Increased International Attention to Corruption

The approach taken by international agencies to anticorruption has been influenced by the international legal framework that governs this domain, notably UNCAC and the African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption (AUCPAC). This framework sets out legal and institutional approaches to fighting corruption that are understood to be universally applicable (Open Society Initiative 2016):

• The provisions of UNCAC impose on signatory countries (which include all fragile countries) a set of statutory commitments and the requirement to establish dedicated bodies to the prevention of corruption. The convention requires all signatory countries to enact mandatory criminalization of active and passive bribery (Article 15), active bribery of foreign public officials (Article 16), embezzlement (Article 17), laundering of proceeds of crime (Article 23) and obstruction of justice (Article 25), as well as providing for the criminal liability of legal persons (Article 26) and criminalizing participation in a criminal offense (Article 27).

• The AUCPAC makes it mandatory for signatory countries to create anticor-ruption agencies (Article 5).

• Similarly, specialized agencies are recommended by the FATF to curb money laundering and the financing of terrorism. Noncompliance with FATF standards may result in countries being excluded from international financial markets.

These international treaties and standards unreservedly aim at a legalistic and institution-building approach, and by their nature encourage standards-based approaches with limited consideration of the specific sociopolitical context of fragile countries.

Following the publication of the World Development Report 2011 (World Bank 2011) and the establishment of UN SDG 16, the IMF has increasingly recognized corruption as an important and integral part of the broader problem of engaging in fragile countries. The IMF approaches the topic from two angles: the first is through institutional discourse on fragile countries, in which IMF papers and reports since 2012 have become more explicit about the relevance of corruption for building institutions in fragile countries. The other is through its discourse on the macrorelevance of corruption more generally, which had a run-up of several years before being affirmed by the IMF Board in 2018 (IMF 2018b).

As a result, the IMF has become more explicit in identifying corruption as a core concern for fragile countries, including by explicit use of the term “corruption.” Some of the IMF’s early documents, such as IMF (2012), which remains the basis for IMF engagement in this area, do not mention corruption but refer to “governance” as a key challenge facing fragile countries. Governance then covers both general institutional challenges as well as possible corruption issues. This tendency to subsume corruption under the broader term of governance continued until about 2017–2018, when the IMF became more emphatic and outspoken regarding the fact that corruption is a specifically important challenge for fragile countries. The report by the Independent Evaluation Office of the IMF (IEO 2018) on fragile countries frequently uses the term “corruption” as an important concept. The report openly acknowledges that the governance weaknesses that characterize fragile countries significantly increase corruption vulnerabilities. The 2018 IEO report thus places corruption at the heart of its assessment of the 2012 policy implementation on fragile countries (IMF 2012), when that policy itself does not use that term. The report also recommends IMF engagement on this issue at an early stage, albeit “with humility and patience” (p 40).

This increased focus of IMF policies and reports on corruption in fragile countries aligns with the discourse on the macrorelevance of corruption in national institutions that has emerged since 2016. IEO (2018) cites the IMF (2017) stocktaking paper on the IMF approach to governance, which calls on the organization to be franker in naming the issue. After the publication of preparatory work undertaken by the IMF (IMF 2016; Lagarde 2016; 2017), the 2017 IMF paper examines the IMF’s own institutional approach to corruption. The paper noted the high degree of correlation between corruption and economic growth, and among other things called on the institution to address the issue in a more direct manner. At the same time, high-level cases of corruption added to the urgency of addressing the issue in the policy dialogue (Box 7.2).

The ensuing 2018 IMF policy on governance affirms the macroeconomic role of corruption and gives IMF staff a mandate to engage on the topic directly, with a specific focus on six core state functions. The “Proposed Framework for Enhanced Fund Engagement” (IMF 2018b) established that the institution would rigorously engage in addressing corruption, when it was found to be mac-rocritical (i.e., affect significantly macroeconomic performance), by focusing on those state functions most relevant for economic activity. These functions, as discussed in Chapter 1, include (1) fiscal governance, (2) central bank governance and operations, (3) financial sector oversight, (4) market regulation, (5) rule of law, and (6) anti–money laundering and combatting the financing of terrorism. These changes point at a firmer and more explicit institutional recognition of the role of corruption in state fragility.

From Best Practices to Country-Specific Engagement

Fragile states have struggled to establish functional accountability institutions despite the assistance of international financial institutions and other development partners. Formulating higher-level objectives, such as having an effective anticorruption legal and organizational framework, is now commonly accepted; however, the main challenge has been to manage the transition from paper organizations and endemic corruption to functional accountability institutions that operate in accordance with the rule of law (World Bank 2011).

