I started this book with three specific aims. I wanted to say something about what corruption is, what causes it and what we might want to think about when trying to tackle it. Perhaps unsurprisingly, finding consensus in doing justice to those aims is a task fraught with pitfalls. Corruption remains very difficult to accurately define (and every bit as hard to measure); there are a number of different ways of explaining the reasons for its existence; and, although there are a multitude of anti-corruption options out there, success stories are depressingly thin on the ground. If corruption was not such a serious problem, causing so much pain and distress to so many, then it might be tempting to follow the logic of Homer Simpson and turn our attentions elsewhere. As Springfield’s finest once said, “if something’s hard to do, then it’s not worth doing”. For good measure, he followed that with “if at first you don’t succeed, give up”. However, given that corruption has become one of the most prominent global public policy challenges of the twenty-first century, these simply are not options.

Before we can begin to rise to the challenge of tackling corruption, we have to do quite a lot of groundwork. It is clearly not possible to pick anti-corruption policies from a catalogue: anti-corruption is not like mail-order shopping. It is, however, certainly worth studying the experiences of states that have made the transition from high-corruption countries to nominally low-corruption settings. We nonetheless need to be clear that it will never be possible to replicate the Swedish or Danish experiences (to take just two of the most frequently lauded) elsewhere. Indeed, if the Swedish model was dropped onto a territory where systematic corruption was the norm, then you would not suddenly have outbreaks of interpersonal trust everywhere and the rapid development of an expansive, high-quality welfare state. If the Swedish model were placed into a developing state, you would be much more likely to inadvertently encourage even more rampant rent-seeking. It would not and could not work. As and when states do try to take a short cut to tackling corruption, they quickly run into problems.