ABSTRACT
Corruption is a phenomenon primarily associated with the public and commercial sectors. Civil society, as the so-called third sector, is therefore naturally seen as one of the key agents in the anti-corruption arena.2 Indeed, at the level of international governance, contemporary forms of global civil society have substantially contributed to the birth and growth of the global anti-corruption venture. Within countries, however, effective civil society involvement has remained challenging and controversial (DCD/ DAC 2003; EUMAP 2003; OECD 2003; WMD 2010).3 With the articles compiled here, the question about the limited impact of the numerous anti-corruption activities of domestic civil societies is back on the table. As shown by the in-depth case studies in this volume, and as recently underlined by a database compiling almost 500 civic anticorruption projects that were realised in 16 eastern European countries, post-communist civil societies have been very actively involved in anti-corruption efforts during the 2000s.4 That their practical impact has remained unsatisfactory seems particularly puzzling since post-communist civil society organisations (CSOs) have been maintaining strong links with both the international and governmental spheres where larger scale anti-corruption action is taking place. Their simultaneous embeddedness within the global and domestic cultural contexts, however, does also present the very crux of the matter. In an effort better to understand the apparent weakness of domestic civil societies in
the anti-corruption field, this chapter outlines key challenges that spring from the entanglement of three cultural contexts where crucial developments have occurred over the past two decades. These have not always been positively synergetic. Two of these contexts are pertinent to civil society involvement in anti-corruption efforts in any country: civil society in general has changed its character, especially at the global level, and, closely related, the anti-corruption venture has evolved as a global movement of its own kind. With regard to the eastern European and possibly other transition countries, these developments are complemented by the contextual dynamics of an ongoing search for viable state-civil society relations at the domestic level. In such countries in particular, civil society in the anti-corruption arena has been sitting oddly between a growing number of stools reserved for an increasingly diverse set of international and governmental actors as well as for global civil society, while often referred to the ranks of ‘traditional civil society’ as associated with protest, awareness raising and large-scale public mobilisation.