International partners increasingly recognize the corrosive effect of corruption on state legitimacy and the essential importance of front-loading support for improving the effectiveness of institutions engaged in development and poverty reduction efforts (Johnson 2016; Rose-Ackerman 2013). The WDR (World Bank 2011), the New Deal Agreement on Fragile Countries (OECD 2011), and the UN SDG 16 all agree on the need to strengthen institutions as a first step toward reducing the internal fragmentation that afflicts fragile countries. Based on reviews of the development experience to date, each of these organizations concludes that institutional stabilization and resilience is at the foundation of the transition out of fragility, in which anticorruption is key, as it touches upon the legitimacy and effectiveness of the state and its agents.

How this institutional stabilization and resilience is to be achieved in fragile states continues to be the key challenge (Commission on State Fragility, Growth, and Development 2018; World Bank 2011). For international financial institutions such as the IMF, an important underlying consideration has been the need to establish complementarity between two distinct approaches. The first approach prioritizes economic growth by maximizing access to international markets, including capital markets. It supports universal legislative and institutional models that these markets recognize. It promotes international standards and best practices, which can result in an approach designed to introduce model laws and institutions into countries. The other approach focuses on building institutions within the local context—sometimes referred to as institutional resilience. This approach taps into and engages with the networks and contextual factors of fragile states and aims at building institutions within those local contexts that are fit for function, which was the overall thrust of the World Development Report 2011 (World Bank 2011).

These different approaches cannot always be easily reconciled, notably in conditions of extreme institutional fragility. The approach that aims at stimulating economic growth by maximizing access to global capital markets, which has been the dominant approach of international financial institutions such as the IMF, often prioritizes efforts to put in place the institutions and procedures that international capital markets recognize and want. This translates into a certain uniformity in the institutions and procedures to be established (underpinned by international standards and best practices). The approach consequently is marked by a high degree of formality and technicality, with country challenges being primarily viewed in technical terms—which then also allows for these challenges to be addressed through technical means. Thus, institutional weakness is defined as the gap between prevailing rules and international standards, often focusing on weaknesses of mandate, independence, capacity, and resources. Reforms designed to respond to those weaknesses emphasize providing the support that will enable organizations to close the gap through corresponding enhancements related to statutory change, capacity building, resource allocation, and so on.

The country-specific approach focuses on the underlying causes of institutional and state fragility. These invariably are country specific. This approach emphasizes the idea that institutions cannot be strengthened without addressing those contextual factors, sometimes called networks or power equilibriums (Commission on State Fragility, Growth and Development 2018; Khan, Andreoni and Roy 2016; Mason 2020). It recognizes that societal fragmentation, as a core feature of fragile states, stands in the way of establishing a civil space that allows for the development of the middle ground that underpins the development of inclusive institutions. Consequently, its approach is principally focused on establishing processes and platforms to promote civil engagement and foster the creation of a collaborative and inclusive framework. It involves a more consensus-building and incremental process within the political economy marking fragile countries.

Both approaches attempt to establish a pathway to creating functional institutions that operate in accordance with formal rules and procedures, but the dynamics of the transition process differ significantly. The economic-growth approach is premised on the idea that changes in laws and formal processes drive functional changes by tapping into an underlying independent rule-of-law and civil space. The country-specific approach is based on the idea that this civic space and rule of law are largely absent and need to be created first in order for institutions to develop an autonomous space in which to operate.

Obviously, as early IMF publications themselves have pointed out (Shah and Schacter 2004), these are not rigid categories.⁶ Even so, the dominant shift in international thinking on addressing fragile states generally, including on corruption, is a movement away from a simple application of international standards. The new approach features greater attention and inclusion of country-specific features, building on the evidence collected over the past half century that shows that the transplantation of rational-legal institutions onto fragile countries tends to fail (Commission on State Fragility, Growth and Development 2018).

The IMF’s experience in this area illustrates the challenges in implementing the different approaches on fragile states and corruption, and the evolution in thinking. Its policies on fragile countries emphasize the importance of contextualizing engagements and programs, yet actual implementation has tended toward the economic-growth model. Thus, the 2012 “Staff Guidance Note on the Fund’s Engagement with Countries in Fragile Situations” (IMF 2012) calls on IMF staff to focus on country specificity, explicitly considering the sociopolitical context and carefully tailoring structural reforms to the fragile context. Applying such guidance means tailoring policy advice to the sociopolitical constraints faced by the authorities, aiming at enhancing social cohesion (or, at a minimum, avoiding placing undue stress on the political and social fabric), prioritizing reforms in a context of low capacity and institutional weaknesses, and adjusting implementation expectations (IMF 2015b).

