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Notes for paper Chicago
When I thought about this panel, as you can see in the description, it was about
a tendency described by those who work in, funding and study civil society
movements and NGOs. It is the obvious evolution toward increasing
professionalism, or the cooptation of passionate amateur activists into NGO
project managers. We have all seen this. So have the people living in the
communities and societies which NGOs are supposed to help; thus, we hear
accusations of an NGO mafia, a rich NGO class, of an insidious foreign agent,
and the accusations of NGO corruption or misuse of state funds. What the
Russian government has enacted in terms of laws (making foreign funded
NGOs into foreign agents of influence) reflects a popular tendency. The point
here is that one-time local activists have become a local elite, and moreover, an
illegitimate or perhaps cosmopolitan/disloyal elite.
This is the local side. On the global side, we also have global civil society
organizations operating out of well-staffed headquarters in London, Brussels or
Geneva and with national branches or chapters scattered throughout the world.
The staff working in these highly sophisticated NGOs may also have grass
roots pedigrees, but they are now working actively for what are called global
moral agendas: –human rights, antitrafficking, climate and env. Protection,
migration rights, refugees, peacefulding, children, women, anticorruption. The
upper staff of such organizations tend to circulate between their headquarters
organizations, their government funders, international organizations and the
consulting units who evaluate these initiatives. Sometimes this consulting is
disguised as some sort of partnership, other times it is simple offers of private
expertise for contract. They may even move from one NGOs to another –Oxfam
today, Save the Children tomorrow…. In carrying out these practices, a whole
set of linkags, networks and obligations are created. People in these global
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NGOs in a European capital become part of a cosmopolitan network of
meetings, coordination conferences, fundraising schemes, strategy planning,
and project implementation. They are what the Norwegian development
researcher Terje Tvedt calls the NGO channel or NGO scene. Those in the
scene; and those trying to enter, form coalitions, conduct campaigns, they meet
at Davos, or make an appearance at Porte Allegre or WSF, or perhaps at and
Occupy meeting. They insist that they speak for a constituency of victims. They
advocate, lobby, fundraise. They are smart, articulate, engaged, and well
connected. They have resources, or access to resources. They are elites.
Some of us anthropologists are wannabe elites. We are attracted, perhaps
captivated, by the skill set that these elites have. When I did consulting for the
Danish and Swedish governments in the Balkans, as donor, advisor and
evaluator, I, too was captivated by the combination of passion and mission by
some of the NGO leaders I met. Working under considerable pressure, in
complex, sometimes violent environments, in ice cold rooms without electirict
several hours a day, hassling with donors abroad and local officials at home, yes
I admired them.
But I was also turned off by the crude careerism of others who handed me their
CV as soon as I walked in the room. I kept dividing the world into the good and
the bad NGOs leaders, in fact, that was part of my job. Not realizing that they
both had an elite project. The good elites talk about ‘making an impact’, ‘doing
something to change society’, ‘getting donors to commit themselves’ ‘giving
people some possibilities’. The others talk about ‘making a career’ or ‘making
money’ or ‘taking a leading role’. A rhetoric which is quite acceptable for
careers in the public or private sector, but not in the world of ‘civil society’, or
the world of anthropologists who study civil society.
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My problem then is to find a way to rethink the gap between the grass roots
organizations that have become professionalized, and the overtly elite
organizations pursuing global agendas, and the various kinds of elites whom we
encounter in this NGOs universe.
My own questioning about elites has most recently been related to my study of
the global anticorruption movement, which I have argued has evolved into the
anticorruption industry, with an ideology of what I have called, somewhat
polemically, anticorruptionism. Since corruption is something that happens
locally, between real people doing real things, it is understandable that there is
grass roots sentiment against corruption, or more precisely, against too much
corruption or the wrong kind of corruption. But the story of anticorruptionism,
and the rise of the anticorruption industry, is a story of elite groups taking up an
agenda and promoting it. Grass roots aside, the real players in the global
anticorruption movement include high officials from the World Bank, global
companies such as Siemens and Price Waterhouse, mining companies like Rio
Tinto, the U.S. International Chamber of Commerce, and, to go to extremes
why two leading donors to the anticorruption NGO Transparency International
was none other than Enron Corporation and Arthur Andersen. What are these
organizations doing in the anticorruption movement?
Let me come back to the distinction between grass roots and elites that we
anthropologists are grappling with. To what extent does such a distinction help
us understand now NGOs work, and how they actually succeed in helping
constituents, effecting change or keeping things from getting worse.
Most of us here have a sentimental affinity with grass roots and NGOs. Face it,
we’re anthropologists. Perhaps because we inherently understand civil society
to be something that comes from below, something that faces off against the
state. Except for the nordic countries where I happen to live (where civil society
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collaborates with the state), most of us have this view of civil society and their
NGO manifestations. In this view, people have a problem, the problem was
created by either nature, by disaster, by poverty, by politics, by social
inequality; and ‘civil society’ is a means by which people understand problems
and develop solutions to solve them. This is how we understand how the grass
roots mobilize. We like it when we see people identifying problems and trying
to solve them. As anthropologists, consultants, or activists, we help them out,
we help them reach new target groups, we teach them project management, we
help them get grants or refine their tactics. We watch, we learn, we
theorize…….
Now what happens when it is elites who are identifying the problems? Or when
those who once were activists take on elite characteristics? How do we view the
way elites view problems? Should we respect, or take seriously, the way elites
look at political, social or economic problems? Is George Soros or Jimmy
Carter or Bill Clinton or the Gates’ foundations, all which have wonderful
problem-solving agendas, as does the Heritage Foundation or the NRA, are all
these some kind of discursive conspiracy? How do we study elites who want to
solve problems? How do they ‘get us on board’ as the phrase goes these days.
