Governance and Corruption in the Public Sector: An Extended Literature Review

This chapter aims to contribute to the literature on public governance and its link to corruption. In particular, the chapter presents conceptual arguments for better understanding the ways in which public governance choices may affect corruption levels, thus identifying governance policies, mechanisms, and roles that can contribute in fighting and preventing corruption at macro-, meso- and micro-levels of analysis.

Starting from a macro-, meso- and micro-perspectives, this chapter is based on a literature review in order to understand connections between public governance and corruption.

Even if literature on the causes of public corruption are analysed from the macro-, meso-, and micro-perspectives, contributions of public governance scholars in relation to anticorruption efforts are mainly concentrated on a macro-perspective of analysis, while only a limited number of scholars offer a reflection on the possible interdependencies among governance policies and instruments and anticorruption efforts at the organizational level.

Despite the importance of the meso- and micro-perspectives, the literature review presented in this chapter shows us an important gap on the definition of which governance mechanisms and instruments or organizational policies are important to carry out in order to prevent or fight corruption, thus highlighting the need to improve research on this important field.