Even so, the 2015 stocktaking report (IMF 2015b) finds that in actual implementation, the IMF has tended toward a technical approach marked by uniformity: “Judged by the number of quantitative targets and structural benchmarks, program design has not changed much in recent years, and is broadly comparable across fragile and non-fragile countries” (IMF 2015b, p. 1). An IMF IEO report issued three years later found the approach unchanged: it concluded that the IMF continues to treat fragile countries “almost like any other country” (IEO 2018, p. 14), and the IEO struggled to find the distinctive country-specific treatment called for in the 2012 guidance.

An OECD report noted that this was the prevalent approach of nearly all international organizations and development agencies, which offer “a standardized political support package that focuses on the technical and procedural aspects of an idealized democracy” (OECD 2017, p. 2). The challenges flagged in its reports brought the IMF in 2018 to take further concrete steps to strengthen country-specific engagement. These measures included the establishment of a permanent interdepartmental committee tasked with enhancing engagement in fragile countries by introducing country-specific strategies and strengthening capacity development, including its integration with surveillance (IMF 2018a).

This also is reflected in the institutional approach on corruption: IMF program conditionality (as well as surveillance) on preventive and repressive anticorruption in sub-Saharan African countries shows a relatively high degree of uniformity and emphasis on a limited number of institutions (Table 7.1).

The program measures are about laws and institutions. Over a period of nearly two decades (2002–2020), IMF programs for sub-Saharan Africa included 45 measures on corruption for 19 countries, which focus basically on three areas: high-level strategies and surveys (for example, in Mozambique, Sierra Leone, Somalia, and Tanzania); statutory compliance with UNCAC (for example, in Central African Republic, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, Republic of Congo, and Tanzania); or setting up (or enhancing) anticorruption institutions. The last includes asset declarations for 17 countries (including Burkina Faso, Gabon, Guinea, Kenya, Liberia, Mali, Mozambique, and Uganda) and anticorruption commissions in eight countries (including Liberia, Guinea, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, and Republic of Congo). There is little distinction between country typologies, including for fragile countries.

The anticorruption measures do not distinguish between fragile countries and others. Generally, the same or very comparable measures apply to fragile states and nonfragile states. Thus, anticorruption agencies are proposed equally for nonfragile countries (for example, Kenya) and for fragile countries (for example, Chad, Liberia, Mali, and Republic of Congo). Asset declarations are similarly applied to nonfragile countries (for example, Gabon, Kenya and Uganda) and to fragile countries (for example, Central African Republic, Guinea, Liberia, Madagascar, and Mali). Corruption criminalization through compliance with the UNCAC is driven by where statutory gaps are found, rather than country typology. These gaps are prominent among fragile states (for example, Chad and Malawi), but the measure can be found equally among nonfragile countries (for example, Mozambique).

^{Table 7.1}

IMF Program Measures on Anticorruption in Sub-Saharan Africa (2002–2020)

Source: Monitoring of Fund Arrangements (MONA) – 2002–2020. Note: Measures in the list include prior actions, structural benchmarks, and structural performance criteria (which no longer exist) and are listed individually as reflected in IMF records: thus, a prior action or a structural benchmark on the same topic are listed as two measures.

^{Table 7.1}

IMF Program Measures on Anticorruption in Sub-Saharan Africa (2002–2020)

Adopt a strategy or do a survey	7 countries	Including 1 fragile state
Submit or enact an anticorruption law or amendment	12 countries	Including 5 fragile states
Submit or enact an anticorruption commission law	8 countries	Including 5 fragile states
Submit or enact an asset declaration law	17 countries	Including 5 fragile states

Source: Monitoring of Fund Arrangements (MONA) – 2002–2020. Note: Measures in the list include prior actions, structural benchmarks, and structural performance criteria (which no longer exist) and are listed individually as reflected in IMF records: thus, a prior action or a structural benchmark on the same topic are listed as two measures.

