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Abstract
This article examines anti-corruption activities in Georgia after the Rose Revolution of November 2003 under the administration of Mikheil Saakashvili. It aims to analyse the existence of different assessments on the country's success in fighting corruption and applies an interpretive framework to study these assessments as “narratives” that reveal the diverging or converging interests of anti-corruption actors in sustaining a common narrative on the country's reforms. The article examines how the two main anti-corruption actors – the Georgian government and international organisations – frame their activities into two different representations of success and seek a mutual validation on them. It aims to identify the factors underlying a (non)-convergence of these actors into a common representation or an “official transcript” of their activities. The case study of the adoption of a national anti-corruption strategy in Georgia in 2005 reveals the difficulty of these two actors to validate their representations and to sustain a coherent image. Certain inherent contradictions in the relations between donor organisations and transition or developing countries, in particular in the juxtaposition of the two notions of a “transfer of external knowledge” and “local ownership/political will”, are viewed as the main factors behind this problem of validation.
Notes on contributor
Lili Di Puppo is Assistant Professor in Sociology at the National Research University – Higher School of Economics in Moscow, Russia. She holds a PhD in Cultural Studies from the European Viadrina University in Frankfurt/Oder, Germany. This article draws on her doctoral dissertation on the question of success in anti-corruption activities in Georgia after the Rose Revolution. She thanks her PhD supervisors Dr Barbara Christophe and Dr Steven Sampson for their excellent advice during her research, the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on a draft of the article and the Robert Bosch Foundation for a generous support during her fieldwork in Georgia in 2007 and 2008.
Notes
1. For example, Sampson (Citation2009, 171) remarks:despite hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of programmes, projects and campaigns, conducted by an army of anti-corruption specialists, experts and trainers, we have very little evidence of any decline in corrupt behaviour, or even a decline in public perceptions of corruption.
2. For example, Hansen (Citation2002, 27) observes on anti-corruption programmes in Georgia: “An anti-corruption project may be entirely successful in its own terms and still make no meaningful contribution to lessening or preventing corruption”.
3. The study is based on data collected during fieldwork in Georgia in 2007–2008, including interviews with government officials and representatives of international and non-governmental organisations as well as written documents.
4. As an illustration of Georgia's progress, the country quickly rose in the World Bank's Ease of Doing Business Index from a score of 112th in 2005 to a recent score of 16th in 2012. Moreover, Georgia ranks 64th out of 183 countries in the Transparency International Corruption Perceptions Index of 2011 with perceived corruption being lower than in several EU member states, including Slovakia, Italy, Greece, Romania and Bulgaria. By contrast, it ranked 85th out of 102 countries in 2002.
5. Interviews with representatives of international organisations, Tbilisi, 2007–2008.
6. I borrow the distinction between a notion of success as “goal achievement” and as “interpretation” from van der Arend and Broekhans (Citation2010).
7. van der Arend and Broekhans (Citation2010, 15) note:success and failure (including those stemming from evaluations) are produced and used for reasons other than evaluative functions; policy success and failure reflect prevailing models and worldviews; their circulation extends outside their specific policies, plans or locales (e.g. lagoons) of origin; and policy success grows from connections with other programs and ambitions.
8. The expression of “messiness” is used by Lewis and Mosse (Citation2006a, 5, Citation2006b) to contrast the actual practice of development projects with the rational policy representations that characterise their “official transcript”.
9. In Mosse's (Citation2003, 8) own words:One thing is evident and that is that whether disciplining or empowering in intent, the operational control which bureaucracies and NGOs have over events and practices in development is always constrained and often quite limited. What is usually more urgent and more practical is control over the interpretation of events.
10. Mosse (Citation2003, 26) remarks on the mobilising potential of development concepts:Policy discourse generates mobilising metaphors (“participation”, “partnership”, “governance”, “social capital”) whose vagueness, ambiguity and lack of conceptual precision is required to conceal ideological differences, to allow compromise and the enrolment of different interests, to distribute agency and to multiply criteria of success within project systems.Sampson (Citation2009, 170) further says on anti-corruption: “Definitions of what constitutes corruption and assessments of the effectiveness of ‘fighting corruption’ are sufficiently vague that they can be integrated into many political agendas or private projects”.
11. Interviews with representatives of international organisations, Tbilisi, 2007–2008.
12. Interviews with representatives of international organisations, Tbilisi, 2007–2008.
13. Polzer (Citation2001, 12) notes on the World Bank's discourse:The spheres of knowledge accepted by the Bank are universalising, empirical, quantitative, institutional, and based on the assumption of the calculating and rationally maximizing individual. Alternative views, such as moral, cultural or political understandings of corruption, are considered to be naive, specious or malicious arguments made by interested parties such as corrupt businessmen or politicians.
