The Zombies take over the OECD

Time was when I read avidly everything the OECD produced on public management…..it was so clearly-written and uplifting…..I actually delivered a paper to one of its Paris seminars in 1990 – if on urban management which was then my area of expertise….But it was practitioners who were then the mainstay of OECD operations and gave it its credibility

The World Bank, on the other hand – with its legions of consultant economists - was suspect – particularly its infamous 1997 Annual Development report The State in a Changing World. To their eternal credit, the Japanese had been warning the Bank that it, for one, did not accept the Bank’s neo-liberal view of the State - Robert Wade’s important article by New Left Review in 2001 gives some of the background to the resignation of Joseph Stiglitz, the Bank’s Chief Economist, driven out in 1999 by Larry Summers…..

The OECD seemed to have a more activist stance on the role of the state – to which my attention turned from the mid-1990s as readers know from my 1999 book In Transit – notes on good governance. The OECD’s 2005 report on Modernising Government was the first warning sign that it had perhaps left its benign role behind.

Critical books and articles confirmed our doubts – particularly The OECD and transnational governance; ed Mahon and McBride (2008); and The OECD and global public management reform; L Pal (2009)

This Canadian academic, Leslie Pal, has worked assiduously over the past decade to bring to our attention the nature and scale of the effort global organisations have made to market a concept of the modern state eg Best practices in public mant – a critical assessment; (2013) ; and The OECD and policy transfer; (2014)

Managing Change in OECD Government – an introductory framework; Huerta Melchor (OECD 2008) represents the high point of optimism – drafted as it was before the full implications of the global financial crisis had hit home. I;ve excerpted the opening couple of paras and explain why I’ve highlighted some text after the excerpts…..

Today’s world is highly competitive and demanding. Society is better informed and expects more from public and private organisations alike. Traditional public processes and institutions are less effective in satisfying people’s needs. Globalisation, the wide use of communication and information technologies, and the coming of the knowledge society, among other factors, are rapidly changing the world’s order. This has created new challenges to nation-states as people’s expectations from government have increased, job seekers are more demanding on job content, and societies call for more investment in education, health, and society but are unwilling to pay more taxes ("Modernising Government: the way forward", OECD 2005).

Personnel systems are becoming less adaptive to these new challenges. Indeed, traditional practices in public administration are the product of a different context with different priorities. Now, governments have a new role in society and are taking on new responsibilities but generally without the necessary tools to manage them effectively. Public managers are expected to improve the performance of their organisations focusing on efficiency, effectiveness, and propriety which were not the priorities 50 years ago.

Therefore, to be able to respond to a changing environment the public sector has to transform itsstructures, processes, procedures, and above all, its culture. In this new order, the management of change has been identified as a critical variable for the success or failure of a reform policy. Managing change aims at ensuring that the necessary conditions for the success of a reform initiative are met. A reform policy may fail to achieve change, may generate unintended results or face resistance from organisations and/or individuals whose interests are affected.

For that reason, policy-makers and politicians need to pay special attention to issues such as leadership, shared vision, sequencing, resources for change, and cultural values while designing and implementing a reform initiative.

I’m always suspicious when abstract entities such as “society” are credited with thoughts….it’s called “reification”; presumes uniformity of thought; and assumes away any possibility of differences of opinion let alone social dissent!! Very dangerous….

And just look at the phrase – “new order”!! And the way that “contexts” have developed priorities….I thought it was people who had priorities!

I explained some years ago why I am suspicious of manuals and “toolkits”…….And seven years on, the OECD has just issued this booklet (for aspiring EU members) Toolkit for……public admin reforms and sector strategies – guidance for SIGMA partners (OECD 2018). which reads as if it were written by a sixth former….  Apparently the EC introduced (in 2014) “a third pillar” into its enlargement policy – to complement those of “rule of law” and “economic governance” – namely public admin reform….I’m sure the army of EC consultants and their counterparts in Balkan and “neighbourhood” countries are very grateful to have such cookbooks – they save everyone the trouble of having to develop approaches which actually fit the local context……

Examples of the new “Manual”/Guidelines/Toolkit approach

The Principles of Public Administration (OECD – SIGMA 2017)

Systems approaches to public sector challenges – working with change (OECD 2017)

Quality of Public Admin – a factsheet; EC Factsheet (2016)
Quality of Public Administration – a toolkit for Practitioners (EC 2015) 

From Old Public Admin to the New Public Services – implications for public sector reform in developing countries (UNDP 2015)
Making Reform Happen (OECD 2010)

Sequentialism or gradualism? – on the transition to democracy and rule of law (2009)  - a more critical article

What are public admin scholars up to?

