An active civil society is normally considered as a guardian against corruption. But findings from extensive field interviews in the Philippines and Bangladesh suggest that in weak and corruption-prone states, civil society actors often form part of existing networks of patronage and corruption. In the Philippines, various civil society groups have deliberately allowed themselves to become coopted by successive ruling coalitions in the Philippine Congress in order to gain access to law-making processes and lucrative priority development funds. In Bangladesh, foreign-funded NGOs have engaged in various kinds of bribery of state regulatory agencies in order to influence administrative decisions and evade monitoring by state officials. Bangladesh and the Philippines are dissimilar cases with regard to their culture, political system and level of economic growth, suggesting that in both cases the weakness of the state constitutes the most important factor for the occurrence of corruption in the civil society sphere.
