Abstract

This article explores the plausibility of some intuitions and counter intuitions about the anti-corruption efforts of MDBs and international organizations leveraging the power of the private sector. Regulation of a sizable percentage of global private sector actors now falls into a new area of international governance with innovative institutions, standards, and programs. We wrestle with the role and value of private sector partnerships and available informal and formal social controls. Crafting proportional informal controls (e.g., monitoring, evaluations, and sanctions) and proper incentives to cooperative games across networks are the lynchpins of successful collective action programs. Ambivalence with informal social controls or effective incentives, we argue, risks far too much deference to private sector interests