فساد مالی غیرمتمرکز و یا تمرکز زدایی فاسد ؟ نظارت جامعه بر طرح های تسکین فقر در شرق هند

Democratic decentralization and community participation often stand at the center of an agenda of “good governance” that aims to reduce corruption and increase the state’s accountability to its citizens. However, this paper suggests based on empirical studies on the Employment Assurance Scheme in rural West Bengal that the strength of upward accountability (especially to political parties) is as crucial as downward accountability to communities. When these vertical accountabilities are weak, horizontal accountability structures between local civil society and officials can mutate into networks of corruption in which “community” actors become accomplices or primary agents.

Development theory has recently paid increased attention to issues of accountability and transparency. Corrupt practices and systems are said to undermine growth and access to public services, in addition to being morally repugnant.1 The question of corruption, however, is dealt with very differently by competing intellectual and policy-making traditions. Drawing on Anne Krueger’s early work on rent-seeking, many neoliberal economists have sought to connect landscapes of corruption to the dominance of predatory states or bureaucratic populism. They have recommended the “rolling back” of the state—of the license and permit raj in the case of India—as the primary means of dealing with corruption and rent-seeking behavior. The structural adjustment programs that were implemented by the World Bank and the IMF in the 1980s and early 1990s thus remained relatively silent on accountability structures in non-market institutions. They trusted that the expansion of free markets and competition would remove the scope for generalized rent seeking. After two decades of deregulation and economic liberalization, however, levels of political and bureaucratic corruption seem not to have dissipated in most countries, and perhaps least of all in the transitional economies of the former Soviet bloc (see Humphrey, 2002). Whereas many hard-liners might insist that corruption persists only where liberalization has been incomplete, or where states have been left with too many regulatory powers, many donor agencies are promoting an agenda of “good governance” that seeks to address issues of accountability and transparency on a broader front. In doing so, they follow political scientists who increasingly regard corruption as a sign of “bad governance.” Dhareswar and colleagues have argued that “corruption ought to be seen as a symptom of the state’s fundamental weaknesses, not some basic or single determinant of society’s ills” (Dhareswar et al., 2000, p. 136; emphasis added), and that appropriate designing of political and economic institutions would therefore be capable of defeating widespread rent-seeking (see also Rose-Ackerman, 1999).2 Multi-pronged strategies for strengthening good governance—including public-sector and judicial reforms, economic policy measures and financial controls, the strengthening of civil liberties, and of structures of participation of civil society—are thus proposed as a way of dealing with bad governance. Proposals for decentralization have also cut into initiatives for the promotion of “good governance” and have been proposed as a conduit for institutional public reform that can enhance levels of political accountability, participation and voice (see World Bank, 2000a and World Bank, 2001). Decentralization now stands at the heart of a bundle of measures that is meant to enhance state capabilities (see World Bank, 2000b).

Democratic decentralization is no panacea for reducing corruption even when local communities are formally included in implementing and monitoring policies, programs and schemes. As economic and political interests vary within communities, some factions are ready to build a nexus with bureaucrats and politicians and become willing participants in corruption networks. The impact of participatory decentralization on the levels of corruption is therefore ambiguous. The underlying social structures can also inhibit participation of the poor and marginalized, and thus render democratic decentralization and community-based monitoring less effective. These findings are in line with Bardhan and Mookherjee’s deductive model which predicts that under unequal or clientelist conditions, existing local elites are able to capture the local state so that decentralization relocates corruption to the locally powerful and leads to the “decentralized corruption” of our title. In contrast to that model, however, our empirical study indicates that social structures should not be regarded as given: decentralization itself may produce and reproduce them. In Old Malda, for example, the introduction of the panchayat system and the decentralized implementation of poverty-alleviation schemes created the conditions for a new class of political entrepreneurs to emerge that eventually captured substantial parts of state benefits. These political entrepreneurs do not necessarily belong to the traditional elites and include political brokers and local councilors who have strong roots in local communities. The boundaries between local political society and local communities are blurred, and it is unhelpful to locate rent-seeking neatly and clearly outside the realm of “communities.”