Today’s guest post is from Beauty Emefa Narteh, the Executive Secretary at the Ghana Anti-Corruption Coalition, and Leslie Tsai, General Counsel at the Chandler Foundation and lead for the organization’s efforts to support good governance, increased transparency and accountability, and robust international and national integrity ecosystems

 IMF bailouts of countries in financial distress often come with unpopular strings attached—strict conditionalities related to fiscal policy that often force countries to make deep spending cuts and to increase taxes on food, healthcare, and fuel. These painful austerity measures have often proved counterproductive, plunging countries into recession and sparking anti-government riots and protests.

But while IMF conditionalities have gotten a deservedly bad reputation, a relatively new category of IMF conditionalities, focused on governance reforms, presents the 3.3 billion people living in countries swept up in the current global debt crisis with something precious: hope and the possibility of a true pathway to financial stability. The IMF’s expanded the use of governance-related conditions is a based on a belated acknowledgement of a point that civil society leaders and anticorruption champions around the world have long emphasized: that governance issues are as macroeconomically critical as fiscal policy, and that when corruption bloats and distorts government spending, a narrow focus on economic policy alone will be insufficient to pull countries out of chronic economic crisis. Notably, the IMF’s governance conditionalities are far more popular among ordinary citizens than their standard austerity measures. This is not only because corruption is widely seen as a scourge that most heavily burdens the poor, but also because anticorruption systems that protect government coffers can blunt the need for cuts to social spending over the long term.

The IMF’s governance conditionalities provide a powerful if imperfect tool for savvy civil society leaders who have long advocated for increased government accountability and stronger anticorruption systems. When governments are in discussions with the IMF about bailouts, domestic civil society groups in those countries can use this opportunity to press for much-needed progress on anticorruption. Continue reading →