Anti-Corruption Strategies in Foreign Aid: From Controls to Results

Almost everyone agrees that corruption is an obstacle to social and economic progress in developing countries. Yet this consensus about the existence of the problem does not extend to agreement over how rich countries and donor agencies should deal with it – or even if it should be addressed directly at all. This essay looks at how foreign aid agencies have changed the way they deal with corruption over the last 25 years in terms of improving the integrity of funders and recipients while strengthening international cooperation. It argues that current approaches rely primarily on transactional controls and, to a lesser extent, on investments in transparency and raising global standards of governance. Much less is being done with regard to selectivity and paying for results. The essay concludes with an assessment of current initiatives and proposes a new strategy that directly incorporates information that is often neglected: data on development results. With better information on what programs actually achieve, funders would be able to (1) prioritize the application of investigative resources, (2) test the effectiveness of control strategies, (3) implement pay for results programs and (4) be selective about providing aid on the basis of objective criteria.