Democratization
ISSN: 1351-0347 (Print) 1743-890X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fdem20
Corruption, grabbing and development: real world challenges, edited by Tina Søreide and Aled Williams Ararat L. Osipian To cite this article: Ararat L. Osipian (2015): Corruption, grabbing and development: real world challenges, edited by Tina Søreide and Aled Williams, Democratization, DOI: 10.1080/13510347.2015.1126580 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13510347.2015.1126580
Published online: 28 Dec 2015.
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Date: 29 December 2015, At: 00:14
Democratization, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Downloaded by [Ararat L. Osipian] at 00:14 29 December 2015
Corruption, grabbing and development: real world challenges, edited by Tina Søreide and Aled Williams, Northampton, MA, Edward Elgar, 2014, 232 pp., US$120.00 (hardback), ISBN 978-1-78254-440-1 This book consists of 16 case studies on grabbing and corruption, prepared by a team of 27 authors. Tina Søreide and Aled Williams suggest that “Grabbing focuses on the selfish act of seizing benefits, while corruption is typically an illegal trade in decisions, usually with the same motivation as grabbing, and thus, the words are close synonyms” (3). The authors acknowledge that corruption has both legal and moral dimensions and thus they prefer to use “grabbing” because it is not a legal term. According to the authors, the risk of grabbing emerges due to information asymmetries, weak allocation of responsibilities, failed accountability mechanisms, lack of functioning markets, or coordination failure (14). In order to accomplish the task of disclosing practices of grabbing, the volume is divided into four parts. First, grabbing is explained by characteristics of an economic sector or state function as a phenomenon shared by many nations. Second, grabbing is placed in a country-specific context. Third, grabbing may be the main challenge at the political level. And, finally, the fourth part explores opportunities for grabbing that emerge in the course of interactions with international organizations. The volume discusses a wide range of substantive topics related to corruption, including contract manipulation in the construction sector, rent extraction in sea ports in Sub-Saharan Africa, informal payments in public healthcare, mismanagement in transportation infrastructure, ghost teachers on the payroll, and corruption in provision of textbooks, land grabs, credit lines, banking sector development, and ineffective distribution of foreign aid. The book also addresses police corruption and vote buying in presidential, parliamentary, and local elections. These issues are discussed mainly from the perspective of the developing world, including Afghanistan, Angola, Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Philippines, Tanzania, and Uganda, but also from one developed EU nation, Spain. Purely descriptive and not even slightly analytical, this book relies on simple facts and personal accounts from work experiences of the authors. There are no concepts or theories deployed in this set of case studies. Nor do the authors use the existing scholarly literature on corruption, embezzlement, and fraud properly. References rarely exceed a dozen of scholarly sources, and Chapter 5 on courts, corruption and judicial independence has only four, three of which are by the author himself. The authors do not use any sophisticated methods to build or substantiate their case studies. In addition, the chapters routinely fail to satisfy minimal standards of
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Book review
social science: The classification of revenue grabbing risks along the resource value chain discussed in Chapter 3, for instance, does not provide any background data, while the R-squared value of the regression analysis presented in Chapter 8 on using salaries as a deterrent to informal payments in the health sector, is too low to claim much explanatory power. Moreover, it remains completely opaque which statistical model is estimated. The introductory chapter, aimed at providing an overarching theme and outlining the main argument of the volume, fails to do so. The brief discussion on the differences between corruption and grabbing is equally confusing and unconvincing. The cases presented by the authors are more akin to reports, essays, and general overviews of a problem highlighted by the specific case than systematic empirical studies. Some chapters are essentially reports reminiscent of materials borrowed from the shelves of procurement and disbursement departments in some international organizations and aid agencies. In sum, the case studies do not only fail to shed much light on the particular cases as such; they also do not add up to a substantial message as a whole. The chapters on grabbing are presented in a dry language typical of bureaucratic reports, which makes it difficult to provoke the readers. “Once a project has been identified and included in government budgets, responsibility for delivery is under the direction of the client or a separate procuring agency working on the client’s behalf” (25), a sentence formulated by Jill Wells, would perfectly characterize the entire volume in terms of style. The text contains a few factual errors as well. For instance, Siri Gloppen mentions a non-existent country, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Moldova (68). Muriel Poisson refers to 13,000 to 30,000 ghost schools in Pakistan that “automatically reduces educational opportunities for thousands of children” (58), while in fact there might be millions of children fictitiously enrolled and not receiving education. For this reviewer, the most troublesome issue with the book was that its goals and the authors’ intentions remain opaque. While the book claims government representatives, students, researchers and practitioners in development aid agencies as its primary audiences, they are unlikely to find much of value in this collection of cases. Nor is this a journalistic account that would be appealing to a broader audience. Rather, it is a set of guidelines and handouts for an anti-corruption 101 course, such as that offered by the International Institute for Education Planning. The authors correctly link corruption with such fundamental processes as democratization and advancing the rule of law that can potentially trigger profound changes in transparency and accountability and improve service delivery. However, they focus on technical aspects of managerial activities, such as per diem reimbursement instead of systematic, scholarly analyses. Ararat L. Osipian Independent scholar
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