ABSTRACT
In Central Asia, hardly any issue is receiving more attention from governments and international organisations than corruption. Accordingly, many anti-corruption plans, strategies, programmes and laws have been drafted and adopted. Nonetheless, the outcomes in terms of actual implementation remain disappointing. From a conventional perspective, scholars have predominantly interpreted the corrupt behaviour of the state’s agents and the disintegration of vital state functions in Central Asia as evidence of state weakness. Thus, if these states could somehow eradicate the scourge of corruption, their economic, political and social development would be reinvigorated. This chapter offers an alternative interpretation of corruption in the region. Instead of seeing the under-provision of public goods and looting of public resources as a sign of state failure, they are predictable outcomes in a distinctive political-economic system where public offices allow individuals to use the authority, mandate, resources and brand name of the state to collect rents. In this system, corruption also functions as a top-down political control strategy. As such, corruption mainly becomes a problem when it violates the unwritten rules of the game and takes non-authorised forms.
