Global South Insights: Transforming Approaches to Corruption

Abstract

Corruption research stands at a critical crossroads. Despite decades of scholarship and substantial anticorruption investments, corruption persists globally, adapting to interventions rather than being eradicated. This resilience challenges established assumptions about how corruption is conceptualized, measured, and addressed. Traditional frameworks, including principal-agent theories, cross-national indices, and rational choice models, have proven inadequate for capturing the systemic, adaptive, and context-specific nature of corruption (Da Ros & Gehrke, 2024; Mungiu-Pippidi, 2023). At the same time, a persistent knowledge asymmetry endures: academic and policy discourse is shaped by theories developed in the Global North, while the Global South’s extensive experience with corruption often remains marginal in theory-building (Odilla & Tsimonis, 2024). This panel confronts these limitations by posing urgent questions. What new analytical approaches can move beyond viewing corruption as isolated exchanges between rational actors? How might research capture the dynamic, relational, and adaptive dimensions of corrupt practices? What shifts when Global South realities become sources of theoretical innovation rather than simply empirical illustrations for Northern theories? How do moral narratives, institutional designs, and policy framings shape both corruption and anticorruption outcomes in ways often overlooked by conventional models? Addressing these questions demands methodological pluralism and epistemological reflexivity. Corruption is at once an economic phenomenon, a moral problem, a network structure, an institutional configuration, and a contested policy arena. No single method seems to suffice to capture this complexity. Experimental approaches can illuminate cognitive and moral mechanisms behind corrupt choices. Network analysis may reveal relational patterns and temporal dynamics masked by cross-sectional data. Qualitative research can uncover how institutional dysfunction often reflects deliberate political design (Amundsen, 2019). Narrative and discourse analysis can show how competing framings influence the legitimacy and effectiveness of anticorruption initiatives (Stone, 2012). Reimagining corruption research also means confronting the field’s Northern epistemological dominance. Many Global South countries have implemented anticorruption reforms such as transparency laws, and whistleblower protections, often under international pressure to adopt Northern-inspired solutions (Blanc et al., 2023). Yet, persistent corruption leads to repeated diagnoses of “implementation failure” (Brinkerhoff, 2000; Lawson, 2009) and cycles of technical assistance that rarely yield transformative results. This pattern signals the need for theories rooted in Global South realities, where elite collusion, regulatory capture (Callais & Mkrtchian, 2024), transnational illicit flows, and adaptive institutional dysfunction may diverge sharply from the contexts that produced dominant models. Recognition of state capture in advanced democracies (David-Barrett, 2023) further underscores the global relevance of these insights. This panel assembles scholars with diverse methodological toolkits to interrogate corruption’s complexity. Presentations explore moral and psychological drivers of corruption, develop dynamic network-based measurement frameworks, propose grounded theory agendas centered on Global South data, and analyze anticorruption as a contested narrative process. Collectively, they demonstrate that understanding corruption requires moving beyond individual transactions to examine moral economies, evolving relational structures, institutional designs, and discursive struggles that shape both corruption and its reform

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