Comparative Anti-Corruption Reform Approaches and Institutionalization in Public Bureaucracies in Developing Countries : A Review

With a change in neo-liberalists’ priorities in the global south, a shift from input-output democracy and a fuzzy relationship between democratisation and quality-of-government, has anti-corruption policy movement sizzled-out, especially, considering the popularity of Chinese Aid and the fact that Western donors have seemingly severed anti-corruption reforms from Aid-conditionalities for developing countries? This article shows that the triumph of neo-liberalism as an analytical discourse, mainly, in Anglophone Africa, only explicates the saliency of anti-corruption reforms whose institutional-foundations trace to English’s Prevention of Corruption Ordinance, 1916. Often times, anti-corruption reform-approaches tie the genesis of accruing institutions or policies to neo-liberalism, while inattentive to their colonial-heritage and endogenous developments, especially, legislation environments, which also influence unique organizational evolution of Anti-Corruption Authorities (ACAs). It is also shown that albeit anti-corruption reforms have practically become a non-issue in governments of developing regions, that is, they have typically featured double-talks and rather symbolic commitments, they have potentially elicited critical lessons on institutionalization and enhancement of ethical-climate in public bureaucracies. In explicating these developments, therefore, ubiquity of anti-corruption policies is presented and corroborated with the case of Kenya, mainly, to generate insightful analysis and to broadly address the state-of-affairs of anti-corruption reforms across sub-Saharan