Over the past three decades, the fight against corruption has evolved from a narrow focus on legal compliance into abroader concern with public integrity and governance. National Integrity Systems (NIS) emerged as a dominant framework, and the shift toward public ethics and integrity standards promoted by organizations such as the OECD, the United Nations, the European Union the World Bank, and Transparency International shaped governance reforms worldwide (OECD, 1996; Pope, 2000; OECD, 2020). These developments unfolded unevenly across the Global North and South, opening space for comparative learning between regions with different governance regimes.
Moreover, the anti-corruption agenda has been institutionalized through the UNCAC, providing a comprehensive legal framework for prevention, criminalization, international cooperation, and asset recovery. However, implementing UNCAC has revealed substantial variation across political systems, highlighting gaps between formal compliance and substantive integrity outcomes. Despite widespread adoption of integrity frameworks, countries have followed markedly different trajectories. While some have strengthened accountability and public trust, others have witnessed the politicization of anti-corruption institutions, selective enforcement, state capture, and persistent or expanding integrity gaps.
These divergent experiences challenge the assumption that universal institutional models can be transferred across different political, historical, and cultural contexts, underscoring the need to situate integrity reforms within each context’s historical trajectory of power and accountability. Recent scholarship has increasingly questioned state-centered and compliance-based approaches to integrity governance, arguing instead for context-sensitive analyses of the interaction between formal institutions and informal power structures (Heywood & Johnson, 2017; Mungiu-Pippidi, 2015; Rothstein & Varraich, 2017). Rather than asking whether countries have adopted particular integrity mechanisms, the fundamental question is how governance regimes shape the possibilities and limits of integrity reforms.
This panel invites contributions exploring the legacies of corruption and the conditions under which integrity gaps emerge, persist, or close across governance regimes. We seek research that moves beyond prescriptive institutional solutions to examine the political, historical, and societal dynamics influencing the implementation and effectiveness of anti-corruption policies. The panel treats corruption not merely as a technical or moral failure but as a historically embedded governance challenge open to context-sensitive and locally grounded reform.
