Session Name: Three New Ethnographies of Governance, Borders, Ethics, and Care
1 - Ethics or the Right Thing: Corruption and Care in the Age of Good Governance
Thursday, August 1, 2024
14:00 – 15:45 (GMT+7)
Presentation Abstract Book Summary: Ethics or the Right Thing: Corruption and Care in the Age of Good Governance (HAU/University of Chicago Press, 2022) offers a sympathetic examination of the effects of anti-corruption efforts on civil service corruption in eastern Indonesian bureaucracy. Attending to the aftermath of tumultuous administrative transformations in the post-Suharto reformasi period, it describes the rise and fall of Good Governance ideology – in which anti-corruption figures prominently – as an internationally supported trajectory for Indonesian moral state reformation. After a hopeful start it became increasingly clear that the push for anti-corruption did not make Indonesia less corrupt. If anything, Good Governance initiatives seemed to have made governance worse, leaving observers to wonder how to make sense of this: if anti-corruption efforts did not decrease corruption, what effects did they have? This book entered these questions through a close examination of civil servants’ responses to the anti-corruption efforts that formed a pivotal part of the general push towards a particular vision of the governmental good. Combining ethnographic fieldwork in the city of Kupang with an acute historical sensibility, Sylvia Tidey shows how good governance initiatives paradoxically perpetuate civil service corruption while also facilitating the emergence of new forms of it. Analyzing the contradictory effects of the contemporary surge in global ethics at the intersection of anti-corruption, ethics, and governance, the book offers an ethnographically grounded investigation into what the good in governance can look like outside of the dominant, contemporary configurations of ethical globalization.
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