Why do developing country anti‐corruption commissions fail to deal with corruption? Understanding the three dilemmas of organisational development, performance expectation, and donor and government cycles

Abstract

Abstract The article reviews aspects of the literature on public sector organisational development in developing countries, and on Anti‐Corruption Agencies or Commissions (ACC), to set the context for its empirical research into five African countries' ACCs 1 . This argues that ACCs are as likely to be affected by the same problems as any other public sector institution, but the approaches taken by donors and the consequential expectations on performance fail to recognise this. The article further argues that, in addition to these two dilemmas relating to the conditions necessary to promote organisational development and performance expectation––organisational continuity––of ACCs, a third dilemma––differing cycles of donor and government activity––also poses problems for that development. This has practitioner and policy relevance. With multilateral and bilateral donors still continuing to establish ACCs as the lead agency to address corruption there is a need to address the future organisational development of existing ACCs as well as using the lessons from the performance of such ACCs to provide the continuity for new ACCs to be capable of dealing with corruption. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. The agencies visited were those with a responsibility for addressing corruption: the Anti‐Corruption Bureau (ACB) in Malawi; the Inspectorate of Government (IG), Uganda; the Commission for Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ) and the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), Ghana; the Anti‐Corruption Commission (ACC), Sierra Leone; the Prevention of Corruption Bureau (PCB), Tanzania; the Anti‐Corruption Commission (ACC), Zambia. The authors would like to thank the staff for their cooperation; the views in the article are solely those of the authors. Part of the field research was for a U4 research project.