Caryn Peiffer
Publications and news by Caryn Peiffer.
Publications
'Islands of integrity'? Reductions in bribery in Uganda and South Africa and lessons for anti-corruption policy and practice
This paper sets out lessons from a mixed-methods study that identified and explored ‘positive outlier’ cases of bribery reduction in challenging governance environments. It discusses the two cases the research examined in depth:
- a 50 percent reduction in bribery in Uganda’s health sector while in other sectors bribery rates increased (2010-2015);
- an almost 15 percent reduction in police-related bribery in South Africa’s Limpopo province while in other provinces it reduced by less than four percent (2011-2015).
The findings suggest the importance of disrupting corruption patterns and of unintended consequences for anti-corruption policy and practice.
Collective Action and Systemic Corruption
A growing body of research argues that anticorruption efforts often fail because of a flawed theoretical foundation, where collective action theory is said to be a better theoretical lens for understanding corruption than the dominant principal-agent theory. We unpack this critique and advance four new arguments.
First, the application of collective action theory to corruption has thus far been both incomplete and narrow. Second, a collective action theory-based approach to corruption is in fact complementary to principal-agent approaches, rather than contradictory as is claimed. Third, both theoretical approaches share in common a ‘blind spot’, which is that corruption often persists because it sometimes provides solutions to problems in resource-poor contexts.
We conclude by arguing that anticorruption effectiveness is difficult to achieve because it requires insights from all three perspectives, which may allow us to better understand how to harness the political will needed to fight corruption.