International donor organizations and host-country professionals alike are increasingly relying on the public-private partnership experience as a major tool in the fight against corruption in transition countries. USAID recently authored a draft anti-corruption strategy, for example, where the importance of 'watchdog' and monitoring organizations is clearly underscored. Yet much of that emphasis relies on two fairly untested assumptions: first, that the positive experience of comparatively few organizations, such as Bulgaria's Coalition 2000, can be easily duplicated in other transition states; second, that such partnerships can maintain their professional integrity over time, despite some very critical challenges. Perhaps it is worth exploring the validity of those two assumptions more at this conference.

Before answering this question, it is useful to take a step back and examine the experience of other public-private partnerships across several different sectors and regions. USAID's Implementing Policy Change project, a wide-ranging program undertaken by the Global Bureau's Center for Democracy and Governance over several years, and implemented by Management Systems International, has compiled a recent summary of those activities. It is relatively broad list, and uncovering institutional similarities across partnerships that could help current anti-corruption practitioners in transition states is difficult.

By definition, public-private partnerships are consensual, rather than adversarial bodies. They function most effectively on a level playing field within a relatively non-confrontational environment. Mutual trust- a rare element in the development history of most countries, the West included- is perhaps the most important element defining their existence. The USAID study notes that public-private partnerships may help foster such conditions, but without some kind of environment where all three elements were already present beforehand, it probably could not become established in the first place. It also notes that there is much less publicly available data on the policy and regulatory effectiveness of such networks and partnerships than on their operational activities.

Of the approximately ten partnerships listed in the study, three focused on corruption specifically. They include (a) Bulgaria's Coalition 2000; (b) Ukraine's municipal-level 'integrity' partnerships in Donetsk, Kyiv and L'viv; and (c) new policies regarding livestock use in the African Sahel. The other projects touched on broader economic issues: transport and communications policy in southern Africa (a huge project involving regional treaties among 11 countries across 7 sectors); private enterprise development in Guinea/Bissau; consultative mechanisms used in Mexico, Ghana and Malaysia to foster national consensus on economic reform; similar national economic fora in Uganda, Ghana and South Africa; and finally negotiated rule-making procedures to promote acceptance of business regulatory reform widely used in the United States, Japan and western Europe.

Looking at this extensive and varied list, it is difficult to make generalizations about traits common to all. In the sole western example cited- rule-making partnerships- the private sector plays an inordinately important role, far more than has been the case with the three anti-corruption partnerships mentioned. Indeed, most of the emerging anti-corruption partnerships in former communist countries have been initiated by NGOs with varying degrees of municipal or national-level public sector involvement, but fairly low levels of private sector involvement. This is in keeping with political and social traditions in Eastern Europe, where agents for change historically came from the intelligentsia and a weakly developed civil society (sometimes with or without the support of established political elites) but rarely, if ever, from the private sector. The playing field for transition partnerships thus looks very different from that in the "West. Private sector weakness, together with the need for political elites, regardless of ideology, to finance new power bases and expand patronage networks, creates powerful temptations to co-opt, rather than collaborate with, the NGO community. The danger that governments will then seek to use such partnerships for their own political purposes is thus very real.

This raises an important question for these new partnerships, one that the Western experience may not be able to answer sufficiently. What price does a newly emergent NGO pay, in terms of its own integrity, to get a seat at the table of power? This is not a theoretical question alone. As Coalition 2000 has noted, even within Bulgaria, probably one of the less corrupt Balkan states, longer-term political tendencies have not emphasized public-private co-operation in favor of integrity, but a more sinister public-private convergence in ways deeply reminiscent of the communist-era party-state fusion that finally did not prove either politically or economically viable. Without a doubt, similar tendencies are at work in other countries throughout the region, from Romania to Russia.

This challenge may well become the most important one facing new anti-corruption public-private partnerships as they search for ways to maintain their integrity. It underscores the importance of developing real codes of ethical and professional conduct, not just for government, but for the entities ostensibly fighting corruption. Across the region, there is no lack of public anger at corruption, or even in the willingness of fledgling NGOs to tackle the issue, but equal degrees of professionalism and established standards of conduct for corruption-fighters has been lagging. This is very much in keeping with a development history that has only just begun to define conflict of interest, whether legally or in practice. But it may become one of the most important variables in determining whether such partnerships can maintain their independence and integrity in the face of increasing political and economic pressures in the years to come.

Part of integrity, of course, is not simply about avoiding the appearance of impropriety, but about locating genuine comparative advantage. The only thing which might damage the reputation of a fledgling partnership more than co-optation is involvement in a sector it lacks either credibility or expertise in. Coalition 2000's ability to foster dialogue on the activities of Bulgaria's customs and police agencies is possible only because of the reputation it has built for itself over several years in promoting integrity in other, less controversial sectors. For a newer coalition, jumping into law enforcement issues, to cite one example, may not only be constitute a poor use of scarce monitoring and intellectual resources, but might actually damage its reputation if it lacks sufficient public credibility to begin with. Other areas, such as procurement and budget reform, where clearly defined private and 'third' sector roles exist, are far more appropriate starting points for fostering public oversight mechanisms.

