Explaining organizational change in international development: the role of complexity in anti-corruption work

Abstract

What explains the rapid expansion of programmes undertaken by donor agencies which may be labelled as ‘anti-corruption programmes’ in the 1990s? There are four schools of anti-corruption project practice: universalistic, state-centric, society-centric, and critical schools of practice. Yet, none can explain the expansion of anti-corruption projects. A ‘complexity perspective’ offers a new framework for looking at such growth. Such a complexity perspective addresses how project managers, by strategically interacting, can create emergent and evolutionary expansionary self-organisation. Throughout the ‘first wave’ of anti-corruption activity in the 1990s, such self-organization was largely due to World Bank sponsored national anti-corruption programmes. More broadly, the experience of the first wave of anti-corruption practice sheds light on development theory and practice—helping to explain new development practice with its stress on multi-layeredness, participation, and indigenous knowledge. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.