6. The Road to the New Orthodoxy

If in the 1970s anti-corruption debates in international organizations were dominated by the problem of corporations as political agents, in the 1990s the role of the state as economic agent came center-stage. The Global South lost its strategic importance with the end of the Cold War, but also much changed with the Latin American debt crisis. Yet, the UN venues dominated by developing countries, such as the UNCTAD, the G77 and the UNCTC continued to argue for regulatory activism in the developing world and that the US-sponsored issue of bribery should be understood within the broader agenda of international regulation of multinationals. When the United States re-introduced the issue of bribery at the OECD in 1989, other major competitors from the Global North seemed largely uninterested in the appeal to ban transnational bribery. This chapter traces the position of OECD member states, as well as the work of the OECD Working Group in controversy management. The chapter further discusses the anti-corruption debates at the UN after 1980, and the different take that developing nations had on the good governance agenda, which emerged in the early 1990s