Enrolling the Local: Community-Based Anti-Corruption Efforts and 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.

Key Takeaways:

• Community-based anti-corruption efforts are often seen as a way to circumvent corrupt state actors, to empower those most affected by the negative consequences of corruption, and to build trust and legitimacy for such initiatives at the local level.
• However, evidence from community-based natural resource management programs around Makira Natural Park in northeastern Madagascar suggests that while community-based anti-corruption efforts may prove effective in cases where local resources and landscapes are of little interest to national-level actors, they are likely to fail when resources are highly valued by those actors for strategic and/or economic reasons.
• When lucrative natural resources are involved, institutional capture that effectively takes power away from local actors is a persistent challenge, requiring a multi-level approach to combatting corruption to increase chances for community-based management of natural resources to achieve desired results.