Constraints on civil society's capacity to curb corruption - Lessons from the Indian experience

This article suggests reasons why it is particularly difficult for civil so ciety to organise effectively to curb forms of corruption which disproporti onately afflict the poor. We take issue with currently fashionable views on the state's ability to 'foster' the emergence of civil-society organisatio ns which effectively articulate the interests of socially excluded people. The Indian case demonstrates the potential for state-fostering to produce p recisely the kinds of 'compromised' civil-society organisations which inhib it the emergence of the most effective form of anti-corruption movement: on e based upon the premise that citizens have a right to audit government fin ances in minute detail. Indeed, the organisation in India that has pioneere d this radical means for increasing accountability to the poor consciously distances itself from state-sponsored efforts to influence the development of civil society In Latin America - whence most of the evidence for the opt imistic view of state-fostered civil society has been drawn - efforts to pr omote popular auditing (as opposed to participatory planning) are conspicuo us by their absence. This raises suspicions that state-fostering of civil s ociety, whatever its merits, comes at a heavy price: the proliferation of a ssociations unwilling to migrate from 'safe' forms of participation to thos e which involve confronting powerful elites and challenging the state's pre rogative of auditing its own financial conduct. Such groups appear disincli ned to demand and obtain sensitive government records, let alone organise o rdinary people to analyse such information to determine where funds allocat ed for their benefit have actually gone.