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Authors: Catherine Shutt
Publication date: March 2025
Keywords: Catherine Shutt
Corruption is a serious constraint on development and despite significant investment by donors, anti-corruption initiatives have made little impact to date (Evans, 2023; Krafchik and Evans, 2024; Marquette, 2021; Rothstein, 2021). Over the past few years SOAS ACE is one among many looking to reverse this trend. Its leading researchers have developed an innovative political settlements approach that makes power central to understanding principal agent problems and addressing corruption. What has come to be known as the Power, Capabilities and Interests (PCI) framework has proved effective in informing debates on how corruption should be understood and what can be done about it (Khan and Roy, 2022). To put it simply, the framework assumes that groups of productive and capable actors affected by corruption who share interests in following rules can perform horizontal checks on peers they interact with that lead to more effective rule following behaviour. These checks work when these actors individually or collectively have the power to stand resolute and influence the behaviour of the rule violators and enforcers to prevent rule breaking. Sanctions can be formal and take the form of fines or imprisonment, but they can also be informal, and exert horizontal pressures on violators and enforcers. Whether formal or informal, the PCI assumption is that expectation of enforceable sanctions is as effective in inducing changes in rule breaking behaviour as enforcement itself.
While the PCI framework has been used successfully in the context of market restricting and policy distorting corruption, it has yet to be extended to the more difficult frontier of political corruption. When it comes to political corruption there are fewer actors who have the power or interest to apply horizontal pressure because demanding rule enforcement is riskier. With the rise of authoritarianism across the globe, the space for horizontal checks even for the first two types of corruption may also be shrinking. Considering whether and how the PCI framework can be adapted and used in such contexts to increase demand for enforcement is a matter of urgency. This is a report from a series of multi-disciplinary conversations between SOAS ACE and experts on peacebuilding, anti-corruption and organised crime, governance, state capability, transparency accountability and participation who came together for this purpose. They explored whether evidence arising from the use of approaches from other disciplines and fields revealed any insights to inform adaptations to the PCI approach. Participants unanimously agreed that there is insufficient evidence to make such recommendations. Nonetheless, conversations surfaced interesting insights on what most agreed are important propositions regarding features of ongoing work. At the same time they highlighted differences of opinion about the definition and roles of social norms in the anticorruption space. Participants concluded that there is a need for ongoing testing of approaches and multi-disciplinary conversations.
The report begins by unpacking the PCI framework and approach before considering its complementarities and differences with approaches used by anti-corruption, peacebuilding and accountability practitioners working on policy implementation and rule enforcement. The next section summarises practitioner insights that inform propositions on important features of anti-corruption work in a context of increasing authoritarianism and political corruption. Suggestions for further theory building and research to identify more specific strategies, such as coalition building under different kinds of political settlements round off the report.
