Elsevier

Journal of Cleaner Production

Volume 246, 10 February 2020, 119078
Journal of Cleaner Production

Impacts of anti-corruption barriers on the efficacy of anti-corruption measures in infrastructure projects: Implications for sustainable development

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.119078Get rights and content

Abstract

This study investigates the correlational impacts of two key constructs associated with corruption in construction and infrastructure-related projects: 1) the effectiveness of extant anti-corruption measures (ACMs) in project planning, procurement and management; and 2) the barriers that hinder the effectiveness of the ACMs. Typically, the study examines the correlational impacts of within developing countries, using Ghana as its immediate context of research. A survey was conducted with 62 professionals involved in project procurement and management. Twenty-four relational iterations were established and examined among the identified constructs (i.e., four barriers and six ACM constructs), forming the study's hypotheses. The results showed that the lack of knowledge and understanding of one's right in a contractual environment and political barriers were the most critical variable and construct, respectively. The partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) results revealed that seven out of the twenty-four statistical relationships tested were significant. Primarily, the socio-political barriers' construct, as the most critical one, revealed to have strong impacts on administrative, compliance, and promotional anti-corruption measures. The findings justify why most projects in developing countries are plagued with political corruption that leads to cost and time overruns. Theoretically, this study contributes to the body of knowledge on approaches for dealing with corruption in construction and infrastructure-related projects, an unexplored topic. Practically, it can inform relevant stakeholders of projects, policymakers, and anti-corruption advocates, of the significant barriers that obstruct the effectiveness of anti-corruption measures and the means to extirpate them.

Introduction

Until recently, the incidence and proliferation of high levels of corrupt practices in infrastructure projects were attributed to the causal factors of corruption and the risk indicators or irregularities associated with a project (Le et al., 2014a, Le et al., 2014b; Zhang et al., 2016). As a result, anti-corruption measures (ACMs) were stipulated to address the variables captured under these two main constructs (Owusu et al., 2018). A longitudinal exploration of corruption-related studies revealed why some of the stipulated measures were noted to be effective and others ineffective. The first attempt to review and conduct an empirical study on the criticalities of the factors that hamper the effectiveness of ACMs was conducted by Owusu and Chan (2019). A list of factors was therefore established from the literature representing the barriers that hampered the effectiveness of the stipulated ACMs (Owusu et al., 2019a, Owusu et al., 2019b). As its main focus, the study examined the criticalities of these factors in developed and developing countries in a comparative analysis structure, to examine how critical the variables are in one context, against the other. As such, the study was limited in several ways – as acknowledged by the authors – presenting the gaps that needed to be addressed.

Some of the limitations were attributed to the generic nature of the results and how it fails to capture the actual conditions of specific contexts. Examining the variables' criticalities only, without considering correlational impacts on the effectiveness of the ACMs was another limitation. Thus, the barriers' impacts on the individual constructs of ACMs remained undetermined. Additionally, the authors emphasized the need for the empirical assessment of the barriers, presenting the need for quantitative models that elucidate barriers’ impacts. These present a serious gap, given that researchers, practitioners, and policymakers not only need to identify the critical barriers but also the extent to which these barriers can “significantly” impact the effectiveness of potential ACMs. Such knowledge is central towards a successful and effective development and application of ACMs in construction and other infrastructure-related project procurement and management (Hosseini et al., 2019).

To address these stipulated gaps, this study aims to examine the significant correlational impacts of ACM barriers on the effectiveness of ACMs. In realizing the study's aim, the following objectives are formulated: 1) conducting a thorough and systematic review of scholarly and institutional works on ACMs and the associated barriers. 2) examining the individual criticalities of the barriers and the effectiveness of ACMs; 3) investigating the causal relationships between barriers and the effectiveness of measures.

The aim, together with the three objectives, is intended to facilitate the determination of the relational impacts of the barriers on the effectiveness of potential measures. Moreover, the study is envisioned to inform the development of strategies needed to curb not only the criticalities of the barriers but also the relational impacts on the notable measurement items and constructs of ACMs. It must, however, be emphasized that the stated objectives are skewed towards construction and infrastructure-related project procurement in developing countries using Ghana as the representative scope. Thus, making it arguably the first to examine the quantitative impacts of barriers on the effectiveness of ACMs in a specific context. This study, in its entirety (that is, the constructs assessed, the hypothesis tested, and the model developed), contributes to a deepened understanding of the corruption-related studies in the construction domain. Cumulatively, research findings assist anti-corruption institutions, policymakers, and industry practitioners in developing and implementing more effective anti-corruption tools and ACMs. Thus, contributing to delivering cleaner and more sustainable infrastructure projects.

Section snippets

Corruption and infrastructure sustainability

Corruption has been defined differently across different contexts (Jain, 2001). Within the domain of construction and infrastructure-related projects, corruption may be defined as the abuse of project resources coupled with the distortion of the stages of projects’ supply chains (Owusu et al., 2018).

While the issue of corruption is identified to be a social issue, its implications affect a diverse range of domains. Morse (2006) explored the detrimental impacts of high levels of corruption on

Research methods

Following an extensive review of the literature, the study's questionnaire was developed and pilot-tested with eight experts from both the industry and academia. A survey was conducted following the pilot study, via two non-probabilistic sampling approaches, known as purposive and snowball sampling. The gathered data were pre-tested to determine their reliability and normality indicators. This constituted the cleaning process of the data. The valid responses were examined at the data analysis

Data analysis and results

This section presents the results obtained from the assessments of the expert-survey data. It presents the results on the effectiveness of the extant ACMs, the criticalities of the barriers, and the correlational results regarding the 24 hypotheses tested. While the study primarily focuses on the assessment of the barriers’ negative impacts on the ACMs, Fig. 4, Fig. 5 are presented to highlight the results regarding the effectiveness of ACMs at both the variable level and the construct level.

