Based on research drawing on both Durban business and resource extraction, CCS Visiting Scholar Sarah Bracking explores how corruption is framed by respondents and performed by market actors. New types of corruption have emerged due to the increasing complexity of the public-private boundary and the effects of more liberalized markets.
Transparency initiatives are largely ineffective. What is acceptable behaviour in the private sector; what is a usable foundational morality?
To reduce corruption, Bracking argues, requires that politicians and public sector workers register their private businesses and refrain from related trading; that the state distributes economic opportunity more widely; that political party financing is reformed; and that corporate law is changed to prevent new forms of corruption.
Abstract
This paper reviews types of private sector corruption in South Africa in order to provide suggestions for the design of anti-corruption policies in the natural resource sectors. It uses qualitative research to explore how corruption is framed by respondents and performed by market actors. The currently used concept of private sector corruption does not cover new types of corruption that have emerged in response to the increasing complexity of the public-private boundary and the effects of more liberalized markets. Moreover, transparency initiatives are largely ineffective in cases such as South Africa, where the market and state are entwined and political connection is a critical gatekeeper for economic opportunity. The paper advocates both redefinition of the concept of corruption and reform of the process of policy design in anti-corruption work. The two are related: the redefinition suggested would advance the important debate over how the global community defines acceptable behaviour in the private sector by providing a usable foundational morality.