Abstract
How is civil society activism affected by the use of indicators? This chapter studies one of the best-known civil society efforts at quantification: The Corruption Perception Index (CPI), developed by Transparency International (TI). It argues that indicators open new avenues of activism and persuasion for civil society organisations, while at the same time imposing important costs that may, on occasion, balance the scales against their use.
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Notes
- 1.
The 1996 Inter-American Convention Against Corruption, the 1997 OECD Convention on Combating Bribery of Foreign Public Officials in International Business Transactions, the 1999 (European) Criminal Law Convention on Corruption, the 1999 (European) Civil Law Convention on Corruption, the 2003 African Union Convention on Preventing and Combating Corruption, and, finally, the 2000 United Nations Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime.
- 2.
On the transformation of the “Washington Consensus” from an economic policy for Latin America to a platform for development.
- 3.
A crucial shift by the World Bank occurred in 1997, when the Board of Directors adopted the Bank’s Corruption Strategy, which has been a key aspect of Bank policy ever since.
- 4.
Calculations made with Google n-gram. http://books.google.com/ngrams.
- 5.
For David Kennedy, for example, “the anti-corruption campaign benefits from the unwillingness of reasonable people to dispute plausible claims that corruption is taking place—the clear evil of the practice in general justifies at least some efforts to combat it. But the anti-anti-corruption campaign does not benefit from a similar generosity to the instinct that the campaign seems part of a broader ideological project of neo-colonialism. There is no countervailing general consensus about the evils of neo-colonialism, but rather quite the opposite. Charges of neo-colonialism seem vague and defensive efforts to change the subject, while charges of corruption seem straightforward efforts to get to the heart of things”.
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Urueña, R. (2018). Activism Through Numbers? The Corruption Perception Index and the Use of Indicators by Civil Society Organisations. In: Malito, D., Umbach, G., Bhuta, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Indicators in Global Governance. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62707-6_16
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