Learning Objectives
• Analyse and discuss the complex nature of the problem of corruption as it manifests itself at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
• Analyse and discuss the multifaceted characteristics of contemporary anti-corruption efforts, including the central actors involved, the major techniques deployed and the key challenges facing anti-corruption efforts.
• Analyse and discuss the growing and ambiguous role of corporations and industries in the governance of corruption, including the drivers behind and main obstacles to corporate anti-corruption efforts.
• Analyse and discuss the relationship between anti-corruption efforts undertaken by corporate actors and other issues of corporate social responsibility (CSR).
Introduction
Only a few decades ago it was commonplace to regard corruption as mainly existing in the global South. By the 1990s this understanding began to change. Researchers and policy-makers increasingly acknowledged that corruption is much more complex and deeply intertwined with globalisation and wider shifts in legal and social norms across the world. Corruption affects economic development negatively, weakens the legitimacy of public institutions and the rule of law, and, not least, it undermines the credibility of international business involved in corrupt transactions. From 2000 onwards, anti-corruption became a global discourse with initiatives created to address the risks that corruption poses, often in conjunction with other initiatives aimed at tackling the illegal production of drugs, money laundering, human right violations, and so on.
Corruption has also emerged as a CSR issue, as companies have moved from regarding corruption as a business expense and simply blaming ‘a few bad apples’, as US President George W. Bush described the Enron scandal (The Economist, 2002). An increasing number of companies attempt to manage their ‘corruption risk’ and have even collaborated in efforts to agree standards of probity. The most high profile indication of this new item on the CSR agenda was the UN Global Compact's adoption of an additional, tenth, anti-corruption principle in 2004: ‘Businesses should work against corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery’. Prior to this, however, a number of businesses had recognised that ‘corruption’ posed a number of reputational as well as financial risks, and had worked with Transparency International (TI). Today, more than a hundred companies are ‘official supporters’ of the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), many of whom signal this as an indicator of their CSR.
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