Building anti-corruption agency collaboration and reputation: Hanging together or separately hanged

The implementation of preventive anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) has been a significant public administration regulatory trend of the last two decades. This article endeavors to better understand how preventive ACAs build inter-agency collaboration and legitimacy. Rather than analyzing ACAs in isolation, this article proposes a novel understanding of autonomy-building by accounting for the underlying reputational dimension of their broader collaborative environment: ACAs need to strike a delicate equilibrium between defending their organizational uniqueness and effectively collaborating to tackle the complexity of corruption. To achieve this, the article employs a mixed-methods multiple case study of four preventive ACAs in Quebec (Canada) over the last decade.