Corruption and Organizational Challenges in a world of Public-Private Partnerships

This article offers a theory of how the degree of corruption that prevails in old and new democracies responds to organizational changes in the ownership structure of major public services providers. It will offer a heuristic tool: the structural corruption approach (ece) that looks for a deeper and more complex understanding of corruption in order to overcome instrumentalist, essentialist and mechanists frameworks. Markets are today the locus of power, and beyond their "efficiency", they are also more opaque and present greater risks of abuse for citizens. The proliferation of public-private partnerships (app) has already started to break down the empirically existing divisions between the public and the private sector, therefore this article will maintain that instead of holding onto old categories to explain new phenomenon, it is time to develop renewed conceptual frameworks in order to continue the with the struggles for greater public accountability and citizen participation.