In the 1990s, anti-corruption emerged as “idea whose time had come”. The issue was initially seized by the World Bank and other development actors, but was quickly taken up by a larger variety of international organisations, such as the OECD or the Council of Europe. Corruption became an increasingly popular topic among academics and a number of new actors emerged, focussing specifically on the issue, Transparency International being their prime example. Acknowledging the political, practical and sometimes coercive power of these organisations, I choose to focus this paper on their ideational and normative influence, as the role of knowledge production and diffusion has been somewhat neglected in corruption scholarship.
Using Haas’ framework of epistemic communities, I argue that this “anti-corruption movement” has become a transnational epistemic community, with a network of professionals and academics united by a common interest and shared core beliefs. This paper This paper does not analyse the influence of international organisations on the domestic level but rather the emergence and expansion of a community of relatively like-minded professionals and experts. The objective of the paper is two-fold: firstly, it provides evidence of the existence of an anti-corruption epistemic community, and second it offers elements to understand the ideational influence of the epistemic community. Combining process-tracing, qualitative interviewing (with anti-corruption experts and practitioners), and discourse analysis (of policy documents produced by these experts and organisations), it identifies the interactions between actors and internal dynamics of the epistemic community that contributed to (re)define corruption as a public problem, and show how ideas travel and become dominant.