I don't want to offend - but this is a 16th Century Albrecht Durer sketch - which seems quite appropriate for the theme.

Strange but refreshing weather in Sofia – starts well, then in late afternoon scudding grey clouds, wind and thunder.
I’m reading at last Basic Instincts – human nature and the new economics by Peter Lunn (who has academic qualifications first in neuroscience then in economics (with a considerable spell as broadcaster in between) and whose book gives a good critique of mainstream economics and introduction to the new behavioural economics which has been developing in the past decade and which already has many books, blogs and, as of last week, a world-wide Association of 3,500 members.
In March last year I suggested that, as both mainstream economics and psychology were undergoing major challenge, it was time that the scholastic discipline of public management had this sort of overhaul The only popular book on the subject I can think of was Reinventing Government (1991) by David Osbourne and Ted Gaebler – which did not, however, attempt an overview of the topic but was rather proselytise for neo-liberalism. For a book which had such a profound effect, it’s curiously absent from google scholar and those not familiar with it will have to make do with this useful riposte to its approach.

Economics and psychology, of course, are subjects dear to the heart of everyone – and economists and psychologists figures of both power and ridicule. Poor old public administration and its experts are hardly in the same league! As I said in yesterday’s post, not only does noone listen to them – but the scholars are embarrassed to be caught even writing for a bureaucratatic or political audience. And yet the last two decades have seen ministries and governments everywhere embark on major upheavals of administrative and policy systems – the very stuff of public administration. But the role of the scholars has (unlike the 2 other disciplines) been simply to observe, calibrate and comment. No theory has been developed by scholars equivalent to the power of the "market”, "competitive equilibrium” or "the unconscious” – unless, that is, you count Weber’s "rational-legal bureaucracy” or Robert Michels "iron law of oligarchy”. Somehow Lindblom's "disjointed incrementalism" never caught on as a public phrase!
Those behind the marketising prescriptions of New Public Management (NPM) were not from the public admin stable – but rather from Public Choice Economics and from the OECD – and the role of PA scholars has been map its rise and apparent fall and (occasionally) to deflate its pretensions. At its best, this type of commentary and analysis is very useful – few have surpassed Chris Hood’s masterly dissection of NPM 20 years ago. This sets out for the first time the basic features of (and arguments for) the disparate elements which had characterised the apparently ad-hoc series of measures seen in the previous 15 years in the UK, New Zealand and Australia – and then goes on to suggest that the underlying values of NPM (what he calls the sigma value of efficiency) are simply one of three clusters of adminstrative values – the other two being concerned with rectitude (theta value) and resilience (lamda value). 
Table 2 of the paper sets this out in more detail.

The trick (as with life) is to get the appropriate balance between these three. Any attempt to favour one at the expense of the others (NPM) will lead inevitably to reaction and is therefore unstable. This emphasis on the importance of balance was the focus of a very good (but neglected) paper which Henry Mintzberg published in 2000 (which I’ve mentioned before on the blog) about the Management of Government which starts with the assertion that it was not capitalism which won in 1989 but "the balanced model” ie a system in which there was some sort of balance between the power of commerce, the state and the citizen. Patently the balance has swung too far in the intervening 20 years!

Hood elaborates on these three sets of values in the book he published at the same time with Michael Jackson - Administrative Argument (sadly out of print) - when he set aut 99 (conflicting) proverbs used in organisational change.

In 2007, Russell Ackoff, the US strategic management guru, published a more folksy variant of this proverbs approach – The F Laws of management a short version of which can be read here We desperately need this sort of approach applied to the „reformitis” which has afflicted bureaucrats and politicians in the past 20 years. A book is needed which –
• Is written in a clear and accessible way
• Sets out the history of public admin thought (already available in many academic texts)
• Sets out the thinking which has dominated practice of the past 20 years; where it has come from; and what results it has had (already well done in academia see the Pal paper on the role of the OECD I referred to a few posts back)
• Gives case studies – not of the academic sort but more fire in the belly stuff which comes, for example, from the pen of Kenneth Roy in the great crusading Emag he edits and which today tells a tale which should be shouted from the rooftops of the collusion of so many public figures with the activities of the cowboys who run privatised companies which are trying to muscle in on (and make profit from) public services.

Perhaps I should try to produce such a book?