Can the World Bank Do the Right Thing

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Paper for Amer. Anthropological Association annual meeting, Washington November 2007

Can the World Bank do the right thing? When anti-corruption movements become anti-corruption budget lines

Steven Sampson

LundUniversity

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We anthropologists like to study social movements. It makes us feel good to be doing fieldwork that seems to document the ultimate in human agency, i.e., the way people can organize their resources to take control of their lives. When we study social movements, however, we quickly become aware of the tendency for these movements to become institutionalized or hierarchical, or even oppressive. Hence, we can observe how movements of religious groupsbecome churches, how believers in group to become members of an organization, and in the NGO world howsocial activists becomeprogram officers and grant managers. Francesco Alberoni, the Italian sociologist, has written a well known book, Movement and Institution from 1984, about this very process. Alberoni notes that this process can proceed in both directions: not only can small groups of believers take on adherents and evolve into institutions butinstitutions that do not fulfill needs degenerate and lead to movements for reform. Now I say all this because I am involved in such a situation where there is a nexus between movement and institution. I am studying the anticorruption movement, this is what their adherents call it’, that is people in real localities – Europe, Africa, Asia --- where people want to change their social conditions. These people and the activist groups to which they are part want to stop having to pay bribes. They want politicians who are honest. They want institutions they can trust. In the vocabulary of international policy making, they want to eliminate bribery and nepotism, restore trust in government, and reestablish integrity, accountability and transparency in public affairs. They want good governance. They are the anticorruption moment. Who indeed, can be against such goals.

At the same time as we discern this social energy to stop bribery, nepotism and corruption, however, this same movement is supported, at times even encouraged, by some of the most powerful elite institutions or government agencies. These institutions are known for agendas and practices are far apart from those of social movements.Hence, surveying the leading supporters of anti-corruption, we find at the forefront the World Bank, the European Commission, the U.S. State Department, companies such as Shell, Statoil, Rio Tinto and Price Waterhouse, and some years ago, we would have included major donors to anticorruption programs such as Enron corporation and Arthur Andersen. What a crew of usual suspects. Add to these the various oppressive governments and petty dictators who all talk about anticorruption or have established anticorruption agencies, (Azerbaijan, China) and we find an impressive global anticorruption landscape. This landscape contains elite institutions at its summit and social activists in its valleys and enclaves. Hanging over this landscape are programmatic statements, notably the UN, OECD, and regional conventions. It has high level governmental gatherings (Global Forum) and nongovernmentalgatherings (IACC). There is an even and InternationalAnticorruption Day on December 9th. An anticorruption beauty contest called the Corruption Perception Index.Further down the chain, in the middle of all this are various bilateral aid donors, (Dfid, Sida, Danida), several foundations supporting integrity and governance, a host of private consulting companies bidding and implementing programs, law enforcement organizations against crime and corruption, various policy NGOs and social capital/governance think tanks, and on downward in local settings, the various local middlemen, the intermediaries, counterparts, and project officers. We have the emergence of the anticorruption industry, and in its basic elements seems to resemble other such industries: development aid industry, the human rights industry, the women’s empowerment industry, and now, the anticorruption industry. Anticorruption may have been a social movement, but now it’s also a budget line. Anticorruption with big A. Anticorruption training alone is now a major industry: in the UK, home of major institutes of development studies, you can also obtain a degree in Fraud Studies.

So if we anthropologists like to study social movements, we are now faced with something else: a configuration of elite institutions who seem to blend in with local social energies. How do we study all this? Well, we can try a sort of a demystification. We try to analyze their rhetoric, their agendas, their practices, their discourses, their hierarchies, their interests and strategies, perhaps within the framework of the anthropology of policy, or as some critique of the neoliberal project. As ethnographers of policy, we might have some misgiving about proclaiming our solidarity with such informants. Our goal, of course is to show others how their world works. But when we study elite institutions we are usually not after solidarity. And we’re not after dialogue. Or giving the informant a voice. No, let’s admit it. We’re after blood.

This paper is about how we are to understand anticorruption projects in this environment where movements somehow coexist with budget lines and institutionalization. I do not propose that this is anything unique to anticorruption. We have seen it in the fields of human rights, civil society, democracy promotion, rural empowerment, of ‘good governance’ and of late, trafficking. I myself have worked in several of these fields as researcher, evaluator, and consultant, mostly in the Balkans. At LundUniv.we are trying to deal with these issues in our research group on the sociology and anthropology of governance. I admit to having been both attracted and repelled by elite institutions. You want to analyze the world bank…….but well, how about being invited to one of their brown bag lunches. In these institutions, I have met committed, activist people with interesting ideas. But I have also met these people working within these elite institutions, who, I am sure many of you have experienced, use us anthropologists as a sounding board for their frustrations, but who are also able to return and be professional (Liisa Malki, humanitarian aid workers compassion/professionalism) These same people are eitheroblivious to the structural constraints around them, or worse, they know these constraints and act anyway.On the other side, in the activists world, I have also seen how vibrant social movements get locked into project budget lines and evaluation culture so that social energy of activists becomes channeled into improve one’s resume or emigrating abroad, i.e., private projects.

