Transparency through Participation Project
“Corruption flourishes only in a society that tolerates it”
Website: http://www.una.org.ge/transparency/
Transparency through Participation was being implemented by the United Nations Association of Georgia in cooperation with Open Society Institute Local Governance Program. It has covered the capital Tbilisi and four regional centers -Kutaisi, Gori and Rustavi.
TTP was based on belief that the concept of civil society is evolving around the integrity and transparency of all of its components. That non-transparent practices within any sector breed corruption. That corruption is the social phenomenon and only through civil participation it can be solved. That fighting corruption/promoting transparency is the bottom-up process, which has to be initiated by the civil society institutions, carried out and promoted throughout the country.
We believe that to start the process we needed to understand the perceptions of various sectors of society. This is why we involved the representatives of the local government, media, businesspeople and NGOs in comprehensive survey through focused interviews and the questionnaires to clarify what we, the society, think about corruption and how we hope it to be curbed.
Meanwhile using the experience of other countries alongside with the results of our research the experts of the program drafted the Ethic Code for the Public Servants that would form the basis for civil check on local government.
WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE WE TRIED TO MAKE?
We approached the problem from the viewpoint of civil society, form the needs and abilities of the people that have to create an effective barrier to corrupt practices and ensure functioning of the transparent mechanism.
We trust in primary importance of citizenship participation. The long tradition of attacking the corruption only top-down, viewing it as only the phenomena that belongs to the government is, in our opinion incorrect. When we try to approach the problem in a transitional society with high indifference of the population and wide-spread sense of detachment of the society from the government going through the administrative barriers is not sufficient. The attitude towards corruption has to be changed – stripped from the partisan politics and presented to the society as illness destroying its integrity.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY AND THE NOTE ON SOCIOLOGICAL VALIDITY
The research consisted of two main parts – focused interviews and the questionnaires. Both of these activities targeted the representatives of the civil society organizations, mass-media, government agencies (central and local) and businesspeople in four cities Rustavi, Gori, Kutaisi and Tbilisi (the capital city). 32 interviews were conducted and 125 questionnaires distributed (23 in each of the regional centers and 50 in Tbilisi).
The purpose of the research part was to identify the perceptions of corruption in a narrowly selected focus-group of people who are in a position to affect the current state of affairs. The results thus provide the dissection of the focus group opinion instrumental for the planned follow-up. These results can not be considered sociologically representative although are quite valid for analytical purposes.
One of the tasks we addressed during the project was to reveal how respondents define corruption. The fact is that the word “corruption” is being frequently heard from the media reports and the speeches of government officials. Well-known definition of corruption is “using public position for the private profit”. We were interested what our respondents inferred when saying “corruption”. In their opinion corruption in Georgia expresses itself in:
- Taking bribes;
- Doing [illegal] favours;
- Conflict of interests;
- Direct or indirect use of the state resources for developing own political image (for instance, scoring political points by sponsoring youth or charity programs);
- The use of public powers to do favors to the relatives (nepotism, favoritism);
- Using international credits intended for rehabilitation of some sector for private benefit;
- Misuse of the budgetary resources;
- Illegally receiving shares in or the dividends from businesses;
- Lobbying the issue (the contract, the law, etc), that will bring high illegal profits to the Public Official;
- Ignoring the interests of the voter;
- Granting credits bypassing due procedures;
- The use of office car for private purposes;
- Being systematically late at work, not being disciplined (inefficiency);
The majority of our respondents consider that the corruption level is growing in Georgia – 55% of them hold this opinion.
The factors identified by the respondents of the research as contributing to corruption growth can be grouped in three categories. These are – historical/cultural, factors that exist on government level and those that exist on a societal level.
Historical/cultural reality of Georgia includes: transitional period – the institutional disorder of the country, traditions – close relationship with Asian culture and Soviet past.
Respondents lay primary responsibility for such a scale of corruption upon government and consider, that absence of the political will on behalf of the State/President is the main reason for existence and growth of corruption. Respondents think, that absence of the political will, on one hand, express itself in weak legislative base (ambiguous laws, imperfect tax and administrative codes) and on the other hand, poor implementation of the laws – administrative and criminal codes are not in operation whet tackling corruption, activities of Public Officials are not strictly regulated and transparent, there is no mechanism of civil control. This is the reason why the syndrome of invincibility (immunity from prosecution) exists among the Public Officials.
