ABSTRACT
Promotion of democracy and good governance are established policies of various international organisations, governments, and NGOs. Anti-corruption programmes, projects, and campaigns have come to constitute an essential aspect of furthering good governance over the last two decades. The post-communist countries in Eastern Europe have presented key targets of such efforts, and indeed most of these countries have shown an impressive record of domestic anti-corruption measures. But how do external structures and agents influence anti-corruption efforts in post-communist countries? How are domestic responses feeding back into the global fight against corruption? And what kind of structures and agents have become involved at both national and international levels at all? These are the core questions that this special issue approaches. They are highly relevant when looking at a policy field and at a region where ‘change’ has been a central parameter. Not only transnational anti-corruption efforts have been evolving and have taken various forms since the early 1990s, but also the relations between West and East have been changing and the domestic transformations in the various Eastern European countries have, irrespective of a shared communist legacy, proceeded in manifold ways. As the
articles compiled here show, these dynamic international and domestic contexts have been conducive to coincidental and spontaneous breakthroughs rather than systematic implementation of appropriate anti-corruption strategies.
