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.