Patronage, Korruption und Governance in Afghanistan. Eine quantitative und qualitative Untersuchung in Nordostafghanistan
Empirische Sozialforschung
Zusammenfassung der Projektergebnisse
The project contributes on at least three counts to academic and policy research debate. First, it contributes to a recent strand of academic and policy research literature on corruption that views the phenomenon as highly ambiguous and, while not condoning it, does not consider a straightforward negative impact of corruption on governance outcomes as a given. Our research shows that the straightforward negative impact of experienced and perceived corruption only fully materialises in the North-East Afghan context in districts with contested patronage and / or when a multi-layered structure of development councils does not function well. Thus, the research also provides policy-makers with tools to mitigate the negative impact of corruption, should conventional anti-corruption measures fail – as they often do. In particular, support to the vertical integration of the aforementioned development councils appears to be well-suited to mitigate negative corruption affects. Second, the research results also contribute to the literature on patronage and clientelism. The heyday of patronage research in social sciences was in the 1960s and 1970s mainly in Latin American, Mediterranean and South Asian peasant studies and it is only recently that interest in patronage seems to be growing once again. This literature, the old and the recent, however, remains almost exclusively qualitative. Our research thus differs from previous works in its mixed-method approach that provides a template for assessing the quality of patronage in an administrative region (through the systematic coding of competition between patrons) that can be integrated with statistical modelling. Lastly, our research also contributes to the voluminous literature on CDD structures. To our knowledge, CDD structures’ impact on corruption has not yet been investigated by methodologically robust methods. Our results suggest that these structures can mitigate the negative impact of corruption on governance outcomes, in particular if vertically linked to higher level councils which gives these structures the ability to raise issues and citizen grievances with the state administration. Once again, our approach – the (cross-verified) self-reported functionality and connectedness of local councils to higher level structures – offers a template that can be used for future research to assess the exact mechanism through which CDD structures deliver outcomes related to governance provision and mitigate the impact of corruption. The probably most notable success in public respect is our participation in the reform process of Afghanistan’s sub-national governance policy. Our analysis of the governance related benefits of the multilayered structure of development councils reportedly significantly contributed to the preservation of these in the form of the Afghan Government’s new Citizen Charter Programme.
Projektbezogene Publikationen (Auswahl)
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„Taming the Unruly. The Integration of informal Northern Afghan Militias into the Afghan Local Police.“ Sicherheit und Frieden, 2015: 218-224
Gosztonyi, Kristóf, Jan Koehler, und Basir Feda
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„The Future of District and Village Representation.“ In Subnational Governance in Afghanistan, von Aarya Nijad, Kristóf Gosztonyi, Basir Feda, & Jan Koehler, 18-49. Kabul: Governance Forum Afghanistan / AREU, 2016
Gosztonyi, Kristóf, Basir Feda, und Jan Koehler
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“Militias: a curse or a cure: A study on factors constraining militia behaviour in North-East Afghanistan.” Berghof Working Paper, 2018
Feda, Basir, Kristóf Gosztonyi, und Jan Koehler
