Rethinking Anti-Corruption Reform in Sierra Leone: A Typology of Local Agency in Hybrid Accountability Systems

This study examines how local agency shapes the outcomes of anti-corruption reform in Sierra Leone. In this post-conflict state, formal institutions operate alongside customary authority, religious leadership, and community-based oversight. Rather than treating “local agency” as a single explanatory variable, the study develops a four-part typology that distinguishes agency as resistance, agency as adaptation, agency as capture, and agency as accountability. It uses it to explain why community involvement in anti-corruption work produces inconsistent results. Using a qualitative research design, the study draws on document analysis of 10 institutional and policy sources and semi-structured interviews with 32 participants, including civil society leaders, anti-corruption activists, customary and religious leaders, public officials, and frontline service users, across 4 regions of Sierra Leone. The findings show that petty corruption remains embedded in everyday service delivery, while political patronage networks, weak institutional oversight, and historical legacies of conflict and resource extraction sustain grand corruption. Local actors, including chiefs, religious leaders, journalists, and community monitors, play a demonstrably dual role: the same relationships that allow them to expose wrongdoing and mobilize citizens can also channel patronage and shield elites from sanction. The article argues that this ambivalence is not incidental but systematic, and that anti-corruption strategies that treat local actors as uniformly beneficial or uniformly suspect will misread the governance terrain they aim to reform. The study concludes by proposing a hybrid framework that pairs formal accountability mechanisms with mechanisms to monitor and discipline local agency itself.