View Table

^{Table 7.1}

IMF Program Measures on Anticorruption in Sub-Saharan Africa (2002–2020)

Adopt a strategy or do a survey	7 countries	Including 1 fragile state
Submit or enact an anticorruption law or amendment	12 countries	Including 5 fragile states
Submit or enact an anticorruption commission law	8 countries	Including 5 fragile states
Submit or enact an asset declaration law	17 countries	Including 5 fragile states

Source: Monitoring of Fund Arrangements (MONA) – 2002–2020. Note: Measures in the list include prior actions, structural benchmarks, and structural performance criteria (which no longer exist) and are listed individually as reflected in IMF records: thus, a prior action or a structural benchmark on the same topic are listed as two measures.

The OECD notes that the general tendency among international organizations and development agencies to offer “a standardized political support package that focuses on the technical and procedural aspects of an idealized democracy” is “unlikely to help” (OECD 2017, i). The Cameron Commission, one of the more high-level commissions to have considered the issue in recent years, notes the broader impact of the standardized and technical approach: “IMF Programmes have adopted essentially the same framework in all countries, whether they belong to the OECD or fragile low-income countries.” (Commission on State Fragility, Growth and Development 2018, p. 37). The report views this approach in fragile states to be “damaging,” (p. 38) noting that overambitious policies tend to undermine the accountability process, broadly speaking. The report calls for a major and public overhaul of the IMF approach.⁷ The challenges flagged in the IEO’s report, as well as the OECD’s and Cameron Commission’s reports, spurred the IMF to take further concrete steps to strengthen its country-specific engagement, of which the current discourse related to FCS is the natural follow-up.⁸

The Way Forward

The new IMF policy framework on corruption, notably the 2018 policy, in conjunction with the findings of the IEO’s report on fragile states (IEO 2018), has opened the door to broadening the IMF’s anticorruption approach, notably for fragile states. A broadened approach could involve a more outcome-driven engagement embedded in, and addressing, the specific country contexts that mark fragile states. A recent DFID assessment notes that the emphasis of international financial institutions on formal frameworks and institutions tends to be on process measures that skirt the key underlying issues and that carry the risk of the institutions being viewed as complicit with the authorities in adopting superficial responses and retaining the status quo (Mason 2020).

Implementational adaptation to country conditions, such as through sustained capacity development aimed at building on local networks, would bolster targeted responses and is vital to shaping reforms to fit into the actual organizational and institutional context. World Bank experts refer to “isomorphic mimicry,” which describes a setting in which countries will be willing to adopt so-called best-practice laws and institutions in order to access financial resources, yet these institutions will fail because the laws and institutions are disconnected with the country realities (Pritchett, Woolcock, and Andrews 2012). Isomorphic mimicry carries two risks: (1) an emphasis on the outward forms (institutions and laws), which camouflage a persistent lack of effective function; and (2) premature load-bearing, in which local learning, legitimacy of change, and support of key constituencies are undercut by high and unrealistic expectations for fledgling institutions, notably in fragile countries. This approach, therefore, is not just ineffectual but can end up becoming counterproductive (Khan, Andreoni, and Roy 2016).

The issue with isomorphic mimicry is not that countries are learning from the experience of others, as such, since countries tend to borrow from each other liberally. Instead, the challenge for countries in fragile states is to shift from trying to replicate foreign structures to working to establish essential functions in local conditions, in part by emulating key principles and practices that have been demonstrated to work in the past (Krause 2013). This approach might come closer to securing the elusive stabilizing and legitimizing effect called for by the World Development Report 2011 (World Bank 2011), UN SDG 16, and IMF policies on fragile states (Johnson 2016).

Deeper Understanding of the Political Economy

The “deeper understanding of the political context” that IMF (2012 p. 13) reports refer to involves identifying and engaging with the “distribution of organizational power” (Khan 2017) in fragile states. This understanding calls for immersion in the existing national discourse by engaging with the key institutional and societal agents that inform it and shape its outcome. The reforms should also build on the knowledge and, notably, problem diagnostics or analyses within these countries. Reform in that sense is not top down and institution-driven, but bottom up through a more diagnostic-based, problem-oriented, and incremental process that builds on initiatives and engagement within countries and focuses on the priorities and objectives identified as a result of this engagement.

With an eye on building state legitimacy and institutional resilience, this bottom-up approach ideally should target anticorruption reform in ways that directly benefit society (Zoellick 2008). A careful balance should be struck between a focus on high-profile cases and widespread endemic corruption, which undermines public services and market access, notably in chronic and extremely fragile states. Focusing on high-profile cases typically will challenge dominant interests, will require the mobilization of large resources with very modest success rates, and will often be distant from the day-to-day lives of citizens. While sometimes such cases must be tackled, doing so can also be disruptive in building legitimacy and resilience, and thus the approach should be carefully calibrated, notably in extremely fragile states. Conversely, an approach that focuses on service delivery will aim to improve the daily lives of citizens and can have a legitimizing effect. As an example, outside of sub-Saharan Africa, in Georgia the anticorruption reforms that targeted the traffic police significantly enhanced the legitimacy of the authorities.

