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Developing a Public Interest Response to State-Orchestrated Corruption

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 July 2021

John Gillespie
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Abstract

As conventionally understood, anti-corruption programs rely on legal rules to define and control the abuse of official power for private gain. This study explores the limits to law-based standards of corruption where state officials obscure bribery and the abuse of power beneath a veneer of legality. Drawing on an empirical study of two public-private partnerships (PPPs) in Vietnam, it asks whether the failure of anti-corruption laws to curb malfeasance in PPPs is attributable to insufficient enforcement, to targeting the wrong behavior, or to both of these issues. It argues that if anti-corruption laws are blind to the opportunistic manipulation of laws in PPPs, then we must consider other ways of conceptualizing and controlling corruption. This argument links the way in which corruption is conceptualized to the efficacy of policy instruments used to curb corruption in PPPs. In particular, it examines whether public interest corruption provides a framework that makes malfeasance in PPPs visible and thus offers a mechanism for holding officials accountable. This study concludes that public interest corruption broadens the analysis of corruption in PPPs from transgressions of legal boundaries to an examination of public inclusion and exclusion from decision making.

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Articles
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Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 47 , Issue 1 , February 2022 , pp. 25 - 54
Copyright
© 2021 American Bar Foundation

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Footnotes

This study was funded by a research grant from the United Nations Development Program, Vietnam. Thank you to Nguyen Van Thang and the research team from the National Economic University in Hanoi and also to the interviewees who gave their time to collaborate on this project. The author is also grateful for the anonymous reviewers’ and the journal editor’s insightful comments.

References

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