14. Tisne and Smilov (Citation2004, 5) note on donor-sponsored anti-corruption project in the Balkans:In all cases, the projects listed reducing corruption as one of their core objectives; yet based on interview material and project reports, none of the donors claimed that their projects had effectively reduced corruption. Projects listed their immediate objectives as successes, stressing that these contributed to the fight against corruption, but could in no way be seen to have tangibly reduced corruption.
15. Michael (Citation2004, 323) remarks that the level of anti-corruption assistance to different African countries is not proportionate to their levels of corruption, thus contesting the positivistic interpretation of anti-corruption activity as a response to a tangible demand for anti-corruption solutions.
16. Once the authority of expertise and technology are established based on the promise of reaching certain results, the attainment of these results becomes secondary as expertise starts to self-reproduce.
17. Attitudes towards the police in Georgia provide an example of rapidly changing perceptions. In an August 2003 survey, 70% of respondents stated that police officers are “most or almost all involved in corruption” (the figure was 73% in 2001 and 70% in 2002). Police officers came second to customs officers. In Georgian Opinion Research Business International: Corruption survey in Georgia: Third wave, Tbilisi, August 2003. By contrast, a February 2007 survey of voters (IRI et al. Citation2007) reveals that 66% had a favourable opinion on the police in February 2007 (70% in April 2006) and the police were the fourth most trusted institution after the church, the army and the Georgian media.
18. Interviews with government officials and representatives of international organisations, Tbilisi, 2007–2008.
19. Interview with government official and representative of international organisation, September 2008 and November 2008.
20. Interview with representative of international organisation, September 2008.
21. Interview with high official in the Georgian government, November 2008.
22. Interview with high official in the Georgian government, November 2008.
23. Interview with high official in the Georgian government, November 2008.
24. For example, a former high official in an international organisation reflects on the cynicism associated with the adoption of strategies: “I'm of the view that one of the major lessons to come out of the Rose Revolution for donors is never, ever write an anticorruption strategy for a government. Never”, and adds:Because it's been written, one has been written by donors or by a government on the request of donors it has been a complete failure, we counted one time the number of anticorruption documents the government prepared for IMF, EU, World Bank and it was between 2000 and 2010, something like ten. The ownership was zero. It was “ok you want a strategy we will produce one, we have one, and give us the money”. There was total cynicism about it. (Interview with a former high official in an international organisation, Tbilisi, December 2008)A Georgian analyst further explains:there is quite a cynical attitude to strategies, a strategy is something you draft for Westerners, sometimes you hire Westerners to draft it for other Westerners, and you put it in your file and when someone asks [you show it] […] they [the Georgians] don't think it's important. (Interview with Georgian analyst, Tbilisi, May 2007)
25. Interview with representative of international organisation, September 2008.
26. Tisne and Smilov (Citation2004, 51) use the marketing analogy when referring to anti-corruption strategies in the Balkans: “the risk is that donors should continue to market a seemingly successful product, while its added value and tangible effects have yet to be determined”.
27. Interview with representative of international organisation, November 2008.
28. The paradigm of “ownership” in development demands that international organisations align themselves with the priorities of developing countries to achieve a true “ownership” of development policies.
29. Interview with representative of international organisation, November 2008.
30. Interview with high official in the Georgian government, Tbilisi, November 2008.
31. Interview with former NGO head, Tbilisi, June 2008. The statement reveals that without its local validation in the form of the “ownership” of the document, the strategy appears to be deprived of its reality as an anti-corruption tool (“It is not real. It's just paper”).
32. Interview with local expert, Tbilisi, December 2008.
33. Interview with former high official in international organisation, December 2008.
34. The strategy is not mentioned as a useful tool for the conduct of anti-corruption reforms in Georgia in the World Bank publication of 2012 (World Bank Citation2012).
35. Christophe (Citation2004, 19) remarks that international donors embraced the notion of a weak state which formed the basis of a mutual understanding with the Georgian power holders in the 1990s-early 2000s. King (Citation2001) further explains how the image of a weak state benefited both actors:With so much money to spend, Georgian officials have an incentive to launch new, allegedly reformist programs and projects, but little reason to make sure that their work has a genuinely transformative effect on local politics-for then the aid money would not be renewed. Since the United States has earmarked a great deal of money for development and democracy-building programmes-in per capita terms, more than is available to any other country in the former Soviet Union-there is also a substantial incentive for both government agencies and NGOs to oversell their work. The ratchet principle works all the way from Washington to the Georgian village: USAID overstates the success of democratization in Georgia to maintain federal appropriations levels; USAID-funded organisations overstate their successes to USAID; and local NGOs overstate their successes to their international NGO partners.
36. See Löwenheim (Citation2008) on the rise of international examination practices.
37. Georgia's insistence on profiling itself as an exporter of reform solutions can be seen in an initiative in 2012 to set up a state agency with the name Georgia Reforms and Partnership Enterprise. The agency's aim is to promote and share the country's reforms worldwide. Georgia's reform success is thus turned into a “brand” and becomes ever more tangible through the act of exporting it.