Increasingly, development scholars and practitioners are reaching for exceptional examples of positive change to better understand how developmental progress occurs. These positive outlying cases are often referred to as 'positive exceptions', but also 'positive deviants' and 'pockets of effectiveness'. Studies in this literature promise to identify and examine positive developmental change occurring in otherwise poorly governed states. However, to identify success stories, such research largely relies on the reputations of cases, and, by doing so, overlooks cases that have not garnered a reputation for their developmental progress. This paper presents a novel three-stage methodology for identifying and examining positive outlier cases that does not rely solely on reputations. It therefore promises to uncover 'hidden' cases of developmental progress as well as those that have been recognized. The utility of the methodology is demonstrated through its use in uncovering two case studies in which surprising rates of bribery reduction occurred, though 2 the methodology has much broader applicability. The advantage of the methodology is validated by the fact that, in both cases identified, the reductions in bribery that occurred were previously unrecognized.

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Motivation Bribery is common in Uganda’s health sector, with an estimated one in four Ugandans who engage with the sector being asked to pay a bribe for services in 2010. Health workers in the public sector are badly paid, while significant numbers of well‐trained health workers emigrate to find better‐paid work. However, between 2010 and 2015, estimated rates of bribery halved in Ugandan health services. Purpose Why did bribery in Uganda’s health service fall so much in the 2010s? What does this mean for anticorruption research and practice? Approach and methods In addition to reviewing relevant literature and documents, in‐depth semi‐structured interviews with service providers, users and experts were conducted in Uganda’s Central, Eastern and Western provinces. Findings The establishment of the Health Monitoring Unit (HMU) in 2009 has been a major factor in reducing bribery. It used highly visible, often controversial investigations based on a principal–agent approach to anticorruption. Its approach, however, also led to negative unintended consequences, including undermining morale among frontline health providers and probably also citizens’ trust in health services. It is moreover questionable if the HMU’s approach can be sustained. Policy Implications To tackle frontline bribery effectively and sustainably, and so enhance service delivery, anticorruption interventions must consider the underlying functions and needs—such as compensating frontline staff for low wages—that bribery may help fill. Otherwise controls on corruption may result in more harm than the good they do in reducing corruption.

The paper examines why there was a reduction of almost 15% in police bribery in Limpopo province, South Africa between 2011 and 2015, compared to only a 4% reduction the country overall. Drawing on statistical analysis and in-depth qualitative fieldwork, the research shows that the reduction occurred during an unprecedented anticorruption intervention in the province that did not directly tackle police bribery. Despite this, the intervention's high visibility, along with uncertainty among the police of its mandate, was likely to have made police less willing to engage in bribery during this period. While police sector-specific characteristics (high degree of discretion, peer solidarity and contact with criminals) make fighting entrenched corruption particularly difficult, the research shows how a disruptive event can counteract these factors and how this can happen more quickly than previously anticipated. For long-term impact, however, disruption strategies likely need to be driven by strong leadership and structural changes that will continually disrupt corruption patterns.

Based on ethnographic research conducted with the wealthiest and most powerful business owners and politicians in urban Pakistan from 2013 to 2015, this article examines the particular set of epistemological and interpersonal issues that arise when studying elite actors. In politically unstable contexts like Pakistan, the relationship between the researcher and the elite reveals shifting power dynamics of class, gender, and national background, which are further complicated by the prevalence of rumor and the exceptional ability of elite informants to obscure that which they would prefer remain hidden. Specifically, this article argues that the researcher’s positionality, and the inversion of traditional power dynamics between the researcher and the researched, can ameliorate, as well as exacerbate, the challenges of undertaking participant observation with society’s most powerful.