How do we take elite civil society organizations seriously? Should we study
them in the same way we study grass roots organizations? Or is there somthing
else operating which takes them out of the NGO defintional equation??
I have been grappling with this problem because for the past serveral years I
have focused my interest on the anticorruption industry. The core of the
anticorruption industry is a combination of agenda-setting powers, access to
decision-makers, money and resources to enforce these, and organizations and
experts to set standards and certifications, and promote a certain
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anticorruptionist ideology. I use the word industry not as a pejorative but as an
analytical term to differentiate it from more spontaneous, locally based
movement and movments, which we might call “craft”. Anticorruptionism in
this sense is what political scientists and IR theorists call a ‘regime’. But here at
an anthropology conference, we might use the most vague word we can find:
assemblage. There is an anticorruption assemblage out there, with the moral
enterpreneurs, legal regulations, fundraising organs, policy strategies, discursive
terminology, with the metrics, statistics, government budget lines, private
anticorruption consulting companies, anticorruption training units, and the
monitoring, evaluation and ‘coalition building’ that has given anticorruption a
life of its own. It is a life totally divorced from the everyday and grand
corruption that continues to occur, and immensely different from a local group
or mass movement that intends to topple political leaders as we might see in
street demonstrations in Bulgaria, North Africa or India.
How did this assemblage take form? It got started with a bunch of elites. These
elites originally did not organize an NGO. They were pressed into it. And
eventually became Transparency International, which last week celebrated its
20th anniversary. Let me you use last few minutes to tell a story of how and
industry – or an assemblage – gets born. And perhaps we can reformulate our
understanding of NGOs by including these elites in the equation.
The data here comes from several years observing what they called ‘the
international anticorruption movement’ in the Balkans, interviewing TI staff and
founders, participating in various project activities and trainings, attending
meetings and conferences, and reading various kinds of documeentation. I can
also add that I am a member of TI Denmark, where I live, that I have not done
any formal anticorruption consulting for TI or others; and that my interest in
anticorruption includes not just TI but the entire anticorruption industry,
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including the private anticorruption and ethical compliance companies (yes, you
can know outsource ethics).
TI is only one of the players in the anticorruption assemblage, which include
international organizations, bilateral aid organizations, government
anticorruption agencies (even china and Zimbabwe now have these), private
and public donors, private consulting firms, and a host of local and international
NGOs, coalitions and advocacy organizations with ‘anticorruption’ as one of
their missions. Among these, TI is certainly the major nongovernmental player,
and takes on the function of representing ‘civil society’ at elite anticorruption
gatherings or the anticorruption sector when other international NGOs meet to
discuss development issues. TI also advises private and public actors on the
proper way to fight corruption, relying on stories and data provided by its
national chapters throughout the world.
TI sees itself as global coalition against corruption. Organizationally, it consists
of a secretariat in Berlin, with about 100 employees and interns, and about 90
national chapters. TI is most famous for its Corruption Perception Index, which
ranks the most and least corrupt countries and creates enormous publicity for
the organization. The CPI is in effect, its brand, and release of the CPI is a
carefully planned public event.
My interest in TI lies with its immense success at putting anticorruptionism on
the global aid agenda. This success begins with the founding of TI in 1993 after
a series of closed meetings in Berlin, London and The Hague. It proceeds
through the establishment of national chapters, first in Ecadoar, and then a
successful meeting at the world bank in 1995, with lobbying for the OECD
anticorruption convention in 1998, with the UN anticorruption convention
enacted in 2003, now Dec 9 is anticorruption day and with various intiatives for
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private business, such as the anticorruption principle on the UN Global
Compact (with specifies ethics for companies) and has promoted the idea of
‘integrety pacts’ between companies bidding for public contracts. Today TI now
has what every major advocacy organization aspires to in Europe: an office in
Brussels.
TI was founded exactly 20 years ago (last week they celebrated their
anniversary at the annual meeting in Berlin). There is a dramatic element to it,
and it resembles the founding of most NGOs. It begins with the idealistic,
frustrated activist who runs up against an obstacle. The founder is a german
econocmist named Peter Eigen. The obstacle is the World Bank. Eigen was
regional director for the World Bank in east Africa, and encountered one corrupt
project after another. Eigen\s development work with the bank had taken him to
many countries and he had cultivated a network of government officails, former
ministers, lawyers, businessmen and development specialists. The vast majority
were older men from the professions in their late 50s or older, solididly
ensconced in careers, but, like Eigen, frustrated and looking for a mission. The
mission became anticorruption. Most, but not all, were from the UK, Austrialia,
Holland, Canada and Germany, but others were from South Asia and Latin
America. All had worked internationally and all had straddled the public and
private sectors. None of them had any NGO, civili society or grass roots
experience. None.
