This piece continues my exploration of how an understanding of the causal dynamics of behaviour at sites of positive deviance in complex social systems - including systems of corruption - can be used to inform policies intended to shape the behaviours and relationships that constitute such systems and drive their dynamics (Part 1, an introduction, is **here**. Part 2, on my work with SOAS-ACE on navigating the political economy of corruption, is **here**. Part 3, on identifying entry points in transnational systems of corruption is here.)
Shortly after my conversation with Søren which I referred to in Part 3, I was excited to come across a recent piece by Dieter Zinnbauer - a long-time colleague in the anti-corruption space - on Power Positive. In this piece Dieter makes the case for re-orienting political economy analysis towards a sort of “political opportunity” analysis, to make it “more action-oriented and more useful for the change agents and transformation projects for whom political-economy analysis is usually commissioned.” (See Stefan Dercon on addressing the problem of best buys in politics for a similar argument).
Dieter’s argument and his observation that in such an approach, “points of particular interest are for example pockets of effectiveness, positive outliers, levers and nudges for change” struck a chord. So I reached out and we had an interesting conversation about our respective explorations of the political economy of positive deviance, and what might be done to encourage this, as part of political opportunity analyses. Perhaps we could identify positive deviants who are taking such an approach, seek to understand their behaviours, and take action that might encourage, amplify and extend the use of such approaches!
My conversation with Dieter reminded me of an earlier literature on “islands of integrity”, positive deviance and pockets of effectiveness. This included the stream of work by Caryn Peiffer, Heather Marquette, and Rosita Armytage, which Dieter, then with Transparency International, had helped to initiate and which involved a three-stage approach to identifying and understanding instances of positive deviance.
This “islands of integrity” work, while not without its challenges, was an innovative and inspiring approach to identifying instances where there was less corruption - bribery, specifically - than one might expect, to better understand the politics of corruption, and, ultimately, to inform more effective approaches to addressing corruption. By seeking to identify examples where there was less bribery than one might have expected, and to understand why that was, it was an attempt to explore the role that political economy dynamics, as well as other factors, played in shaping particular patterns of corruption, in order to inform more effective policies.
There are similarities and differences with the approach taken by SOAS-ACE to learn about, and leverage, instances of positive deviance, and with my emerging thinking on learning about the political economy of positive deviance. Taking on board Dieter’s caution about trying to make too much of a science out of the search for positive deviance, and instead to “retain its lightness, nimble ambition and non-mechanistic application to map a broader opportunity space, find new potential levers and assemblages that may or may not be useful for making change”, I’m excited to revisit this literature.
Further reading on islands of integrity and pockets of effectiveness
- For more details about the three-stage approach to “islands of integrity”, see searching for success: a mixed methods approach to identifying and examining positive outliers in development outcomes, by Caryn Peiffer and Rosita Armytage.
- For a write-up of case studies in Uganda and South Africa, by Heather Marquette and Caryn Peiffer, see here.
- For a helpful review of the wider literature, including the project led by Heather through the Developmental Leadership Programme, see this expert answer on the impact of ‘islands of integrity’, by Nieves Zúñiga and Marie Chene, at the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre.
- For a more recent compilation of research on pockets of effectiveness - “pockets” rather than “islands” to maintain the connection between pockets and the political context and “power domains” that they emerge from - see pockets of effectiveness: the politics of state-building and development in Africa, edited by Sam Hickey.
Next up, I explore the connections between my work on reflective relational practice - an approach to collaboratively assessing the qualities of relationships that make social systems more than the sum of their parts - and efforts to leverage learning about the political economy of positive deviance to inform engagement in complex social systems.
In the meantime, if you’ve used some sort of political economy analysis to inform actions intended to address complex social challenges, have a think about whether and how it enabled you to move beyond describing the dis-heartening dynamics of a dysfunctional system, to identifying ways in which you might - by encouraging different behaviours - contribute to effectively shifting those dynamics given the landscape of power, incentives and institutions. And/or have a look at some of the pieces, and the summaries I’ve provided, in the references to this series of posts.
First published on LinkedIn, 28 July 2025.