Malaysia’s Approach to Fighting Corruption

Malaysia’s Approach to Fighting Corruption - Summary from the World Bank Report: Enhancing Government Effectiveness and Transparency: The Fight Against Corruption.

Malaysia’s case study highlights both the opportunities and challenges of building and sustaining an effective anti-corruption drive over time. Despite having a rich history of public administration since independence and drawing on international best practices, Malaysia continued to fair badly in global perception surveys on corruption. Indeed, many of the institutions that were set up to detect and sanction corruption became gradually compromised with the increasing concentration of political power. Only when the magnitude and scale of corruption in the 1MDB sovereign wealth fund became widely known to civil society and the global media, did citizens become so outraged that they voted out the political party that had been in power for over 60 years. The new government—a loosely formed coalition of opposition parties led by a former Prime Minster— stressed the “rule of law” and took upon itself to revitalize the institutions that were put in place to fight corruption and to re-establish limits on the power of the Prime Minister.

Yet, without the parliamentary majority needed to make changes in the Constitution, the scale of changes was necessarily limited. The actions taken by the Pakatan Harapan (PH) government during its two years in office boosted Malaysia’s ratings in global surveys of corruption perceptions. With the collapse of the PH government in March 2020, there is uncertainty whether the anti-corruption reform momentum will be sustained.