Alena Ledeneva
Publications and news by Alena Ledeneva.
Publications
The Global Encyclopaedia of Informality
Alena Ledeneva invites you on a voyage of discovery, to explore society’s open secrets, unwritten rules and know-how practices. Broadly defined as ‘ways of getting things done’, these invisible yet powerful informal practices tend to escape articulation in official discourse. They include emotion-driven exchanges of gifts or favours and tributes for services, interest-driven know-how (from informal welfare to informal employment and entrepreneurship), identity-driven practices of solidarity, and power-driven forms of co-optation and control. The paradox, or not, of the invisibility of these informal practices is their ubiquity.
Expertly practised by insiders but often hidden from outsiders, informal practices are, as this book shows, deeply rooted all over the world, yet underestimated in policy. Entries from the five continents presented in this volume are samples of the truly global and ever-growing collection, made possible by a remarkable collaboration of over 200 scholars across disciplines and area studies.
By mapping the grey zones, blurred boundaries, types of ambivalence and contexts of complexity, this book creates the first Global Map of Informality. The accompanying database is searchable by region, keyword or type of practice, so do explore what works, how, where and why!
Where does informality stop and corruption begin? Informal governance and the public/private crossover in Mexico, Russia and Tanzania
Despite significant investment and anti-corruption capacity building in the past decades, “most systematically corrupt countries are considered to be just as corrupt now as they were before the anti-corruption interventions”(1). Statements like this are indicative of the frustration shared by practitioners and scholars alike at the apparent lack of success in controlling corruption worldwide and point to the need to rethink our understanding of the factors that fuel corruption and make it so hard to abate.
In this article we challenge the prevalent anti-corruption approaches in three ways.
- First, rather than discussing the failures of anticorruption reforms and the normative anticorruption rhetoric of the leadership in Mexico, Russia and Tanzania, we explore patterns of informal governance that work effectively, allowing the authorities to stay in power and citizens to access services and resources.
- Second, we link these practices to the impossibility of a clear public/private divide and identify those practical norms that enable its seamless crossover in these countries.
- Third, we find that the resilience of corrupt behaviours is associated with the fact that the informal governance norms that we identify across the three cases are permeated with ambivalent meanings and implications.
This approach is expected to generate insights relevant to the development of a new generation of more effective anti-corruption measures for countries that suffer from high levels of corruption.