The founders were by any definition elites: they came from the world bank,
international business, foreign aid, government ministries, financial firms and
law firms. The founding of the NGO TI is an elite narrative. Eigen insisted on
bringing up the corruption factor but was rebuffed. He eventually resigned from
the bank (‘in a huff’ as he expressed it). At the timie corruption was not spoken
of at the bank, being called ‘the C word’. To this day Eigen is obsessed about
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getting the bank on his side, something he successfully accomplished. Eigen
had his cohorts in this project. Frank Vogl was a reporter for the London Times
and then moved to the Bank as communciaitons director before establishing his
own communciations company. Hans Jorg Elshurst worked at the German aid
ministry GTZ, Gerald Parfitt at was at Lybrandt and Coopers (later PWC), Fritz
Heimann was general counsel at GE, which had just been caught in a major
anticorruption scandal and investigator Michael Herschmann had his own fraud
investigation company. George Moody Stuart, a businessman working in
Jamaica whose brother Mark became head of Shell and helped facilitate TI’s
contacts with the Dutch minister of development, Laurence Cockroft a UK
development expert, Kamal Hossain, a former Bangladesh minister and lawyer,
Olusegun Obansajo former president of Nigeria, Joe Githongo a Kenyan
businessmen, and the former Costa Rican President Arias Sanchez were also
part of this global elite cabal. In 1993 this group held a series of meetings to
discuss how to fight corruption, Dutch minister of developmet Jan Pronk and
former World Bank head Robert McNamara agreed to help the initial startup of
TI with 50.000 dollars from the Glocal Coalition for Africa. Elshurst procured
200.000 Deutsch Marks from GTZ. At these meetings various possibilities were
discussed: TI could become part of the Dutch ministry of foreign affairs. TI
could become a consulting unit, or a think tank. At one of the meetings, held at
Latimer House (loaned from Lybrand and Coopers, later PWC), the NGO
option was discussed. But no noe knew what an NGO was at the time.
1) That TI should be a think tank.
2) Michael Hershmann, who as an investigator with AID and later formed
the Fairfax Group for business investigation, thought that TI should be
more an investigation organization, a prosecutor…..
3) The Dutch wanted to make TI a unit within the Dutch ministry of
development
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4) Consensus on making TI an NGO, but it had no human or financial
resources
Most foreiegn aid was being channeled to church groups, and none of the TI
elite had any NGO experience. They took a taxi over to Amnesty to hear about
how NGOs are organized. One issue was that some global NGOs are run
centrally with members everywhere. The TI group did not see things this way.
They undersetood the need to work on decision makers, to create coalitions.
As Frank Vogl writes, ‘How could a handful of angry middle-aged men make
any difference at all?’ (p.62). In Feburary 1993, 20 colleageus from 12 countries
met in the Hague (and it was speculated that TI would have its headquarters
there). In May 1993 McNamara came to Berlin for the opening of TI, along
with Ecuadorian vice president Alberto Dahlik, who became president of TI’s
international council. The first professional staff was Jeremy Pope, former
General Counsel of the Commonwealth Secretariat, who took on TI’s research
arm and developed the TI Source Book and the concept of analyzing a country’s
Integrity System. Frederik Galtung, the son of Peter Eigen’s friend Johann
Galtung, became a research specialist at TI, developing the CPI and other
research tools (Pope and Galtung later left TI to form their own development
organization called TIRI). With the aid of the German economist Johan Graf
Lambsdorff, TI developed the Corruption Perception Index. Funds for TI came
from aid agencies, Soros Foundation and others.
Today TI has up to 100 staff, a sizable budget and its local chapters have their
own budgets as well. Much of TI’s work, like any NGO, is image making,
publicity and fundraising. The goal is to put a face on corruption, both the
victims and the perpetrators, and to get as many actors ‘on board’ as possible.
These include the major donors and governments, organs which monitor
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adherence to existing conventions, and especially business community through
the establishmet of codes of conduct. Recent enforcemet of the US FCPA and
the UK Anti-bribery act have been game changers in this regard, extending
prosecutions for corruption.
TI’s current global director, Hugette Labelle, is a former head of the Canadian
foreign aid office, CIDA, and a university chancellor. TI’s former managing
director, David Nussbaum from Britain, hired professional staff and increased
the budget. A former financial officer at Oxfam, he spent 5 years at TI and then
moved to the World Wildlife Foundation where he received 110.000 pounds as
CEO. TI’s current executive director, Cobus De Swardt, is a sociologist from
South Africa who has had experience in NGOs, public and private sector, and is
an avid mind-mapper. These people are professional, highly educated, skilled,
intelligent elites fluent in the languages of diplomacy, fundraising, civil society
activism, development strategy, empowerment and project management.
Let me return to one of the founding moments in TI’s genesis, its relation to the
World Bank. Eigen and Vogl had both been with the bank as had another key TI
person Michael Wiehen, who would become had of TI Germany. Eigen had
resigned in frustration, if not in protest. Up to the mid-1990s, corruption was
taboo at the bank, they called it the C word. In January 1996, Eigen secured a
meeting with new Bank president James Wolfensohn. Wolfensohn conluded “as
he told a few of us that the Wrold Bank had to take the lead in the
anticorruption fight.’ Wolfensohn invited TI to make a presentation to the banks
top twenty five managers. The arguemtns presented were that corruption is a
cost of developemtn, that the bank could make an impact, and that
anticorruption reforms were needed to make a level playing field for
international corporations (the level playing field ideology was important for
American interests in getting the OECD convention, in so far as foreign
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corporations could deduct bribes from their taxes). Wolfensohn was convinced,
and at a major speech in October pledged to fight against what he called ‘the
cancer of corruption’.
The same success occurred with the OECD anti-bribery convention. “The
motivations were different, but the objectives of TI and American business
lobbies were the same’ when it came to the issue of anti-bribery. The campaign
was led by executives from Boeing, Merck and Enron. GE, which had been
fined for bribery, now saw that there should be laws to prevent others from
paying bribes. Under TI’s prodding 20 business leaders wrote to European
heads of state asking them to sign the anti-bribery convention. TI purued its
strategy of wooing the business community and other key actors, forming
coalitions, encouraging others to fund conferences and campaigns, but ensuring
that it still played the organizational role.
