Civil society and anti-corruption: experiences from Albania, Kosovo and Serbia.

• Author: Sadiku, Lejla
• Position: EU AS A GOOD GOVERNANCE PROMOTER

Introduction

With the introduction of the good governance agenda in the 90s, corruption has been increasingly recognized as an impediment in democratic functioning and economic development. The rising salience of corruption (and anti-corruption) is demonstrated by the frequency of citations in world press: while in the beginning of 90s, corruption was mentioned approximately 800 times, by 2000 this number had reached 1200 (Bryane, 2004). Notably, a large part of the sector has been concentrated on the European post-communist countries.

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Albania, Kosovo and Serbia have all had turbulent recent history with fervent changes and troublesome transitions--creating favorable conditions for breeding corruption. Kosovo has gone through decades of de-investment, a conflict, international administration and state-building. Serbia, on the other hand, has been at the center of the fall-out of Yugoslavia, having inherited the secret state structures of the Communist regime, and then suffered international isolation during Milosevic's regime. Meanwhile, Albania faced civil war as pyramid structures collapsed. Transitions have been difficult for all post-communist countries, but the political, social and economic turmoil after the fall of communism have put an additional strain on the already fragile institutions of these countries. While their experiences might be different (yet interconnected), Albania, Kosovo and Serbia have much in common, among which a post-communist past, widespread corruption and much donor and EU influence.

Despite a decade of heavy investment in anti-corruption, concerns about corruption have increased. In polls, 80 to 90% of respondents in Albania, Kosovo and Serbia find corruption and bribery harmful (Gallup International, 2008). An analysis of the civil society sector is not only necessary to understand its role in changing institutional behavior, but will also serve as a guide for policy-makers, donors and civil society practitioners. The experience of these three countries is insightful evidence into the elements that make anti-corruption projects successful or not.

The goal of this research is to explore the impact of civil society organizations in the field of anti-corruption, and compare these experiences to each other. Furthermore, it looks into specific projects within these countries looking for elements which make these projects successful and tries to identify practices which could be transferred to other organizations and countries.

The first part presents the theoretical grounding on the question why should civil society contribute to curbing corruption and what tools it has in its hands. The second part is the methodology and limitations encountered in the study. The third part diagnoses corruption in these countries, based on the typology developed by Alina Mungiu-Pippidi. Before diving into experiences of civil society organizations, the fourth chapter explores the strengths and weaknesses of investigative journalism in fighting corruption. The fifth part assesses civil society in Albania, Kosovo and Serbia, followed by impact assessment of the civil society in anti-corruption and experiences that organizations have had with their projects.

1. Civil Society and Anti-corruption

   Nowadays, some authors argue that formal political institutions, such as administrative control and judicial structures, have had a small effect in CEE, whereas among the systems that work are the watchdog role of the press and NGOs (Schmidt, 2007). International organizations have increasingly sought civil society involvement in anticorruption since the 90s, leading to the establishment of civil society involvement as a central theme in anti-corruption (Schmidt, 2007). Nowadays, the Organization for Economic Community and Development firmly states "civil society plays a key role in fighting corruption" (OECD, 2003:8).

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   A large part of the civil society sector in the region has, in one way or another, been involved in anti-corruption work. In most of the region, first steps were made towards establishing a successful cooperation between the executive and NGO-s (Ralchev, 2004). This involvement has been catalyzed by the attention that international donors have paid to anticorruption projects (Ralchev, 2004). To illustrate, Figure 2 shows that projects strengthening civil society constitute the second largest segment of USAID aid directed at reducing corruption (second only to Fiscal/Customs) (USAID, 2010). In response to escalating perceptions of corruption, donors increasingly undertook anti-corruption initiatives. These programs were conducted by anyone who could conduct them: universities, consulting companies, NGO-s, individual contractors and divisions within national governments (Bryane, 2004).

