Anticorruption Agencies: Experience to Date Richard E. Messick World Bank February 16, 2006

What Anticorruption Agencies Can Do Enforce investigate claims of bribery and other crimes/ prosecute well-founded ones Prevent police conflicts of interest; simplify procedures Educate public, media, public servants Coordinate

Countries with ACAs Part 1: Hong Kong, New South Wales, Singapore Africa: Botswana, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia LAC: Argentina, Costa Rica, Ecuador ECA: Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, Kazakhstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Asia: Bangladesh, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal,Thailand

Recent Evaluations -- 1 Very few examples of successful independent anticorruption commissions/ agencies. UNDP, Dec. 2005 Agencies appear to be overloaded with expectations and tasks while vague definitions of mandates and powers . . . and the human and financial resources allocated to the agencies put strong limits on achieving these expectations. COE, July 2005

Recent Evaluations -- 2 None of [the five African] ACCs studied have had a discernable or measurable impact on levels of corruption. U4, May 2005 The majority of ACAs probably serve no useful purpose in combating corruption. Meagher, March 2005 A mounting body of evidence [shows] they fail to reduce corruption. WBI, Sept. 2004

Why Create Them? Crisis of legitimacy Need to do “something”

Questions Ignored When Creating One mission or many? What will it do that existing agencies are not doing? Why aren’t existing agencies performing? Will existing agencies continue to perform function too?

Obvious Reasons Why Agencies Fail Poor legal framework Unrealistic expectations; try to accomplish too much too soon Insufficient resources Inadequate or poorly trained staff Adversarial relations with other agencies (aka turf battles) Absence of performance measures

More Fundamental Reason for Failure “The achievements of the last 150 years in every single area are achievements of narrow focus, narrow concentration. . . .Whenever an institution goes beyond a narrow focus, it ceases to perform.” Peter Drucker, 1999

Most Important Reason for Failure ?