TI’s goal is to reduce or eliminate corruption, understood as ‘the misuse of
entrusted power for private gain’. This definition is post-Enron, as corruption is
understood to occur not only in the public sector but in private or NGO sector as
well. Entrusted power is everywhere, also in the boardroom. To do this, it
participates in coalitions of public and private actors, principally major aid and
banking organizations, and groups of business people within the extractive
industires sector or other sectors. TI does not demonstrate. The coalition is
most visible at the biannual International Anticorruption Conference where
about 1500 participants attend from government, aid organizations, private
sector and NGOs (mostly TI members from local chapters).
TI has a range of activities and products beside the well known Corruption
Pereception Index. These include other indexes such as the bribe payers index,
gallup poles on corruption, a global corruption report covering corruption in
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various sectors (health, education, water, foreign aid); advocacy campaigns scuh
as monitoring the UN Anticorruption Convention; assisting and coordinating
relations between the various local chapters in advocating or training about
laws, e.g. whistleblowing, access to information, legal aid. Local chapters may
be small voluntary groups as they are in most of northern Europe, or they may
be staff organizations and project units as in the postsocialist countries, or as
many as 400 employees and thousdands of volunteers in Bangla Desh. Most
local TI’s are typical NGO project units which a board, a dynamic, often
cosmoplitan director who is lawyear or NGO person, a staff of program officers,
and funds from foreign aid organizations, or the TI secretariat, which itself
secures funds for various regional or sector initiatives. The funds could be for
campaigns, training or research surveys, or advice on legal issues such as
procurement, customs or whistleblowing.
The secretariat itself, with a budget of 10 million euros, is funded by several
West European, US and Canadian governmetns or aid organizations, by projects
from the EU, World Bank and some private funds from foundations and
company donors. TI now also has a small Brussels office. In recent years, TI
has also begun to offer anticorruption training to companies, so that they can
compe with new laws and regulations for public procurement, due to the the UK
anti-bribery, the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or the World Banks new
procedurs for debarring corrupt companies.
Eigen has been very adamant that TIs policy should be one of ‘coalition
building’, cooperation with business, government, international oragnizations,
and local groups to build a global coalition agisnt corruption and the abuse of
power. In this project, TI has been extraordinaliry successful.
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This success has not been without conflict. At annual meetings of ‘the
movemetn’, there are invariable complaints from the local chapters that the
headquarters in Berlin is keeping funds or information from them, while Berlin
complains that the local chapters do not read their memos or take advantage of
information. An evaluation of TI commissioned to an evaluation NGO by
NORAD (also a major donor) notes that there is still a challenge of the local
chapters communicating with each other horizontally, not having to deal with
Berlin. The Latin Ameircan TI’s feel particualrlyh sensitive to this issue,
More seriously as anticorruption became a popular buzzwords in development,
more unscrupulous operators came in for a piece of the action, leading to some
minor scandals, or corruption in anticorruption NGO. TI now has a membership
accreditation committee to ‘guard the brand’. TI’s logo is in fact copyrighted.
Hence, some TI branches have been closed down, others put on probation.
Let met stop and recapitulate. If NGOs are measured by their impact on a public
agenda, then TI has been enormously successful in getting corruption, or
anticorruption, onto the lips of politicians, policy makers, funders and aid
organizations. TI was instrumental in the bank’s turn to governance isuses, its
CPI, immune to methodological critiques, remains a widely publized naming
and shaming instrument which embarrasses prime ministers and gurarntees TI
press coverage. Through its professionalism, TI has entered various government
and international gatherings as a spokesman for the victims of corruption and
for grass roots activists fighting corruption. TI’s ability to do this was based on
the biographies, careers, connections and skills of its founders, the aging white
middle class men who had been international civil servants, lawyers,
development experts and businessmen, all of whom understood not just the
value of communcations, but communication to the key journalists. They were
well connected. They did not need to become an NGO, but in the end made the
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decision, when pressed from a bunch of African women at a meeting of
Ecuador. TI therefore maintains this dual structure of a tight global secretariat
and relatively independent local chapters, each with own fundraising and
strategies. TI is both a global NGO and a set of independent local units who
borrow the TI brand and reputation. TI IS ESSENTIALLY A FRANCHISE.
As a result, Anticorruption has now reached the policy summit: it is a budget
line, like governance, human rights and democracy, gender, children and health.
And has an office in Brussels. Like other such industries or assemblages, the
concept of corruption has become more fluid and anticorruption has inflated
into struggles for open information, accountability, access to information,
whistleblowing, political party financing, and a general effort to prevent or fight
abuse of power. Like these industries it extends itself into public sector, private
enterprise and moral entrepreneurship. There is now even a critical
anticorruption studies that sees anticorruption as part of a neoliberal plot. In
fact, TI has always been neoliberal, and its coalitions are inherently coalitions of
the powerful, including powerful business interests. In the anticorruption
struggle, everyone can come ‘on board’. It is in changing the minds of the
powerfujl, rather than mobilizing the powerless, that TI finds its strength.
According to Eigen’s colleagues, it is this focus on affecting the elites that has
given TI access to the world’s boardooms. TI is a movement, but a movement
of a different kind, quite different from any sort of World Social Forum or
Occupy movement.
And it is here that we understand the attractiveness and the power that elites,
elitism and elite practice has in the NGO world.
Elite NGOs and elites in NGOs operate with a very simple theory that power
itself can be for the good. In our Foucauldian optic, we may have forgotten this
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idea. But perhaps we need to search for a kind of theory of the ‘good elite’
power to recapture why we need to integrate elites into NGO studies. We need
to understand that elites also have a kind of cosmopolitan knowledge that
competes with the local knowledge of our grass roots. If there are grass roots,
then perhaps there are also tree tops……….
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
‘The whole thing was bizare’
When it came time for the officers, peter and frank were there as executives together with
kamal h. and olusegun obansajo. It was extremely impotrnat that there were reprsentatives
from the south on the initiatl committee, as this gave TI international legitimacy and it was
not seen as a pressure from the north against the south….
