Wasta – or ‘middlemanship’ – is a widespread and deeply ingrained form of favouritism in the Arab region, based on personal or family connections. It is the use of these social networks to secure advantages, services, or opportunities outside formal or merit-based procedures.

There is a key paradox in how wasta is framed. It is viewed both as a positive and negative to society, depending on who is doing the ‘viewing’, and on the specific context.

On one hand, wasta remains a form of social capital: a resource that individuals obtain through their connections and networks, demonstrating their prestige and social status. On the other hand, wasta is also widely seen as an impediment to a fair, just, and merit-based system in which individuals compete on an equal footing.

Jordanian anti-corruption laws addressing unethical use of wasta require clear, actionable definitions

This duality – with wasta condemned as corruption and defended as a cultural right – has been prominent in anti-corruption debates in Jordan. The persistence of favouritism in public administration is of increasing concern within Jordanian society and civil society groups. Despite Jordan’s strict anti-corruption laws, enforcement is inconsistent. The country appears unwilling to curb practices such as wasta because they are so widely used.

The Jordanian Integrity and Anti-Corruption Law of 2016 – the first legal statue in Jordan that mentions wasta – states that acts shall be deemed to be corruption if they involve ‘the acceptance of wasta and mahsubiyyeh [favouritism] by public administration employees, which revokes a right or validates what is void.’

Blurriness stems from the absence in current legislation of a clear definition of the acts and motivations that constitute wasta. The 2016 Act associates wasta with favouritism but gives no further detail. Without a concrete legal definition, Jordanian courts struggle to act.

Centred on the 2016 Act, two facets of wasta are hotly debated. First is the extent to which wasta should be included under the definition of what is corrupt and, second, the intersection of wasta with legitimate cultural practice.

Jordan’s Anti-Corruption Law does not highlight wasta in isolation, but only alongside its negative expression mahsubiyyeh, or ‘favouritism’. This selective association of wasta with favouritism becomes apparent when observing how wasta is interpreted by different actors across Jordanian society. Religious authorities in Jordan, for instance, distinguish between ‘good wasta’ – where an individual uses their connections to protect someone’s rights, such as expediting a process that has been unreasonably delayed due to inefficiency – and ‘bad wasta’, where an individual uses their influence to infringe upon the rights of others, such as securing employment outside of the competitive process.

This distinction highlights how wasta can be construed as either a reciprocal practice (‘middlemanship’) or administrative corruption (mahsubiyyeh) depending on the context in which it is used. In Jordan’s political space, elite tribal leaders and politicians have become adept at navigating this dual discourse, invoking wasta as a legitimate exercise of social capital and practice when it serves their interests, while simultaneously labelling wasta as form of corruption when it is counter-deployed against their interests.

How international frameworks fall short on wasta

In the context of anti-corruption guidelines and conventions, ‘favouritism’ is undefined and absent from the UN Convention against Corruption and from the OECD’s Glossary of International Criminal Standards. However, the OECD has repeatedly highlighted the need to combat wasta as part of implementing effective institutional reforms.

Some aspects related to wasta – winning favours, favouritism, and nepotism – are mentioned in OECD frameworks, but only in the context public servants and gift-giving, and only within debates around fraud, bribery, and other forms of corruption where financial rewards are sought. This excludes situations in which personal connections are exploited for non-material and non-financial rewards. This means that practices such as influence-trading through social networks – where the ‘payment’ might be a future obligation, for example, rather than money – falls outside the purview of the OECD framework.

These international anti-corruption frameworks have yet to take stock of the complexities that surround informal practices (such as wasta) that serve legitimate social functions in non-Western societies.

The policy and legal discourse around wasta shares considerable similarities with that surrounding guanxi in China, which highlights similar pitfalls. Despite being an integral feature of Chinese culture, operating as a network of friendships that comes with a moral obligation to provide reciprocal favours unconditionally, it can be often confused with its corrupt iteration, zou houmen (‘walking through the back door’), where individuals use their guanxi to obtain illegal favours such as access to goods not available to the public.

Unethical vs. corrupt: The need for a more nuanced approach to wasta’s use and misuse

People are not discouraged from the practice or principles of wasta when they see it being exploited or misused because wasta retains its social value in situations where reciprocity is needed. The same is true for other community-based practices grounded in tribal traditions. This is because wasta is itself not the issue, but rather the leakage of such practices into formal bureaucratic settings where reciprocity can be abused to gain undue advantages.

The survival of wasta in Jordan, despite the country’s stringent anti-corruption laws, implies that culture and history have a direct impact on how corruption is understood within different social and political contexts. Hence, a re-exploration of how corruption is defined within tribal settings like Jordan is necessary, and there needs to be distinction between ‘unethical use of cultural norms’ (illicit behaviour) and ‘abusing power for private gain’ (corruption). This is important because categorising deeply seated traditions like wasta alongside illegal practices such as fraud and bribery contributes to a normalisation of corruption by overgeneralising the problem.

In other words, mainstream understanding of corruption would undergo ‘semantic inflation’: the definition is stretched to cover less severe cases (where authorities expand a crime’s remit to capture behaviours they want more powers to address), ultimately diluting the severity of the term itself. Such overgeneralisation – and over-criminalisation – may lessen the legitimacy of anti-corruption laws, creating a psychological process where people find it easier to rationalise breaking them.

When culturally enshrined practices that people deem ‘reciprocal’, regardless of their abuse for personal gain, are suddenly equated in law with more severe acts such as bribery or fraud, people naturally reject the law’s legitimacy rather than abandon the practice, making legal enforcement highly counterproductive.

Reconceptualising the problem

The debate around wasta raises key questions for practitioners and policymakers. For instance, would reconceptualising certain practices as ‘unethical use of social capital’ rather than naked ‘corruption’ better address the sociocultural complexities at play?

Such a re-articulation goes beyond semantics. It carries implications for improving and contextually sensitising the design of governance reforms. Although wasta can be used to reinforce community bonds, it can equally undermine institutional fairness. This is why reformers must accomplish the complicated task of targeting specific manifestations of wasta that cause harm while also being mindful of social infrastructures that wasta may support.

This approach asks reformers to move beyond simple either/or categories and instead examine how informal practices become problematic – shifting from community-based reciprocity to exploitative mechanisms within hierarchical institutions.