With this in mind, Here I would like to flesh out how this relationship between elite institutions and movementsworks in the field of anticorruption. I will do this using the metaphor of an anticorruption landscape, and an anticorruption site. There is nothing revolutionary here. It is reminiscent of other metaphors in the anthropological study of globalization: Frederik Barth, for example, talks about strands in his study of Bali; these strands (modernism, Islam, Balinese Hinduism, each has their own history), Ulf Hannerz talks about flows of meaning mediated by state, market and movement, Appadurai talks about ‘scapes (ethnoscape, financescape, technoscape, etc.). which carry money, symbols and people along trajectories. We are all looking for the right framework to study the dynamics of transnational spaces where we find elite institutions, committed individuals and various hybrid forms. For me, the metaphor of a landscape works because it reminds us that the understanding of the flow of resources depends on the position in which you find yourself. The resources that flow are basically, money, ideas, knowledge and people. Some actors in the anticorruption landscape are at the summit and have a big picture and can send things down. These are for example donors and policy makers such as the Bank, OECD, the Commission, or UNDPs anticorruption office or UNCAC secretariat. Those at the summits communicate easily with others in other summits but rarely descend down into the valleys. Other actors are in valleys or enclaves, operating as social movements, and/or project units in particular local spaces, places where we anthropologists tend to hang out.. In between are the actors who can bring resources, restrict them, divert them, or convert them, the transnational NGOs, international consultants, the trainers, experts, specialists who can affect that international initiatives reach local target groups. Along this landscape there is a traffic in resources, i.e. the money, ideas, knowledge and people who in concrete terms become things like Grants, good governance, corruption assessment toolkits, and anticorruption training specialists.. these are the kinds of things that move. Sometimes, as we have heard at other papers these resources can move along strange paths. A anticorruption program can move from the Ukraine, where USAID started, to Albania, and the to Serbia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Other times these resources get stopped or diverted. The resources also move between elite organizations and intermediaries and local groups. When the resources move and we like what we see, we use words like impact, or buyin or ‘the spread of standards’. But along the way, some resources get lost (money), and other resources are refused or used for other things (corruption, wasted).

I admit to having one specific problem: how do we understand major institutions when they have projects that I agree with. One response here as been to see some kind of conspiracy, and today, it looks like all conspiracies are either neocon or neoliberal. This is also true in the field of anticorruption. Hence, the anticorruption agenda of the Bank or of USAID, while it may talk about integrity of public life or honest officials, is really about making the world safe for international business transactions. The U.S.government, which normally is against internationaltreaties like Kyoto or International Criminal Court, is very active in international anticorruption work. The conspiracy view is fed if we examine the premiereanticorruption NGO, Transparency International or TI, was originally founded in 1993 with this primary goal in its very name “fighting corruption in international business transactions”. The problem with the neoliberal conspiracy hypothesis is that it is untestable. There seems be no anticorruption cabal. At best we can observe that some anticorruption NGOs, TI among them, feel very much at home in elite forums. TI attends the Davos meetings for example and has had many contacts with the world bank. It founder, peter Eigen, worked for the bank, its global director is a former bank official, its communication director used to work in the Nixon white house!. Not exactly your grass roots organization.

Yet seen anthropologically, we need perhaps a more nuanced approach to elite institutions. An approach which is less cynical, and takes its point of departure in moral projects of their leaders. That is, are there also elites who want a better world? Can we talk about the concept of movements, as people talk about anticorruption movement, and use World Bank or USAID or OECD or TI in the same breath? These days, our view of movements is colored by the romanticism of the antiglobalization crowd, waving their copies of Hart and Negri and talking about empire and global justice. When we investigate such moments, or their NGOs, we of course find some of the same intrigues, conflicts, and struggles over resources and interests that we describe among elite institutions. Life inside movements can be extraordinary nasty. As committed anthropologists, or researchers with careers who don’t want to ruin our relations to our field site, we make certain decisions. People doing work with NGOs often experience this dilemma. I have a doctoral student doing a thesis on ATTAC who was criticized for not joining the organization by fellow sociologists, but she refused. I myself have been asked by TI to do consulting work for them, certainly an opportunity for a fieldworker, but I too refused as it would create obvious conflicts of interest with doing research on them. (I volunteered to be a sparring partner or in some other capacity at no charge, but my overture was rebuffed). This has had a negative effect on rapport. Now I mention all this because I think we need to reassess how we anthropologists study elites, and especially the good elites. How do we study global morality?

