they are implemented (p. 17). The book highlights inconsistencies between the local experience of the anti-corruption campaigns and the IFIs’ technocratic universalised interpretation of the issue and criticises the application of the same brand of prescriptions ‘from Nigeria to Bulgaria’ (p. 28).
However, the argument is not one for localism. The importance of the international context in which the anti-corruption campaigns arose – even as their effects are felt variously – emerges throughout the volume. Ivanov argues that the origins of the anti-corruption campaigns lie ‘in the interests of the US government, multinational companies and multilateral donors’ (p. 29). In a similar vein, the geo-politics which govern the IFIs’ unequal application of anti-corruption policies is central to Brown, Cloke and Rocha's analysis of anti-corruption in Nicaragua (pp. 182–201). Moreover, in her chapter on corruption in the Philippines, Co argues that the legacy of colonisation and international inequalities are key to the production of Pilipino corruption (p. 123). Bracking's own chapter offers the most in-depth analysis of the international in the book. Her chapter situates the anti-corruption campaigns within international power relations and explores the contradictions that these relations produce in development finance. She highlights how discourses of corruption ‘fix its meanings spatially, with coordinates within related ideas of race, space and nationality’ and so act to structure the international (p. 252).
Central to all the arguments in the book, both those that explore global power relations and local politics, is the relations between corruption and development. Hall-Mathews’ examination of President Mutharika of Malawi's anti-corruption campaign, for example, reveals that the equation of anti-corruption measures and development allowed him to ‘claim to be pro-development by the fact of making arrests per se’ (p. 82). Moreover, many of the activities of Mutharika's anti-corruption drive were arguably only targeted at undermining his political opponents. Anti-corruption measures in Malawi thus distracted and detracted from development priorities, rather than furthering them. Hall-Mathew's conclusion is that corruption is only one issue for development and not necessarily the most significant one (p. 98). The role of the anti-corruption campaign in Malawi in obscuring Mutharika's political goals is comprehended within the volume as only one example of how the foregrounding of corruption acts to obfuscate. This conceals not only political machinations, but also global inequalities and even the failures of the IMF and World Bank policies (p. 31). This chimerical nature of the anti-corruption campaigns, the book contends, also acts to obscure the gaps between the global and local discourses and Northern states’ culpability for corruption (pp. 28, 303).
The book achieves the objective stated by Bracking, namely to ‘critically review policy and practice in the field of corruption and anti-corruption’ (p. 17). The plurality of the chapters, all of which stand alone, is a great strength of the book and individual chapters may be of great interest to area specialists or, as in the case of Alolo's work on gender and corruption in Ghana, to scholars with particular research foci. The conclusions of the book and a number of the chapters build on this critical review to problematise the orthodox conception of the relations between corruption and development. The pervasiveness of this orthodoxy in development thinking makes this book a significant critical contribution.