Abstract
Corruption significantly affects the large majority of countries, and it has negative social and economic impacts. Its impacts on environmental and resource management (ERM) sectors are less well understood. We review corruption in the extractive industries, irrigation, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and conservation activities with a focus on the management of protected areas and the wildlife trade. There is significant evidence that corruption in ERM sectors is systemic. Corruption in these sectors has significant negative environmental and economic impacts, which can be expected to result in negative social impacts. Many of the anti-corruption policies proposed for the ERM sectors draw on the principal-agent theory. The political science literature on corruption found that theory to have limited application when corruption is systemic and the principal is corrupt. The analysis of corruption and anti-corruption in countries with systemic corruption should draw to a greater extent on collective action theory to identify more effective policies. We highlight some anti-corruption policies relevant to ERM sectors.
Highlights
We analyze, respectively, the sectors extractive industries, irrigation, agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and conservation with a focus on protected areas (PAs) and the wildlife trade
We have seen that corruption is widespread across the environmental and resource management (ERM) sectors analyzed, and there is evidence that it is systemic
The corruption system was revealed in detail for the irrigation system in India, and that model was found to be relevant to other ERM sectors in that country
Summary
The UN Convention against Corruption came into force in 2005, and 186 countries had ratified it by June 2018 (https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/corruption/ratification-status.html). The earlier definition of corruption as the abuse of public office for personal gain has evolved into variants that refer to abuse of authority or power, which implies holding of positions in the public or private sector and which can involve holding formal office as well other positions of trust (14) This view of corruption essentially involves an exchange of favors between two actors who deviate from normal, noncorrupt behavior (13, 14). This actor-focused perspective is the basis for the analysis of corruption through the lens of the principal-agent theory that has dominated until recently the analysis of corruption, by economists and political scientists.
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