Corruption is high on the agenda of national governments, international organisations, aid providers and civil society. At the same time, decentralisation has become a dominant policy reform across the developing world, within a context of democratisation and expectations that ‘democratic decentralisation’ would bring government closer to the people, increase accountability and help to combat corruption. However, research on decentralisation shows it has a mixed record in the real world, and corruption research and policy-making increasingly recognises the need to disaggregate corruption – corruption takes many different forms and has different causes and effects in different settings, and strategies to combat corruption are also likely vary across these types and settings. As a result, the links between decentralisation and corruption are complex, and the role of decentralised governance in combatting corruption remains unclear.
This report aims to deepen understandings of the links between decentralised governance and corruption, and the implications of such linkages and dynamics for the effectiveness of anti-corruption measures at the local level. It synthesises the findings from two indepth case studies on decentralised governance and corruption in Bangladesh and Nigeria.