Discussions

First, it must be emphasized that due to the copious amount of information gathered from the results, the discussion will have a bias towards the explications of the barriers’ constructs and PLS-SEM results. The discussion will consider all the constructs from the topmost ranked barriers to the least. The analyses were conducted to identify not only the critical barriers and their associated constructs but also test the research hypotheses. While the individual barriers will be thoroughly

Conclusion

This study first explored the criticality of the barriers identified to be psychosocial, socio-political, fear, and insecurity and administrative barriers and later examined their correlational impacts on the established ACMs’ constructs. An expert survey was conducted with 62 professionals involved in the modus operandi of project procurement and management in the developing context. Different relevant techniques and tools ranging from descriptive statistics to FA and PLS-SEM were employed to

Declaration of competing interest

The authors of this paper declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

Acknowledgments

This paper is developed based on a large dataset produced in conducting an umbrella research project titled “Dynamic Evaluation of Corruption in Public Infrastructure Procurement: A Comparative Study of Emerging and Established Economies.” Several research outputs have been extracted from this project, each one with a different objective. We express our sincere gratitude to the Research Grants Council (RGC) of Hong Kong and to the Hong Kong Polytechnic University for funding this research

References (59)

  • P.A. Bowen et al.

    Corruption in the South African construction industry: a thematic analysis of verbatim comments from survey participants

    Constr. Manag. Econ.

    (2012)
  • Cambridge Dictionary

    Meaning of fear in English

    (2019)
  • A.P. Chan et al.

    Corruption forms in the construction industry: literature review

    J. Constr. Eng. Manag.

    (2017)
  • M. de Jong et al.

    Eliminating corruption in our engineering/construction industry

    Leadersh. Manag. Eng.

    (2009)
  • A. Doig et al.

    Feature review Corruption and its control in the developmental context: an analysis and selective review of the literature

    Third World Q.

    (1999)
  • A.P. Field

    Discovering Statistics Using SPSS

    (2005)
  • F. Gale

    Regulating the market in an era of globalization: global governance via the forest Stewardship Council

    (2006)
  • Global Infrastructure Anti-Corruption Center (GIACC)

    Anti-corruption programme for organisations

    (2016)
  • F.L. Greitzer et al.

    Psychosocial modeling of insider threat risk based on behavioral and word use analysis

    e Serv. J.

    (2013)
  • J.F. Hair et al.

    PLS-SEM: indeed a silver bullet

    J. Mark. Theory Pract.

    (2011)
  • J.F. Hair et al.

    Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) an emerging tool in business research

    Eur. Bus. Rev.

    (2014)
  • P. Heiser et al.

    Alterations of host defence system after sleep deprivation are followed by impaired mood and psychosocial functioning

    World J. Biol. Psychiatry

    (2001)
  • M.R. Hosseini et al.

    Distinguishing characteristics of corruption risks in Iranian construction projects: a weighted correlation network analysis

    Sci. Eng. Ethics

    (2019)
  • A.K. Jain

    Corruption: a review

    J. Econ. Surv.

    (2001)
  • C. Kenny

    Publishing construction contracts to improve efficiency and governance

    Proc. Inst. Civ. Eng.

    (2012)
  • C. Krishnan

    Combating corruption in the construction and engineering sector: the role of transparency international

    Leadersh. Manag. Eng.

    (2009)
  • Y. Le et al.

    Overview of corruption research in construction

    J. Manag. Eng.

    (2014)
  • Y. Le et al.

    Investigating the causal relationships between causes of and vulnerabilities to corruption in the Chinese public construction sector

    J. Constr. Eng. Manag.

    (2014)
  • Marriam-Webster

    Ignorantia juris neminem excusat Latin phrase

    (2018)
  • Cited by (36)

    • Do research and development and environmental knowledge spillovers facilitate meeting sustainable development goals for resource efficiency?

      2022, Resources Policy
      Citation Excerpt :

      The harmful impacts of corruption on the economy are well established (Marchini et al., 2020). Therefore, it is not surprising that corruption it also commonly stated to distort sustainable development (Owusa et al., 2020). In fact, for example the study by Leal and Marquques (2021) using data from 23 African countries has underlined that stricter regulation to reduce corruption would mitigate environmental degradation by restricting the relocation of polluting industries.

    • Management and analysis of barriers in the maritime supply chains (MSCs) of containerized freight under fuzzy environment

      2022, Research in Transportation Business and Management
      Citation Excerpt :

      Likewise, Venkatesh et al. (2017) and Garg and Kashav (2019) conducted in depth argument on the infrastructural barriers. Some of the prominent and recently performed studies talks about infrastructural barriers in the MSCs are Khan, Khan, and Haleem (2019), Al-Shboul (2017), Angelstam et al. (2017), Iacovidou and Purnell (2016), Majumdar and Sinha (2019), Govindan and Hasanagic (2018), Govindan (2018), Kashav et al. (2021) and Owusu, Chan, and Hosseini (2020). The sub-criteria of infrastructural barriers are listed in detail in Table 1.

    View all citing articles on Scopus
    View full text