The Internationalisation of Conflict of Interest Regulation: the Role of International Anti-Corruption Policy Brokers

Conflict of interests are often presented as a fact of life that we all face daily, but they can pose a risk to the integrity of public decision-making when power-holders face such situations and favour their own interest over the public interest. An increasing amount of countries around the world have adopted policies to prevent or regulate politicians’ conflicts of interests. These policies tend to look very similar across jurisdictions that do not share the same political system or the same idea of interest representation. Using two instruments (interest registers and codes of conduct), this paper shows the role played by international organisations (IOs) for the convergence of anti-corruption policy and sheds light on the roles, resources and practices of (IOs) as policy-makers and policy brokers. The paper is based on archival and documentary analysis as well as semi-structured interviewed conducted with actors from the OECD and the Council of Europe. It borrows a method employed by urban studies scholars interested in policy mobility, inspired by multi-sited ethnography, referred to as ‘following the policy’ to trace the circulation and transformation of ideas about conflicts of interests from the countries in the Anglosphere from where conflict of interest regulation originally stems and across jurisdictional boundaries and levels of governance. The paper suggests that, in addition to creating compliance mechanisms based on peer-reviews, international organisations facilitates the transfer of anti-corruption policies by favouring the emergence of an anti-corruption paradigm, by discursively striping policies of their political elements and rendering them technical/neutral and thus shaping the ideational context in which national policy-making takes place.