The construction of success in anti-corruption activity in Georgia

Abstract

This article examines anti-corruption activities in Georgia after the Rose Revolution of November 2003 under the administration of Mikheil Saakashvili. It aims to analyse the existence of different assessments on the country's success in fighting corruption and applies an interpretive framework to study these assessments as “narratives” that reveal the diverging or converging interests of anti-corruption actors in sustaining a common narrative on the country's reforms. The article examines how the two main anti-corruption actors – the Georgian government and international organisations – frame their activities into two different representations of success and seek a mutual validation on them. It aims to identify the factors underlying a (non)-convergence of these actors into a common representation or an “official transcript” of their activities. The case study of the adoption of a national anti-corruption strategy in Georgia in 2005 reveals the difficulty of these two actors to validate their representations and to sustain a coherent image. Certain inherent contradictions in the relations between donor organisations and transition or developing countries, in particular in the juxtaposition of the two notions of a “transfer of external knowledge” and “local ownership/political will”, are viewed as the main factors behind this problem of validation.