The convening conference brought together an array of international figures, including the
Nobel Peace Prize Laureate and former President of Costa Rica Oscar Arias Sanchez, the
former Foreign Minister of Mauritania Ahmedou Ould Abdallah, the former Foreign Minister
of Bolivia Robert MacLean Abaroa, and Olusegun Obasanjo, then of the African Leadership
Forum and now former President of Nigeria.Together with Peter Eigen, the founding
members were Hansjörg Elshorst, Joe Githongo, Fritz Heimann, Michael Hershman, Kamal
Hossain, Dolores L. Español, George Moody Stuart, Jerry Parfitt, Jeremy Pope and Frank
Vogl.
1. The changing climate of foreign aid. Up to 1990 aid was a means of forging
alliances in a cold war climate. Donors had little interest in making sure their
money was used widely. With the end of the cold war, citizens demanded
accountability from governmens as to how their aid was going.
2. Decisive public relations campaign due to FWs skills and networks in the
key journalistic venues
3. Dedicated and well connected group of founders who knew their way around
the elite circles.
4. ????Peters own networks and perseverance within developmet circles.
TI in its early years was basically a small operation run largely by the active board members.
There was nothing about national chapters in its original charter.
By focusing its energies on changing world bank policies, the idea was that these ideas would
thus ripple out to other donor agencies as well.
Logo Texas instruments, frank, global coaltion against corrupton in intrenaitonal business
transactions………..
Speech by peter
Coalition-building has remained one of the key principles in our operations – it requires also
one of the most difficult balancing acts, that TI and other CSOs have to perform daily: how to
keep enough distance from political and business leaders, while cooperating with them for
change.
The TI approach to building coalitions was evident in the evolution of the OECD AntiBribery Convention. The key to securing support for the Convention, which came into effect
in February 1999, was the support of large companies. TI met between 1994 and 1996 in the
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Aspen Institute in Berlin with business leaders in a series of confidential conferences, some
of them chaired by President Richard von Weizsäcker, and over time reached agreement on
the need for global, simultaneous elimination of foreign bribery. The result was an open
letter, signed by 20 European companies and sent to their ministers encouraging them to sign
a Convention sponsored by the OECD, which would outlaw bribery of foreign public
officials in international business transactions.
One of the elements to bring business on our side was to offer an escape route from the
prisoner’s dilemma in which they found themselves. Many business people do not want to
bribe, but they felt they must, in order to keep up with their competitors. Our idea was to
arrange no-bribes Integrity Pacts, to be signed by all competitors in given markets where all
competitors are known.
It used to be an uphill battle to persuade businesses, particularly small and medium-sized
businesses, that the benefits of operating on the basis of honesty outweighed the costs of
losing business while competitors were bribing their way to winning contracts. Economists
were inclined to agree that in a bribe-demanding environment the pursuit of profit would
induce all competitors to behave equally;
(Peter Eigen, Chasing Corruption Around the World – How Civil Society Organizations
Strengthen Global Governance, Stanford University, 4 October 2004, page 13 of 23) 13
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hence building a bridge out of this corruption trap could give all players the confidence not to
bribe.
TI combined the common search for joint solutions with major campaigns of awarenessbuilding, using our annual Corruption Perceptions Index and Bribe Payers Index, regular
publications, guidebooks and tool kits. The result during the past few years has been a
dramatic change in public awareness. Serving the active operations of by now more than 90
national chapters all over the world, diagnosis, reforms and good practice, adapted to various
countries, are now underway. It is now evident that the world has woken up to the dangers of
corruption. A new consensus is emerging in recognition of the damage caus
Interview laurecne
Joe had an accounting firm in Kenya, Githongo and Co. Joe introduced LC to PE at a
restaurant in Nairobi called The Red Bull, in 1991.
Another key actor was Goerge Moody-Stuart,
http://www.transparency.org.au/newsletters/jan05.pdf
who had been in the sugar refining business in Jamaica, and who had written a book on
corruption, coinced the term ‘grand corruption’ and whose brother Mark became head of
Shell Oil. Mark lived in the Hague, and facilitated a meeting in 1993 when TIs charter was
signed.
Aside form the Latimer House meeting, there was also a meeting outside Berlin, in Wannsee,
in which PE brought Obejango (former pres. Of Nigeria), Mcnamara (former pres. Of world
bank, now with Global Coalition for Africa, former Germ president van Weizacker, and
Alberto Dahik from Ecquador.
:
1) Coopers and Lybrand supported TI because they saw themselves with a potential
client or partner in offering consulting services
2) LC thought that TI would develop into a civic action group like Amnesty
Internaitonal
3) PE saw TI developing in the directionof an advocacy coalition.
A key contributor to all the meetings was Fritz Heimann, former general counsel to General
Electric and later head of TI USA. GE had been involved in a bribe case in Egypt and was
fined by the Dept of Justice under the FCPA. One of their penalties was that they should
publicize antibribery activities, and GE became a donor to TI (or TI USA??)))
This was followed (preceded) by a conference in Fairfax, VA, sponsored by Michael
Hershman o the Fairfax Group. Hershmann had formerly been with USAID as a
financial/legal investigator, and as PE notes in the book, had experience with anticorruption
prosecution as such. They had prosecuted Bofors, among other things, and he was well
connected.
Kamal Hossein, former min. of law and foreign affairs in Bangladesh, and a prominent jurist
was also prominent in TI and became one of TIs first vice directors (with FV).
According to LC, Peters strategy was to mobilize people through his WB network. This
network included people Peter had met while in Latin America and Francophone Africa, as
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well as East Africa. Peter had also worked as advisor in Botswana, reforming the legal
system.
