The effectiveness of accountability measures in the prevention of curruption within arm’s length public institutions in Belgium

Hybrid public-private organizations or ‘arm’s length public institutions’ in Belgium, as in many other countries, have been at the center of a number of corruption scandals in recent years. This is not surprising as such organizations (e.g., government agencies, governmental NGOs or intercommunal companies) play an important role in the delivery of public services. These novel ways of public service delivery and the shifts in accountability arrangements are expected to impact the opportunity for and the nature of corruption in these organizations: corruption risks might be higher, organizational properties might encourage deviant behavior, and accountability interventions might bring about quite the opposite of what was intended.