ABSTRACT
Daniel Kaufmann's perspective on corruption implicitly recognizes that public officials cannot be trusted to manage the public purse, because the temptations are too great for poorly paid civil servants to steal for their personal enrichment. In terms of action plans, external entities are more interested in carrying out surveys, holding workshops, running anticorruption programs, strengthening top-down accountability, and raising public sector wages. One can hardly disagree with Kaufmann's highlighting of the pervasiveness of corruption in the developing world. But development finance officials' perceptions about corruption differ greatly from those of citizens in corrupt societies, as do their needs and proposed solutions for corruption. To get the strategy right and to encourage sustainable local ownership of efforts to get at both the causes and consequences of corruption, evaluation needs to be done in a more participatory way, taking all stakeholders' viewpoints into account.
