The international approaches to tackling corruption discussed in Chapter 7 still inevitably have as their focus the work and behaviour of governments, businesses and civil society organizations that work largely within national boundaries. Corruption is, in other words, a transnational phenomenon that requires internationally agreed responses to be translated into the frameworks and cultures of national political life. This ensures that the divide in this book between international and national approaches is, by definition, something of a false one. International approaches are translated into national contexts, while national (and, indeed, local; see Chapter 9) approaches often have their roots in – or, at the very least, a relationship with – initiatives that began either in the international arena or simply in other places. The notion that there is a clear divide between the national and international arena therefore needs to be dispelled right at the beginning.

There has also been a fair amount of diffusion in anti-corruption thinking. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the institutions of the Washington Consensus (World Bank and IMF), for example, had a considerable influence over how states thought about anti-corruption. Still, some of the most popular tools that national governments use start out as discrete responses to specific national (or subnational) problems. They can prompt copycat actions elsewhere; in terms of national anti-corruption commissions, for example, the creation of the Hong Kong Independent Commission against Corruption (ICAC) in 1974 prompted scores of similar (although rarely identical) institutions to be created in other jurisdictions. The ICAC was a genuine trailblazer. The American FCPA, passed in 1977, has become a piece of legislation that firms all over the world, and not just those who conduct most of their business in the US, are aware of. National anti-corruption initiatives can, and do, have international effects.

This chapter analyses how national governments tend to approach the anti-corruption challenge. Given that many anti-corruption reforms are not particularly successful, this chapter begins by grappling with a potentially tricky question: how does the outside observer know that a given authority is actually serious about wanting to tackle corruption in the first place? Just about every politician everywhere decries corruption’s deleterious effects, and they all claim to want, in some way, to do something about this.