International Journal of Political Science and Development
 

International Journal of Political Science and Development

Vol. 3(2), pp. 85–100, February, 2015.  

DOI: 10.14662/IJPSD2015.010

ISSN: 2360-784X

Research Paper

This historical research uses the concept of boundary politics to analyze the impact of shifting economic development policies on grand administrative corruption in the East African country of Tanzania. It documents how development policies reconfigured public/private and national/transnational boundaries, thereby altering legal definitions of what constituted corruption, fostering different types of grand corruption, and changing opportunities and incentives for grand administrative corruption. After documenting how colonial legacies of racialized class formation and bureaucratic state formation created the key actors involved in grand administrative corruption, the paper explores the effect of the following policies that defined socialist and neoliberal development strategies: nationalization and privatization, regulation and deregulation, and implementation and elimination of a Leadership Code for civil servants. Boundary reconfigurations are historically situated in the broader long-term historical context of Tanzanian socialist and neoliberal economic development policies. The research also documents how the shift from an authoritarian to a liberalized political system made possible a public discussion that transformed corrupt administrative practices into public scandals, thereby fostering political contention over the boundaries created by neo-liberal development policies.

Keywords: corruption, boundary politics, socialism, neoliberalism, Africa

 

Cite This Article As: Aminzade R (2015). The Political Economy of Administrative Corruption: Boundary Politics in Post-Colonial Tanzania. Inter. J. Polit. Sci. Develop. 3(2): 85-100.

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