Rather, our interest must be in tracking how statementsof good intention, including those made by elite institutionstake on a life of their own in texts, practices, and the movements of money, ideas, people and knowledge.

Let me use the rest of my time, then, to describe some aspects of this process by focusing on the world bank and its relations with TI, since it is often with or via TI that so many anticorruption projects are implemented locally.

The bank is important for two obvious reasons. One, it gives out a lot of money in developmentassistance, and this money is given only togovernments who commit themselves to fighting corruption. Discourse is tied to cash. Two, the bank is the major repository of ideas about corruption and its relation to development. The bank is the generator of enormous amounts of data about corrupt behavior. That is, while there are other corruption perception surveys and local assessments, the bank is the only organ that compares corruption across 200 countries. The primary vehicle for this is their governance indices, carried out by the World Bank Institute, in an annual statistical publication called Governance Matters. For the bank corruption is a symptom of bad governance, and control of corruption an index of good governance. Good governance is now considered a precondition for development. Bad governance in the form of ‘state capture’ or cronyism, inhibits development. The bank thus generates moral commitment, a whole bunch of money, and a fund of data to legitimate its practices. Measuringcorruption is not easy. First you have to define it (which by the way is defined as the use of public resources for private gain). Then you have to find some categories of corruption petty/grand/looting; public/private ;individual/political; or divide by sector (police, customs, health, procurement,). You have to use indices and you have to either ask people how they experience corruption (give/take), or you go out and ask experts to assess the corruption climate (businesses think they may pay more this year tan last year). Then you have to compare countries and see if they rise and fall to examine progress in good governance. These statistics are not simply an academic exercise. Bad numbers on the governance index give lower international credit ratings or disqualify a country for loans on the US Millennium Challenge Fund. Countries who don’t make the grade governance wise simply do not quality. Corruption indices are part of the grading system.

Let me now return to the world banks commitment. Prior to the mid 1990s, it is accepted that corruptionwas not a policy issue at the bank. Yes, funds were abused, but the bank thought that it could not intervene in the politics of receiving countries. Abuse and funds were kept under wraps. Corruption as called the C=word. Various dictators could receive aid – Suharto, Mobuto, Nigerian leaders – and smuggle it out to Swiss bank accounts (now we have asset recovery). This all changed in 1996 when bank president JamesWolfensohn gave his famous speech condemning corruption in development, known as the ‘cancer of corruption’ speech.

Since then, the bank has developed anticorruption policies, strategies, tools, measures and programs. Loans can be suspended due to corruption. Anticorruption training modules are included. Public sector reform, transparency in hiring, easing up business practices (reducing number of permits), aiding watchdog groups, altering political party financing, are all part of this list.

Equallyimportant, corruptionbecame a scientific concept, something that could be measured, assessed and classified, so as to further create methods of assessing whether the struggle against corruption succeeded. Measurement of corruption became a political instrument. And today, certain of these measures, including the TI corruption index can create headlines in countries which move up or down the list. This is notsimply about reputations. Countries actually lose aid or must take loans with higher interest rates.

Let me give some example of these statistics to show you how governance is measured done. They are done by the World Bank Institute under the leadership of Chileaneconomist Daniel Kaufman. Basically, the bank has formulated 6 indices of governance, as follows:

Voice and accountability, politicalstability and absence of violence, government effectiveness, regulatory quality, rule of law, and control of corruption,

Each index is a composite of about 40 surveys, mostly expert surveys where businessmen or diplomats judge the degree of governance related areas in a country; freedom of the press, difficulty of obtaining construction permits, transparency of tax system, government commitments to control corruption. My favorite index is called ‘state capture’ State capture refers to the ability of private actors to purchase laws, lawmakers, or political processes for their own benefit. When its done legally we call it lobbying. This means that there are high capture and low capture states. Statistics are about knowledge and power. They are scientific assessments for the purpose of making policy. Any statistic must do two things. It must divide phenomena into classes and must assign individual acts to a class. Decroissere, in his history of statistical reasoning, calls this ‘classifying’ and ‘encoding’. This is how we get corruption indices, integrity indexes or opacity scales.