((((here I should note that TIs emphasis always seems to be on development issues, but since
development depends on private sector actors/contractors, infrastructure fx, as well as loans
from banks, etc., the private sector/international business component is an essential part of
the equation)))))
This included the Commonwealth networks, via Jeremy Pope, who had been secretary in the
Commonwealth administration, and perhaps Tim Lankester???
And some recipient countries such as Bolivia and Ecquador.
Peter’s ‘ability to manipulate networks’ also included people from Germany, such as HJE
who was at GTZ, and German business circules. But Peter ‘never played the German card’.
((((It was perhaps because he was neither British nor American, a kind of trickster
anthropologically speaking)))) He even told the TI staff in Berlin , ‘don’t speak german’,
because it was an international organization.
LC says that it was good that PE organized TI from Germany, with the help of HJE he could
operate in germany.
LC emphasizes that Jeremy Pope was a key player, having been the legal affairs secretary in
the Commonwealth Office in London. Jeremy would soon design the integrity systems
approach.
TIs original charter was signed in the Hague. But it was composed by an E.German lawyer,
and there was some confusion as to who could be members. The original charter had only
individual members, and at its start, TI had 20 such individual members.
Also important was Michael Wiehen, who had worked for the WB in Washington for 35
years, but who soon took over TI Germany as head, subsequently becoming advisor to TI.
National Chapters was not an original vision of TI, it arose during a meeting in Ecquador
when the local chapter head, Valeria, said that local problems of police bribery were more
important to people than international private business regulations..
The vision of TI had originally not to have national chapters. But this soon changed, as it was
realized that the local knowledge and mobilization were important. This made TI different
from Global Witness or Hum. Rights Watch, who acted from a central office and had no
larger constituency, ‘not reponssible to anyone’. But TI was also different from Amnesty
which had indvidaul members linked to a central office, with a central campaign. TI instead
had a dual structure with TI-S and the local chapters which were autonomous. When they
established TI, Fritz H. and Frank V. took a taxi over to Amnesty to see ‘how do you set up
an ngo’
From interview with HJE
At the Latimer house meeting there were 40 peo. There were several objectives of TI that
were discussed.
5) That TI should be a think tank.
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6) Michael Hershmann, who as an investigator with AID and later formed the Fairfax
Group for business investigation, thought that TI should be more an investigation
organization, a prosecutor…..
7) The Dutch wanted to make TI a unit within the Dutch ministry of development
8) Consensus on making TI an NGO, but it had no human or financial resources
HJE stresses that TI was unique because there was no grass roots mobilization to corruption
as a specific problem, ‘there was no trend in society’, no movement. TI was therefore
someone abnormal as far as ngo mobilization was concerned.
‘We would be different from other NGOs’ who tended to be suspicious of Ameircan business
interests, because TI would take American interests as allies in the fight against corruption. .
Peter’s ideas were that you should not start at the grass roots, but instead get the leadership on
board. He also had the Algerian prime minister, and the VP of Ecquador (Dahik). Peter also
had the idea of linking the ‘giving hand with the taking hand’, that is, to clamp down on
Western businesses giving bribes and kickbacks for contracts. Therefore Peter had Wimans
from Thiele??? and Siemens on board. His task was to convince business leaders that its in
their interests. There was a fear of being labeled a servant of American industry.
Fritz Heimann, he was a lobbyist, GE, with OECD connections and US Friendly.
There was the power games of German industry, and there was pressure by German
companies on HJE and on others in the Aid system. The German secretary of state thus
forbid HJE to participate in one of PEs meetings, prior to Eshborn?
1) Coalition building (bringing in business interests, even if stigmagtized, but now if
they would come on board it was OK
2) Concentrating on leadesihp circles
3) Bringing in leaders from the South to make it an international movement
4) Including both the giving and taking hand, i.e. corruption by bribe givers in
international business.
HJE emphasized that the original project was to influence aid and business at the local level.
He didn’t want chapters in local countries. In 1994, however, at the meeting in Quito,
ecquador, there were 80 people there; and many African women in leadership posts, they
dominated instead of the usual top people (elites). HJE describes heading a panel of six
African women. And then also Valeria, from Ecquador, says, ‘you don’t think we in our
country can do anything’. The focus on aid and big business had to change; the TI group
could only work at the global level…
It was clear, they said that ‘we have to allow for dealing with local issues’, ‘We ((the original
group))) could not form national chapters. ‘So we decided to givet them (the chapters) a high
level of independence. This was a major innovation, not trying to control the chapters. It was
‘their business’, and ‘their corruption’…
This idea of independent chapters was thought out while on a trip with others in the group on
the Galapagos islands. Margit von Hamm received early responsibillty, she had learned from
GDR history to avoid north-south domainance. She took the South seriously, there would be
no central planning and high degree of autonomy. These autonomous chapters were ‘the most
revolutnary thing that TI has done’. They did not try to maintain control, and there was no
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money for them either. Each chaper could define their own strategy and own priorities.
There were things which the AMM regulates, but everything else the chapters could do.
Characteristics of the anti-corruption industry
The following list summarises the distinguishing characteristics of a generic ‘industry’ as
defined here. By ‘generic’ is meant that it could apply to many kinds of moral projects or
policies – development, trafficking, climate, etc. The listing of features is roughly chronological
(the industry ‘evolved’), but it would be more accurate to say that these characteristics
tend to evolve in synergistic fashion. For each item, I then provide an example
specifically from the anti-corruption industry.
(1) There exists, initially, an articulated grassroots concern, in which a politician or
media story highlights a specific case or issue. In the case of corruption it is generally
something of a ‘scandal’, a major open breach of trust. ‘Fighting corruption’ emerges
as a priority among several major policy actors, seemingly at the same time.
