About the project
According to the 2019 Global Corruption Barometer report, South Africans perceived local government officials as the most corrupt, aside from the police. This prevalence of corruption has resulted in a significant decline in public trust and confidence in the integrity of public officials. Consequently, the South African government has implemented several anti-corruption interventions over the last decade. However, recent studies suggest that these interventions have yielded minimal results.
Experiences from these anti-corruption interventions and several others on the continent of Africa partly suggest that they fail because they tend to over-rely on formal norms, bureaucratic procedures, the enforcement of transparency and accountability and disregard the intricacies of informal norms within local government institutions. Informal norms are generally socially shared rules usually unwritten and enforced outside a state’s official sanctioning channels. Recent studies show that disregard for such norms results in a mismatch between the design expectations of anti-corruption strategies and the actual realities in the contexts of their implementations.
The South African government has reaffirmed its dedication to fighting corruption through the implementation of a new and “improved” anti-corruption strategy launched in 2020 and expected to run until 2030, at which point the government expects South Africa to be “corruption-free”. But how do prevailing informal social norms within the country’s local government institutions propel or threaten its corruption-free dream? This project, through ethnographic methods, will attempt to answer this question.
Project period
The project will run for four years starting May 2022.
Financing
The project is funded by the University of Oslo.