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Free keywords:
communities, corruption, community-based institutions, forest depletion, privatization
Abstract:
I believe that recent theoretical developments on corruption from the field of social anthropology can shed light on various processes that communities confront in different areas. This paper focuses on practices related to forestry, trying to show different mechanisms by which corruption might be performed, as well as the way in which the villagers' definitions of a corrupt act relate to morality. In Romania, 50% of the forests were privatized and a huge number of community-based institutions were established in the forest areas. A dense net of forestry institutions is beginning to work in rural Romania for managing and regulating forest-related issues in a decentralized way. Parallel with this process, storytelling about illegal logging and forest depletion is becoming a routine. How is it possible to perform corruption in the context of privatization and decentralization, which are among the anticorruption panacea promoted by international development agencies? - this is a question which will be answered in the article.
