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The power of performance indices in the global politics of anti-corruption

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Abstract

While scholars have focused on the macro-structural, institutional and legal dimensions at work in international anti-corruption, they have paid little attention to role of the more specific technologies through which social forces become entangled in efforts at combating corruption internationally. Drawing on studies of organisation, surveillance and governmentality, this article examines the capacity of performance indices to construct comparable and governable subjects in international efforts to combat corruption. It conceptualises performance indices in terms of technologies of distance, communication and surveillance and analyses a variety of corruption and anti-corruption indices, including corporate blacklisting as applied by the World Bank towards fraudulent corporations. It demonstrates how performance indices are implicated in the construction of standards and scripts for action against corruption, pointing to their importance for the determination of what constitutes legitimate social practice. More generally, the paper contributes to the study of global governance literatures by highlighting how practices of calculation, measurement and comparison can play a distinctive role in the constitution of spaces of governance.

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Notes

  1. The terms ‘standards’ and ‘scripts for action’ are used here to designate the things and processes that organisations should or are advised to have or to do, implying changes and improvements according to more or less explicit criteria, and not what they necessarily must do or have according to formal legal regulations (Brunsson and Jacobsson 2000: 5; Power 2007).

  2. Here, normalisation is not taken to refer to purportedly shared values, but to the particular forms of knowledge and measurement techniques that help to produce the normal (Triantafillou 2007). In this sense, performance indices can have a normalising effect in so far as they suggest and induce compliance with norms that are posed as prevalent or desirable, or simply by discouraging rule-breaking through deterrence.

  3. Gapminder is a Swedish NGO that under the heading ‘unveiling the beauty of statistics for a fact based world view’ has transformed complex global statistics into digitalised maps that illuminate striking gaps in world economy and politics over time. See http://www.gapminder.org (accessed 10 October, 2008).

  4. The World Bank has also developed ‘investment climate surveys’, such as the Business Environment and Enterprise Performance Survey, which identify areas or sectors in a country most prone to corruption, as well as the so-called ‘report card surveys’ that investigate citizens' opinions of the availability and quality of public services. Finally, there are the ‘triangulated governance diagnostics’ that combine the findings from the previously mentioned surveys, as well as the ‘public expenditure tracking surveys’, which draw on actual expenditure data to estimate to what degree funds for service providers actually reach those providers (Campos and Bhargava 2007: 3–7).

  5. See http://www.ftse.com/Indices/FTSE4Good_Index_Series/index.jsp (accessed 5 February, 2009). This index identifies the companies in the current FTSE4Good list that have the highest levels of risk of engaging in bribery. There are three main filters to determine the extent to which a company is exposed to ‘high risk’ — country, sector and public contract — and they must all apply to a company before it is designated a ‘high risk company’. Thus, a company that does business in a country that scores less than four on TI CPI and zero or negative on the World Bank Governance Indicators list, and is operating in an industrial sector that is likely to have the highest level of exposure to risk of engaging in bribery, such as oil, gas, pharmaceuticals or telecommunications, while being involved with government contracts or licence, is considered as having the highest level of exposure to risk of engaging in bribery.

  6. For example, the consultancy firm PWC, an important producer and disseminator of performance indices in this area, has recently set up an ‘Anti-corruption center of excellence’ devoted to ‘provid[ing] innovative anti-corruption solutions’. See http://www.pwc.com/us/en/forensic-services/anti-corruption-center-of-excellence.jhtml (accessed 5 May, 2010).

  7. Here, legitimacy is understood not as an inherent characteristic of an entity but an attribute conferred on it in matters considered as important or decisive (Johnson 2003).

  8. See http://go.worldbank.org/A8B2QAGE20.

  9. The settlement between Siemens AG and the Bank was announced after World Bank investigations and after Siemens AG in late 2008 had acknowledged to German and US authorities its past misconduct in global business (US Department of Justice 2008). By confessing wrongdoing and cooperating with the US authorities, the company allegedly avoided being debarred from business with the American government.

  10. See for example http://ins.onlinedemocracy.ca/?p=8400#more-8400 (accessed 2 June, 2010).

  11. For example, in February 2007, the aforementioned Lahmeyer Gmbh was blacklisted by the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, after the company had approached it for a bid on a project.

  12. Besides recommending that ‘lists and details of debarment mechanisms must be made public to maximize their preventive potential’, TI also recommended that the EU Commission set up a centralised and transparent debarment system to prevent the corruption of EU resources and to ‘bring consistency and accountability to the system’ (Transparency International 2006).

  13. According to the Bank, ‘Under the agreement, entities debarred by one MDB may be sanctioned for the same misconduct by the other participating development banks, in effect closing a loophole that had previously allowed a firm that had been debarred by one MDB to continue obtaining contracts financed by other MDBs’ (World Bank 2010b).

  14. Earlier studies by the NGOs Corner House and ECA Watch pointed out that ECAs generally suffer from weak standards for reporting suspicions and evidence of bribery to authorities (ECA-Watch/Corner House 2006; Multinational Monitor 2006). ECAs were also regarded as lacking in due diligence procedures, as well as in knowledge of the dynamics of foreign bribery and how to detect and prevent it. ECAs also did little to inform companies about the risks of bribery, and they seldom withheld support for projects in which they had suspicions or evidence of bribery.

  15. See http://www.ebiinc.com/about-ebi.html (accessed 2 June, 2010).

  16. See http://www.primeassociates.com/prime/dataServices.asp (accessed 2 June, 2010).

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Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the two anonymous reviewers for useful feedback as well as for the input of the participants in the 2008 workshop ‘The Power of Numbers: Exploring the Use of Ratings, Rankings and Benchmarking Schemes in Global Governance’, which was sponsored by the GARNET EU Programme of Excellence, University of Warwick, as well as by CBS.

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Hansen, H. The power of performance indices in the global politics of anti-corruption. J Int Relat Dev 15, 506–531 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1057/jird.2011.18

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