(2) A variety of initiatives are taken and ‘measures’ enacted to set up a framework for
dealing with the issue. These measures include (a) declarations of intent or statements
of ‘commitments’, (b) signing of agreements and conventions, (c) efforts to
enforce or monitor these commitments/agreements by governmental and nongovernmental
actors, and (d) setting up of civil society monitoring coalitions. In the
anti-corruption field, key governmental and intergovernmental organs are the
Global Compact and the Group of States against Corruption (GRECO), and in civil
society organisations such as TI, the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
(EITI) and the UNCAC coalition (an advocacy group pressing for stricter adherence
to the UN Convention against Corruption).
(3) The policy area takes on institutional autonomy, with specific organs, office and
bureaus established to deal with the problem. The problem becomes its own budget
line. Those organs with the largest budget lines (World Bank, UNDP, USAID,
OECD, EU, the UK foreign assistance unit DFID) become the major actors.
Bureaucratic interests develop to sustain or expand budgets by expanding, mainstreaming
or exaggerating the definition of the problem and including ever more
areas of concern. In the ‘anti-corruption’ field, for example, we obtain new policy
areas: ‘corruption and crime’, ‘corruption and security’, ‘corruption and climate’, etc.
(4) A diverse group of secondary actors emerge who seek to influence the major actors
by ‘pushing’ certain issues or priorities. These secondary actors include Western
European bilateral aid agencies, donor foundations searching for new areas of
concern, major NGOs and large consulting firms seeking to expand their activities.
These secondary actors are at once donors, recipients of aid funds, stewards of
funds, implementers of programmes and advocates for certain priorities. Hence,
they may be combining fundraising activities with project management, being
ever more integrated with the major policy decision-makers.
(5) A corpus of key texts emerges to which everyone pays reference, most especially
the international or regional conventions. These declarations are invoked at international
gatherings, meetings, ritual celebrations (10 years since passing of
Convention X) and in formulating new initiatives. Typically, the documents are
broad on principle, whereas measures for monitoring and implementation are less
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clear and subject to further negotiation. What took place in the areas of human
rights, development aid, women’s equality and environmental protection has now
been replicated in the field of anti-corruption. Key UN, OECD or European conventions
are followed up by various monitoring and compliance mechanisms.
Getting countries to ratify or fulfil their commitments to these conventions is now
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seen as a key tool for fighting corruption.
(6) An array of tools and indicators is developed to measure, assess and evaluate the
extent of the phenomenon and the effectiveness of policy measures (in this case,
measuring corruption and effectiveness of anti-corruption measures). These tools
and methods, called ‘diagnostics’, become abstract, complex, standardised and
comparable across countries and sectors. Qualitative, intensive studies keyed to
specific situations or countries are downgraded in favour of standardised, contextfree
methods. The issue of quality of baseline data (measuring corruption levels
in, say, Burma or North Korea) is downgraded in favour of comparable statistical
measures and rankings that can be easily ‘crunched’. ‘Diagnostics’ becomes a
branch in itself, accessible only to specialists. Various actors attempt to make their
indicators the standards of the industry. In the anti-corruption industry, for
example, the comprehensive World Bank Governance Indicators competes with the
Bertelsmann Transformation Index, the TI Bribe Payers Index, the Global Corruption
Barometer, the Freedom House index, the TI CPI and the more qualitative
country studies of Global Integrity).11
(7) The major players who dominate the discourse – be they governmental, multilateral,
private-sector or NGO – can effectively marginalise those who question the conventional
approaches, or even limiting grassroots input. These players coordinate
with each other, harmonising their terminologies, statistical categories, understandings
and view of appropriate solutions. Meanwhile, the initial grassroots
‘movement’ behind the problem evolves into more professional activities. Staff
and personnel also become more professional and stable. Civil society leaders,
government aid specialists and business leaders become more comfortable with
each other, sharing similar perspectives, strategies and tactics. Deciphering ‘donor
priorities’ and strategic fundraising becomes a key field of action for civil society
organisations. In the anti-corruption industry, the governments within the UNCAC
monitoring mechanism have succeeded in eliminating NGO input and country
inspections. In the NGO sector, TI is administering its own Integrity Analysis of
27 European countries, with funds from the EU. The study is to contain the same
kinds of data, gathered in the same way, from Sweden to Macedonia, from Hungary
to the United Kingdom. Anti-corruption grassroots organisations, often loose
affiliations of activists, now evolve into coalitions and organisations.
(8) Knowledge about the phenomenon, its causes, consequences and remedies is systematised
into knowledge regimes in which academics, specialist training, and
project implementation overlap. Academic specialists move in and out of policy
implementation areas, while policy specialists receive certified training in areas such
as Governance, Project Management, risk assessment or CSR. A cadre of specialists
emerges, whose major talent is to determine donors’ priorities. In the case of anticorruption,
there is now a whole retinue of specialists, trainers, project managers,
11. See Sampford, Shackock, Connors, and Galtung, Measuring Corruption, for a fuller discussion
of these measures.
Q3
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270 S. Sampson
diagnosticians, centring around foreign aid, public administration reform and
private sector CSR. Anti-corruption knowledge banks have emerged, such as the
U4 group of European foreign ministries, the World Bank’s http://www.fightingcorruption.
org, TI’s Research and Policy unit, and the Business Anti-corruption
Portal. These data banks contain risk assessments, project evaluations, and the
inevitable catalogues of ‘lessons learned’ and ‘best practices’. TI, for example,
assists anti-corruption activists with its Corruption Fighters Toolkit, Global
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Integrity assists aid professionals with its Country Assessments, the Danish Global
Advice Network, financed by several European foreign aid ministries, assists
businesses with information about corruption, the OECD offers information for
government actors, the U4 assists European development aid organs, and the
Internet Center for Corruption Research offers anti-corruption training.