Serious problems arise because of the structural underdevelopment of the prosecuting and controlling anti-corruption agencies, corruption existent within them and overlapping responsibilities among them. Because of these reasons these bodies are virtually disabled as anticorruption mechanism, while the functions and possibilities of the Parliament Committees in this regard remain unclear and are limited. The low salaries of the public servants and social hardship were named as the major cause of the mentioned problems.
Respondents place certain responsibility for corruption on society too, but to a lesser extent. Respondents referring to the ‘society’ connote three entities: individual citizens, representatives of mass-media and civil society organizations. The main way of supporting corruption by the society is tolerating it. Citizens think, that nothing can be changed, he has no other way but to accept the rules of the game and pay the ‘gratitude’, go through informal relationships even if knowing that demands are legal.
The second reason according to the respondents is low standard of the society’s legal education and legal culture. Citizens do not know what rights and obligations Public Servants and citizens have. Due to these two reasons, the society remains indifferent by this also supporting corruption.
And at last, the role of mass-media is weak. The issue of corruption is a ‘hot’ topic for the media, but working seriously on it requires considerable resources, so it is not worthy for the individual journalist to go beyond the superficial allegations. Low income of the journalists makes it easy to bribe them too. See these points summarized in a chart.
It is extremely important to note that the factors to which the most respondents – 72% in total – attribute growing corruption, are either objective (historical/cultural background) or relate to the government. Placing low responsibility on society could be the sign of undervaluing the social component of corruption (tolerating corruption) and trying to avoid the responsibility for it. The chart “Factors that would help to reduce corruption” can easily demonstrate this point – respondents clearly place lower value on active public attitude.
WHY WE THINK THAT PUBLIC ATTITUDE SUPPORTS CORRUPTION?
Attitude of the citizens toward corruption is not 100% negative. Emotionally, corruption is the bad thing — “Immoral way of life;” “The form of mental degradation;” – these are the quotes from the interviews. But this emotional drive rarely expresses itself in real life. People do prefer to give a bribe if doing so would advance his/her immediate interests. Definitely corruption-free country is a public good, according to the economic theory it would be scarce. But there are certain other points that show that it would be virtually impossible to break the vicious circle of corruption if the Georgian society won’t change its attitude.
As it became obvious from the interviews bribes are mostly given to the public servants not to violate the law, but to follow it. If the person asks the public servant to violate the law, he/she certainly is not interested in official following the law. Therefore this maybe is not the case when we can ask of the citizen to emerge as an anti-corruption hero. But when the individual is ready to give the bribe for actually following the law, he/she tolerates the corruption, receives the ‘rules of the game’ without a protest.
Why does it happen so? As a rule, the individual makes choices according to the own system of values and gives primary consideration to the value that is higher on a hierarchy. Action pattern of the Georgian citizen suggests that the principle of justice/rule-of-law is not the higher value. In every specific situation there exists an a priori assumption that the time and energy necessary to uphold the principles of the rule-of-law would not be paid off.
Therefore accomplishing the narrow task of receiving the service/document/permission is more important and every means – including bribe – are acceptable for reaching it quickly and efficiently.
Several charts present the scheme of expectations from the local governance (LG) public servant. Aside from describing the public perception of these bodies, the results may be interpreted in a way that the person approaching the local governance body is ready to give the bribe/use corrupt practices.
Brief conclusion – even the most rigorous government rhetoric and action aimed at reducing corruption would be inefficient or marginal in each citizen would not be interested in accomplishing this task.
Certainly the political will of the government to tackle corruption is important. But in our opinion it is also important to break the vicious circle of corruption and have the society as a major supporting force.
What can be done specifically? First of all the government measures aimed at reducing corruption must include the mechanism that foresees civil control function. The notion of Transparency is not less if not more important that the notion of anti-corruption.
With a traditional anti-corruption framework we are once again stipulating the old soviet perception that fighting corruption means at best several high-profile resignations and at worst scoring political points or sidelining political opponents.
The matter of trust (of the citizens in government and more importantly of the citizens in ability to change something) based on a principle of transparency – is paramount and has to be primarily addressed.
From the government side it can express itself in stipulating the Ethic Code for the Public Servants (see our draft) and guarding it with active civil participation
The civil society organizations on their side must create the possibilities for the citizens to receive credible information and the mechanism of approaching low-key, local level corruption. As it is exactly this level where the most of the people form their opinion and expectations.
As a conclusion we can accent that the issue of corruption emerges in Georgia during the stage when the society tries to define itself as a state, when the citizenship culture is lacking.
Therefore we can not approach corruption without viewing the bigger picture of democratization.