Decentralized Corruption or Corrupt Decentralization? Community Monitoring of Poverty-Alleviation Schemes in Eastern India RENE ´ VE ´ RON University of Guelph, Ont., Canada GLYN WILLIAMS University of Sheffield, UK STUART CORBRIDGE and MANOJ SRIVASTAVA * London School of Economics, UK Summary. — Democratic decentralization and community participation often stand at the center of an agenda of ‘‘good governance’’ that aims to reduce corruption and increase the state’s account- ability to its citizens. However, this paper suggests based on empirical studies on the Employment Assurance Scheme in rural West Bengal that the strength of upward accountability (especially to political parties) is as crucial as downward accountability to communities. When these vertical accountabilities are weak, horizontal accountability structures between local civil society and offi- cials can mutate into networks of corruption in which ‘‘community’’ actors become accomplices or primary agents. Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Key words — corruption, decentralization, participation, poverty alleviation, West Bengal, India 1. INTRODUCTION Development theory has recently paid in- creased attention to issues of accountability and transparency. Corrupt practices and sys- tems are said to undermine growth and access to public services, in addition to being morally repugnant. 1 The question of corruption, how- ever, is dealt with very differently by competing intellectual and policy-making traditions. Drawing on Anne Krueger’s early work on rent-seeking, many neoliberal economists have sought to connect landscapes of corruption to the dominance of predatory states or bureau- cratic populism. They have recommended the ‘‘rolling back’’ of the state—of the license and permit raj in the case of India—as the primary means of dealing with corruption and rent- seeking behavior. The structural adjustment programs that were implemented by the World Bank and the IMF in the 1980s and early 1990s thus remained relatively silent on accountabil- ity structures in non-market institutions. They * We would like to acknowledge the financial support of the United Kingdom Economic and Social Research Council, as well as the Department for International Development (DFID), for this research. The views pre- sented in our analysis, however, are our own and not necessarily those of DfID. Final revision accepted: November 10, 2005. World Development Vol. 34, No. 11, pp. 1922–1941, 2006 Ó 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved 0305-750X/$ - see front matter www.elsevier.com/locate/worlddev doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2005.11.024 1922