(9) A standardised, ‘industrial’ terminology develops in which key terms, problems and
solutions are framed and understood. In the field of anti-corruption, for example,
this terminology refers to types of corruption, understandings about the causes of
corruption, extent, impact, the need for broad solutions and coalitions, the use of
sanctions, and about the urgency of the corruption problem. One of these understandings,
for example, is that it is possible to change people’s corrupt practices if
the right ‘tools’ are found. And the tools include a package of structural reforms,
openness, enforcement, and raising awareness that corruption is bad, including bad
for business. Among anti-corruption activists, TI has now developed a Plain Language
Guide so that its members understand the phenomenon they are dealing with.
(10) The industry produces a standardised product (of knowledge, measures, activities),
which is then marketed by major actors as absolutely essential. Clients for the
package – countries, municipalities, private sector associations or firms – are those
seeking entry into key associations (EU, chambers of commerce), those who need
credit worthiness, those who want additional foreign assistance, or those who do
not want to lose these resources for lack of compliance. The anti-corruption industry,
for example, produces an ‘anti-corruption package’, which some governments
‘purchase’ only reluctantly. The ‘customer’ (Romania prior to EU accession, for
example) may lack ‘political will’ or may never really ‘come on board’, but they
are compelled to accept the package anyway. The marketing of the package may
be stimulated by a combination of external pressures, a trusted local ‘champion’,
a public relations campaign (‘raising awareness’) and ‘capacity building’ among
those clients who now see the value of the package (or the consequences of not
accepting it). In the anti-corruption field, for example, the establishment of anticorruption
agencies and commissions, with the accompanying foreign consultants
and advisors and the continuing training, is one such trajectory. 12
(11) Various actors attempt to expand the industry so as to overlap or include neighbouring
industries. The expansion can take place by linking previously separate
policy areas (‘corruption and climate’, ‘corruption and gender’, ‘corruption and
12. Nicholas Charron, Mapping and Measuring the Impact of Anti-Corruption Agencies: A New
Dataset, http://ancorage-net.org/index.jsp?page=documents&id=82 (accessed December 14, 2009);
John R. Heilbrunn, Anti-Corruption Commissions: Panacea or Real Medicine to Fight Corruption?
(World Bank Institute, 2004). Stock No. 37234, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/WBI/Resources/
wbi37234Heilbrunn.pdf (accessed December 15, 2009); ‘Local Anti-Corruption Agencies: Pros
and Cons’, U4, http://www.u4.no/pdf/?file=/helpdesk/helpdesk/queries/query141.pdf (accessed
December 1, 2009).
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post-conflict aid’, ‘corruption and human rights’) or by connecting sectors of social
activity (corruption and private business, corruption and NGOs). As a result, anticorruption
initiatives that were once limited to international business and corruption
in foreign aid have now expanded into issues of environment/climate, water, organised
crime, security, sport, and issues of whistle blowing and access to information.
(12) As the industry comes of age, local initiatives are increasingly tailored to the needs
and donor priorities of the major industrial players. Public outreach, fundraising,
branding and deciphering the donor landscape all become standard activities in
the ‘home office’ or ‘secretariat’. The problem of ‘certification’ becomes an issue,
insofar as local governments or NGOs need to ensure the public and their donors
that they are indeed doing what they say they are doing. In the anti-corruption
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field, based as it is on integrity in public affairs, there have been several scandals
or near-scandals in connection with foreign aid to anti-corruption agencies and
bogus anti-corruption NGOs. Even TI now has an entire monitoring and certification
process to ensure that none of its national chapters abuse the TI brand.
(13) The final sign that an industry has come of age is that it spawns an academic critique.
The critique of the industry poses questions as to its political correctness, adequacy
of its programmes, its motives, effectiveness and interests. These critiques
of development, humanitarian aid, of NGOs and of democracy promotion, often
with a post-structuralist, discourse-analysis perspective, are well known. Yet the
critiques tend to dwell on the margins of the industry and do little to substantively
alter the established knowledge regimes, techniques or policies. The critique of the
anti-corruption industry, for example, has centred on the misuse of the CPI, the
lack of impact of anti-corruption programmes and the notion that anti-corruption
policies are but a handmaiden of neoliberal capitalism.13 These critiques have had
little impact on the evolution of the anti-corruption industry.
Today, anti-corruption has arrived. To use a term from feminist theory, anti-corruption
is now ‘intersectional’, touching on a wide variety of issues in different manifestations.
Just as feminist scholars (or environmentalists) conceive of no issue that can be free from
gender (or environmental) impact or policy relevance, we are now at a stage where all policy
issues must now be considered in light of their implications for transparency or potential
corruption. Anti-corruption has become a burgeoning industry with hundreds of millions
of dollars in project funds, hundreds of anti-corruption professionals and a continuing
stream of reports, indicators, conferences, action plans, conventions and evaluations. In
the space of a decade, the world has now obtained dozens of national anti-corruption agencies
in even the poorest third world countries. There is now a UN Convention against Corruption,
a monitoring apparatus, a World Bank anti-corruption unit, a private sector anti-corruption
initiative (fightingcorruption.org), a USAID anti-corruption programme and generalised
anti-corruption budget lines or programmes in every major West European aid agency. TI
leaders are now permanent invitees to Davos and TI’s chairperson, Hugette Labelle, can
command op-ed pages in major newspapers. The anti-corruption industry is starting to peak.
13. See for example Hindess, ‘Anti-Cor
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