Enrolling the local: Community-based anti-corruption efforts and institutional capture

Abstract

This Brief examines community-based anti-corruption efforts in natural resource management in order to better understand their rationales, potentialities, and challenges—especially complications posed by the intersection of such initiatives with national-level dynamics of institutional capture. The authors present a case study from northeastern Madagascar in order to empirically explore such dynamics, and conclude with a discussion of how multi-level anti-corruption interventions might offer a promising way forward for reducing corruption in natural resource management for certain high-value landscapes or resources that might be subject to challenges connected to institutional capture.