The Handbook on the Geographies of Corruption offers a comprehensive overview of how corruption varies across the globe. It explores the immense range of corruption among countries, and how this reflects levels of wealth, the centralization of power, colonial legacies, and different national cultures. Barney Warf presents an original and interdisciplinary collection of chapters from established researchers and leading academics that examine corruption from a spatial perspective.

This book provides a fresh and extensive discussion of corruption issues in natural resources sectors. Reflecting on recent debates in corruption research and revisiting resource curse challenges in light of political ecology approaches, this volume provides a series of nuanced and policy-relevant case studies analyzing patterns of corruption around natural resources and options to reach anti-corruption goals. The potential for new variations of the resource curse in the forest and urban land sectors and the effectiveness of anti-corruption policies in resource sectors are considered in depth. Corruption in oil, gas, mining, fisheries, biofuel, wildlife, forestry and urban land are all covered, and potential solutions discussed.

Analysing political corruption as a distinct but separate entity from bureaucratic corruption, this timely book separates these two very different social phenomena in a way that is often overlooked in contemporary studies. Chapters argue that political corruption includes two basic, critical and related processes: extractive and power-preserving corruption.

First published 1997, this volume examines the way in which political corruption remains neglected as a matter of scholarly enquiry and research. There is still a powerful and traditional taboo which is quite out of the step with the topic’s real world significance and the increasing attention it receives from serious sections of the media. The book aims by systematic exposition and case study to break down that taboo and to demonstrate the topic’s importance within a framework provided by the discipline of geography. The novelty of the book is then that it considers a formerly unconsidered factor - corruption - as part of the world’s geography, as both part of the geographical context in which human activity takes place and as a spatially variable condition explicable at least in part in terms of other geographies. The conclusion is that much geographical scholarship ignores this factor at the risk of its credibility.

This book makes political corruption an object of public ethics by demonstrating how it is an internal enemy--a Trojan horse--of public institutions. To understand political corruption, Emanuela Ceva and Maria Paola Ferretti argue, we must adopt an internal point of view and look at how officeholders' interrelated conduct may fail the functioning of their institution because of their unaccountable use of their office's powers. Even well-designed institutions may bederailed if the officeholders fail to uphold by their conduct a public ethics of office accountability. Political corruption is one such failure, and it is wrong even when its negative consequences are unclear or debatable. To correct this failure, the book calls on officeholders to oppose politicalcorruption from the inside by engaging in practices of mutual answerability.

This monograph explores the nature of corruption around the world from a geographic perspective. It focuses on historical context and cultural factors. Readers will learn that though corruption is pervasive, geography greatly shapes its character. This book will offer a better understanding of the level of corrupt activity in any given country. The book analyzes an array of countries and regions. Coverage ranges from democratic societies, where corruption is low due to high rates of literacy and a free press, to the most corrupt places, where centralized power structures and lack of a free media allow corruption to unfold unimpeded. Anti-corruption campaigns and their effectiveness are also reflected upon. In addition to data from Transparency International, the text examines relevant political events. In each case, the analysis focuses on the major actors and institutions involved; the cultural norms that often regard corruption as a normal part of doing business; and the attempts by foreign and domestic actors to minimize corruption. This book will help readers better understand the causes and consequences of corruption, as well as its type and severity varies widely across the planet. It will appeal to students, researchers, policy makers, and interested general readers.