It is also important to strategize anticorruption approaches by assessing their distortive impact on an economy. Khan, Andreoni and Roy (2016) notes that the distortive effect on an economy of targeting high-value corruption transactions depends on the productivity of the underlying investment. If that productivity is not too adversely affected, the impact is limited, as is typical of profit-sharing corruption. On the other hand, modest bribes, such as those related to permits, can have a major distortive effect on the economy. The latter form of corruption is harder to capture in some PFM oversight instruments, such as audits, because the PFM triggers tend to be weak. An example of this is the impact of corruption on access to birth, marriage, and death certificates, where the need to make side payments to secure these documents has a profound impact on the economic opportunities for disadvantaged communities and reduces the impact of social programs. Another example is the granting of permits in the health sector—individual bureaucratic decisions that have a potentially wide-ranging effect on health and related topics.

Ownership and Inclusiveness

An inclusive approach is critical in shoring up state legitimacy and institutional resilience. Inclusiveness in this context covers the need for broader engagement of competing interests and stakeholders, and the importance of bringing in civil society and market actors. It also translates into providing incentives that will accommodate key stakeholders.

Reforms should be tailored to balance aspirational and formal and legal objectives with the underlying incentives offered to key stakeholders. The objective should be to progressively build legitimacy and resilience, which is different from the elusive goal of establishing an idealized state setting. Ownership, therefore, should be understood as a substantive alignment of interests (Khan, Andreoni and Roy 2016). Inclusiveness also requires a form of institutional architecture that facilitates broadening stakeholder participation in procedures and institutions.

An example is the CEMAC directive on the budgetary process, which envisages the participation of both stakeholders and civil society, the importance of which is hard to overstate. Another example is CEMAC Directive 6/2011, relative au Code de transparence et de bonne gouvernance dans la gestion des finances publiques, which calls for the publication of, among other things, revenue from extractives, SOEs, and procurement, and for the participation of civil society and societal partners. This CEMAC directive has been enacted in some CEMAC countries, such as Cameroon, Chad, Gabon, and Republic of Congo, though implementation in some of these countries has been slow (Chapter 5). The EITI standards are similarly important in creating an architecture of transparency, not just internationally but domestically.

It is also important to envisage institutions as multistakeholder platforms, aiming to accommodate the often adversarial interests in fragile states. Institutions, then, are seen to serve as platforms to hash out matters in small forums, seek compromises, and build an institutional agenda and identity in the process.

This points toward more committee-based institutions (rather than single-head command structures) to prevent institutions being captured by a single dominant interest, which undermines institutional resilience and sustainability. This approach requires a trade-off between short-term functionality, on the one hand, and medium-term resilience and sustainability, on the other.

An example is the Indonesia Anti-Corruption Agency (ACA), whose committee structure was purposely aimed to create broad political ownership of the agency. In fact, under this structure, competing stakeholders (such as CSO representatives and senior police officers) became commissioners and their respective constituencies became co-owners of the agency. This ensured that for a long time important competing interests owned a share in the agency, and while criticized, none were radically opposed. The committee structure prevented partisan capture and created institutional space, as the ACA fought out battles on competing interests internally. That structure helped enhance ACA sustainability and resilience, as it continued to exist and operate effectively beyond the five-year period initially envisaged in the face of sometimes significant challenges.

In aiming for an inclusive approach, it is tempting to focus on process measures that are broadly uncontested (such as compliance with UNCAC, which calls for setting up an anticorruption agency), rather than focusing on outcomes (limiting corruption in procurement). The emphasis on criminalization and anti-corruption agencies can be somewhat removed from the actual problematic faced by citizens in their daily lives.

In most countries the number of corruption cases that can be investigated and prosecuted is limited, and the overall impact of such criminal enforcement of corruption or an economy remains tentative. Khan, Andreoni and Roy (2016) therefore advocate complementary engagements. Their more problem-oriented approach focuses on specific corruption types (for example, corruption in the central bank, the budgetary process, SOEs, fiscal systems, procurement, or extractive industries) and seeks to address them through targeted structural measures.