Beyond this lies a larger question seldom raised, at least by donor organizations contemplating funding of such activities across the region. Can the experience of one country, such as Bulgaria, be successfully replicated in diverse places such as Macedonia, Albania, or even Kazakhstan? Are there really such things as trans-border examples, or do all partnerships, in some sense, have to re-create their own conditions each time from scratch? Speaking as a donor organization, I would like to believe that the answer is yes. Indeed, the negotiated rule-making procedures mentioned earlier were first pioneered in the U.S. but later widely exported to France, Netherlands, Japan and Germany, and today form an integral part of all modern economies. But whether such practices can be successfully exported from one transition country to another is still open to question and research. We should not simply assert, Alice in Wonderland-like, that when a pawn reaches the eighth square, it automatically becomes a Queen. There are simply too many examples to the contrary from all over the world. Societies frequently adhere to their own path, however disastrous, rather than learn lessons from their neighbors.

None of this should be interpreted as saying that because the experience of public-private partnerships as successful agents for policy change has been limited, or is made more difficult because of private sector weakness in the transition states, we shouldn't support them. And it would be unrealistic and unfair in the extreme to demand that these partnerships look exactly like their western counterparts. But it does require us to acknowledge- in a straightforward manner- some of the real threats anti-corruption partnerships in transition states now face. Of all of these, I believe the danger that they will all too easily become co-opted by and dependent on political elites, and increasingly accommodate, rather than challenge, bad or corrupt economic policies, is perhaps the greatest. We can see this playing out today, not in Bulgaria, but in Japan. There, the government and the private sector- particularly the banking sector- are engaged in a kind of collusive public-private partnership that encourages banks to continue issuing bad credit to companies without fear of reprisal. Designed to foster business, this sort of anti-integrity 'partnership' paradoxically ends up fostering both public sector corruption and private sector mismanagement, and transition states would do well to heed its negative example.

I seem to be saying two contradictory things, I realize. First, a level playing field and high degrees of institutional (and perhaps interpersonal) trust seem to be necessary for public-private partnerships to succeed. But on the other, trust can very easily turn into collusion, especially without standards of professional conduct and strategic direction. Personally, I believe the danger of the latter for transition states is greater than the former. Because of that, it seems that some kind of adversarial relationship between anti-corruption coalitions and government is absolutely essential for policy change. Otherwise the incentive for governments to depart from corrupt practices simply does not exist.

Aside from elaborating specific problems facing public-private partnerships, as a donor representative I am often asked how western societies manage to "solve" their corruption problems. Sometimes the question is more subtle: how did the West manage to pass through its 'robber baron' phase of capitalism and keep its political institutions intact? The inherent assumption is that the West faces far fewer developmental challenges in this area.

First, I want to make it clear that I do not believe that western societies are any more moral than their eastern counterparts; in fact, they may be less so, as paradoxical as that may sound. But the West undoubtedly faces fewer developmental challenges in this area. The main difference is that in the West is that the price of corruption is much higher and its marginal utility to the corrupted person much lower than in the East. As the former mayor of La Paz, Bolivia once remarked, corruption is not a crime of passion, but of calculation. If you systematically raise the price and decrease the benefit, people will simply behave differently. That is a highly economistic view of corruption, but I believe it is well-merited. I want to assure my transition state colleagues that if the price of corruption were as low in the West as in the East, we would see just as many scoundrels. All people everywhere will probably behave immorally if given half a chance. If this is true, and I believe it is, then the trick is to give them less and less of a chance over time. This is not to disparage the role of ethics training; indeed, I believe it is a critical component of economic measures, but to acknowledge the importance of getting the right incentives in place.

Second, even with some very strong institutional safeguards, many westerners, not just Americans, increasingly believe that their own public institutions today are largely bought and paid for by special interest groups. Thus, campaign finance reform for political leaders and parties is an issue being debated today, not only in the United States Senate, but across all of Europe, which is no less plagued by its own type of scandals involving illicit political party financing. Without saying this belief is true or false, it certainly exists, and should be a caution to those who look too closely to the West to replicate models of behavior. I believe there is much western societies can help transition states with, but the entire question of political financing is an issue clearly western societies have not solved very well, and Western guidance there may not be of much assistance.

Third, what seems to have played one of the strongest roles in fostering integrity over time has been the presence of a strong, viable, professional political opposition. Municipal corruption in places like Chicago and New York was only chipped away over time because the political machines that ran these cities eventually lost their power, or found it gradually taken from them through the ballot box. So although it is not saying anything new, democracy is still critical to integrity, especially at the local level.

Fourth, economic growth really matters. With a growing economic pie, corrupt elites are more open to policies which regularize economic processes, or subject them to greater scrutiny and transparency. Elites always have incentives to pursue order, but they can afford to do so under positive economic conditions, without damaging their own patronage networks. But under conditions of zero or negative growth, I fear the incentive to engage in transparency is simply absent; in fact, the reverse might be true. For countries most of southeast Europe, that is clearly bad news. Nonetheless, public-private partnerships organized around corruption must remember that their goal must not only be about increasing transparency, but about increasing real economic performance- a difficult passage between Scylla and Charybdis.

In summary, the accumulated experience of public-private partnerships across sectors and regions is a mixed one, without strongly identifiable conclusions. "While transition states should be receptive to western experience, and donors should make stronger efforts to put forward their best practices, many of the issues corruption partnerships face are new ones, or ones where western experience has either been far from uniform, or unable to solve. Chief among these challenges, perhaps, is the need for new partnerships to maintain their integrity and independence in the face of new economic and political challenges. How they do this will determine, in large measure, whether our assumptions about their effectiveness are indeed warranted.