Informal Governance and Corruption – Transcending the Principal Agent and Collective Action Paradigms in Tanzania

Alternative title: Dismantling networks of corruption: challenges and opportunities in reforming informal governance in Tanzania.

This Tanzania country report is part of a research project funded by the Anti-Corruption Evidence (ACE) Programme of the UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) and the British Academy.

The project has identified informal practices in selected countries in order to establish their general and specific features in comparative analysis; assess their impact based on the functions they perform in their respective economies and indicate the extent to which they fuel corruption and stifle anticorruption policies.

The comparative research design involves seven countries from two geopolitical groups East Africa and Post-Soviet countries as follows:

• East Africa: Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda
• Post-Soviet countries: Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia

The goal of the research is to produce evidence for the relevance of informality in support of the ‘localisation’ of anticorruption strategies and promoting the development of a new generation of policies that may harness the transformative potential of local patterns of informality.

See the research findings on the Basel Institute’s Informal Governance website.