Corruption and Adherence to Rules in the Construction Sector: Reading the “Bidding Books”

ABSTRACTIn this article, I explore how anticorruption strategies affected a tender held in 2008 at the Department of Public Works in Kupang, eastern Indonesia, in ways both unexpected and unintended. I show how anticorruption programs get refracted at the local level and become unanchored from their original intention, leading to an obsession with adherence to the form of the anticorruption discourse that runs counter to its spirit and actually undermines the anticorruption initiative by providing new opportunities for corruption. Here I contribute to recent anthropological attention to both corruption and documents by looking at how traces of corrupt procedures can be found in the very documents designed to counter them. I argue that documents form a significant ethnographic point of departure from which to study the unintended effects of anticorruption programs, especially when they perform the ambiguous effect of both strengthening the anticorruption discourse and subverting it.