This approach is reflected in the constructive efforts to address corruption in strategic transactions in Somalia. While corruption remains a critical issue for the country, substantial progress has been made in increasing oversight and monitoring of high-value state contracting under the auspices of the Financial Governance Committee, a transitional structure bringing together representatives from the government of Somalia and officials from the IMF, World Bank, AfDB, and key bilateral donors, mostly in an advisory capacity (World Bank 2019). The work of the committee proved to be instrumental in stopping and forcing the retendering of the largest procurement contract in the country, with substantial savings to the country and enhanced civilian control over expenditures by the military (Davis, Farley, and Handley 2020).

International Agencies

International agencies play a critical role in addressing countries’ fragility, notably when chronic or extreme. Several considerations are significant in this regard:

• The importance of being there: This refers to the broader concept of building understanding and relationships, which is best achieved through physical presence in the country. This would seem to be a necessary precondition to an institutional policy that calls for “a deeper understanding of the political context” (IMF 2012, p. 13). The absence of some international agencies in some fragile states has been noted and would seem to make achieving the objective of those policies harder (Manuel 2017). Several factors impact on the country presence of IFIs, including their mandates, some of which by their nature will necessitate significantly more local program engagement. IMF engagement in fragile states has been extensive, including through technical assistance (IMF 2018b).

• The importance of multidimensional rather than single-issue engagement, tailoring, and sequencing: One of the challenges for international financial institutions and development agencies is the tendency toward single-issue engagement, such as an exclusive focus on the passage of an anticorruption law or the creation of an anticorruption agency. It is important for external partners to support a more joined-up engagement, given the multidimensional challenges of state fragility.

The policy advice should be tailored to the sociopolitical constraints faced by the authorities and should recognize that efforts to strengthen accountability have the potential to place extraordinary stress on the political accommodations and social negotiations that have established peace. This tailoring of structural reforms to the fragile context should be adjusted to reflect capacity. This calls for prioritizing reforms, factoring in capacity constraints, and managing implementation expectations. Similarly, the need for a sequenced approach that recognizes the capacity constraints, and is more prioritized, staggered, and paced, is a recurrent theme in the literature on engagement in fragile states. The development of diagnostic tools and fragility assessments should assist in achieving a good pacing of reforms, though country studies show the challenges international partners experience in addressing that issue.

• The importance of mixed instruments, including broad-based capacity development, targeting outcomes: One of the challenges for international financial institutions is how to implement the different instruments at their disposal to help countries exit fragility. These instruments typically are surveillance, financial programs and projects (which come with conditionality), and capacity development. A sustained engagement based on a “deeper understanding of the political context” typically calls for significantly enhanced and sustained engagement within these countries, with surveillance and program support pushing that capacity development program along, rather than the reverse.

The process-oriented nature of most anticorruption measures, such as developing a plan (an anticorruption strategy, for example), passing a law (UNCAC compliance legislation, for example), or setting up an institution (an anticorruption agency, for example), typically do not address the underlying problems. International partners should be more outcome-based, with a stronger focus on the contribution of anticorruption activities to achieving better public sector performance. The corollary is that less emphasis should be placed in fragile states on stand-alone anticor-ruption achievements (such as the number of individuals sanctioned for corruption or improved public perception of the incidence of corruption).

• The importance of local partners and triangulation and coordination: While the government is and will remain the key counterpart of international financial institutions and development partners, a more engaged approach in fragile settings calls for broadening of the engagement. This includes routine visits and direct engagement with oversight and control institutions, such as supreme audit institutions, anticorruption agencies, and enforcement agencies, to underscore the importance international financial institutions and development partners attach to these institutions, and the empowering function such visits and engagement can have. That engagement also ideally should build on reports such agencies have developed. Other societal local partners, such as professional organizations and CSOs, should be engaged to address anticorruption. In some countries religious organizations can play an important development role and should be engaged.

While development partner coordination is often mentioned in reports and documents, the precise nature of that coordination often is left vague and undefined. It helps to flesh this out when considering the engagement on anticorrup-tion measures in fragile states. This principle carries important implications for the need to establish priorities shared across domestic and international partners. It likewise requires commitment to a pathway to improved governance and forsakes the mirage of transformational magical governance solutions that have underpinned and undermined countless reform efforts in fragile contexts. The challenges are significant and call for a coordinated approach that uses all of the scarce resources available to achieve concrete outcomes. These outcomes can serve as platforms for further reform and rallying points for expanding reform constituencies.