   The discourse of international organizations promoting good governance has been to support civil society organizations in the fight against corruption. Despite popular convictions, actual evidence of success is rather scarce. The impact of civil society programs is increasingly questioned and establishing the link between curbed corruption and civil society actions is not easy (Grimes, 2008). As the area is new, the evidence of long-term successful programs or projects is mainly inconclusive (Bryane, 2004), thus the usefulness of anti-corruption campaigns, creation of new institutions or passage of laws, as well as much of the traditional public sector management and legal reform approaches may have been overrated (Kaufmann, 2003).

   1.1. Civil Society Tools to Fight Corruption

   Civil society organizations are expected to build partnerships, provide links between public and business actors, and between international actors and domestic contexts through information, mediation and education (Schmidt, 2007). Civil society is generally involved in civic monitoring of corruption through regular corruption perception indexes, anti-corruption public awareness campaigns, consulting and expertise sharing, anti-corruption education courses, and anti-corruption initiatives both on national and local level (Ralchev, 2004). The following three dimensions, with a naming and shaming sub-dimension for public awareness, are the main tools to fight corruption:

1. Raising public awareness,

   1. Naming and shaming

2. Providing analyses and recommendation, and

3. Training through seminars, workshops and lectures

2. Methodology

   This paper is a comparative case study with three cases. I have done three levels of analysis: macro, meso and micro level. At the macro level, civil societies of Albania, Kosovo and Serbia are compared against each other based on ratings provided by USAID on NGO sustainability and Freedom House Civil Society score.

   At the meso level, I have assessed the impact of the civil society anti-corruption sector based on the model developed by Helmut Anheier in the book "Civil Society: Measurement, Policy and Evaluation." The model looks at four dimensions: policy impact, public awareness, media coverage and expert opinion. Because of lack of reliable data, I have adjusted policy impact to impact on legislation, where I have used three indicators: 1. Invitation to participate in Anti-corruption strategy drafting, 2. Participation in Anticorruption strategy drafting and 3. Amendments in legislation as a result of civil society involvement. For the first two indicators, I have developed a dichotomous value of Yes and No, scored with 1 and 0, respectively. Meanwhile, for the third value I have four values: 0 = never, 1=sometimes, 3=often, and 4=always. The largest score on the legislative impact a country can have is 6, which would indicate a very high impact of civil society organizations in legislative processes. Media coverage, is the number of hits that "corruption + respective country" gets on a Southeast European Times news website. For public awareness, I have used a dichotomous value again: Positive or Negative, which I have based on the change in attitudes between 2008 and 2009 in Albania, Kosovo and Serbia on acceptability/unacceptability of using money to evade the law or receive preferential treatment in public institutions. A positive score means that the acceptability for bribing has decreased and vice versa. Meanwhile, a negative score indicates lower unacceptability and higher acceptability of bribing behavior. Finally, the value on expert opinion is based on the question asked to donors, journalists and independent analysts: "how do you rate civil society actions in fighting corruption?"

   In the micro level, I have analyzed three projects that were deemed successful by various stakeholders for each country. To measure the impact of the projects and develop a best practices guide, I have developed a framework aiming to identify the elements which make civil society projects successful and what is the impact they have. The elements are: cooperation with institutions, media coverage, and anti-corruption target/aim. I have measured impact across three dimensions: legal: what has been the legislative impact; institutional: has the project had an impact on modus operandi of the targeted institution; and social: have people become more involved with the targeted institution, or has it changed the perception about the institution in question. For anti-corruption target, I have developed three values: high politics, administrative corruption or transparency. The other indicators are scored qualitatively from Low to High, based on submitted evaluation reports and interviews.

   In the course of my field research, I have interviewed 30 stakeholders from government agencies, independent agencies, donors, activists and journalists. A full list of interviewees is available with the bibliography. Project scoring is done based on project evaluations I have gathered and interviews I have conducted. The rest of the data is from reports by international organizations, where those are...