NGOs Fighting Corruption : Theory and Practice

Since the last decade of the twentieth century corruption has caught the attention of international community which has resulted in the adoption and wide acceptance regional and international anti-corruption treaties. Many of these treaties expect non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to play an important role in combating corruption. As yet, there is no empirical study, to our knowledge, on the strategies adopted by the various NGOs in respect of the anti-corruption drive or the nature of their interaction with other stakeholders such as the public, businesses and the state and their contribution to policy-making and the drafting of codes of conduct. In order to address this gap the authors used a postal questionnaire to provide, as part of a larger project on corruption in international business, an insight into the ways in which NGOs operate, both with respect to their strategies and stakeholder engagement and their views on the various anti-corruption regulatory approaches. This article, the main aim of which is to provide the findings of the survey, consists of three sections. Section I briefly discusses the conceptual differences between civil society and NGOs, the different forms of NGOs and the roles envisaged for them in relation to anti-corruption by the various anti-corruption toolkits in order to provide a backdrop for the survey. Section II provides the survey results and Section III concludes with a discussion and suggestions for future research