All fall down

Think-tanks enjoy a mixed reputation – originating in the USA where, for the most part, they have become little more than lobbyists for big money and being increasingly seen in the UK as part of an unrepresentative social elite which exercises too much influence over current policy debates and supplies too many of the country’s politicians. Far from bridging the gap between academia and government, they are often seen in the UK as undermining democracy. A good (and more objective) paper on the patterns and traditions in various countries was recently published as part of an exchange with China.

For those, however, like myself in the international consultancy business, British think-tanks and their reports have been a god-send in the past decade or so. Well-written and comprehensive in their analyses and data (increasingly comparative), they have allowed us to pontificate with authority in places such as Baku, Bishkek, Sofia and Tashkent about the latest experiences with improving public management. Academic texts are so boring and out-of-date compared with the endless flow of pamphlets from the Think-Tanks.  

Look for example at this 2007 report on Innovations in Government – an international perspective on civil service reform produced by the Institute for Public Policy Research – a centrist British think tank. Or this 2009 review of the state of the British Civil Service produced by the independent British Institute for Government which also recently published a fascinating case-study of the failure of the UK’s Centre for Management and Policy Studies 1999-2005 which had been (for about 20 years) the Civil Service College and which transmogrified after 2005 into the National School of Government – before itself being abolished this year. The failure of the shortly-lived CMPS is attributable , in the report, to –

• confusion about the main role of the Centre – policy or management focus
• inappropriate (academic) leadership
• loss of Prime Ministerial interest
• the number of other parallel initiatives

British government has, of course, become notorious for its non-stop programmatic,policy and institutional changes. New Labour launched a blitzkrieg on the administrative machine with its Modernising Government programmeof 1999 – an official output of which you can find here. 

Right now I’m not sure where you can find the coolest assessment of the lessons from a decade’s frenetic energy of targets, increased choice, organisational and personnel change. 

But one thing is clear – political discontent with civil service performance is as great as it ever was – and in June the UK government announced its reform plan for the civil service accompanied by a powerpoint presentation. A useful independent website on the British Civil Service has provided a useful summary. The plan was the subject of a fairly positive Institute of Government assessment. 

And this week the Government has also announced a short study into lessons from other civil service systems

But the wider public is not so impressed.

European Failure - of knowledge management

I want to return to a theme which I have mentioned several times on the blog – the apparent absence in English-language texts (whether books, journals or blogs) of analysis of the many positive models of socio-economic practice which can be found in European countries such as France, Germany, Netherlands and Scandinavia. There are many academic texts on the history and politics of these countries – and many academic journals devoted to their literary or political aspects. But they are all academic in tone and style and highly specialised – although I seem to recollect from the 1990s a few academic journals which had more open content and style eg West European Politics; Journal of Democracy; Governance – an international journal of policy, administration and institutions; and Government and Opposition. However a quick look at the titles of their current issues suggests that they have, in the meantime, become very specialised and recondite.
Where, therefore, do you now turn if you want to learn on a regular basis (and in clear analytical text) either about success stories of, for example, organisational change or social policy in these countries or, even more interestingly, about how exactly that success was achieved ?

Few books are written about such matters written, at any rate, in a style calculated to appeal to the average activist or journalist. The book market caters for universities (a large niche market) - or for the general public. University course are specialised - so we get a lot of books and journals on public management reform - but almost nothing on comparative policy outputs (although a fair amount on the process of comparative policy-making - but very badly written). My fairly simple question and focus falls in the cracks and therefore gets no coverage. A good example of market-failure!
Eurozine is a rare website which does bring articles by thinkers of all European nations together in one place – sometimes under a thematic umbrella - and has received several honourable mentions on this blog. But the papers don’t deal with policy mechanics – but operate at a more rarified level of philosophical discourse.

Of course one of the roles played by many Think Tanks is to bring appropriate foreign experience to the notice of opinion-makers in their countries – but this is generally done in a partial and superficial way since most Think Tanks these days are associated with a political party and have an axe to grind. Experience is selected to fit an agenda – and the positive aspects are stressed.eg the one on Free Schools which came out in 2009. Those interested in the role of Think Tanks (and how they have become politicised) could usefully read the paper Scholars, Dollars and Policy Advice by James McGann (2004) the doyen of the field on the American side; Think Tanks in policy-making - do they matter ? from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (September 2011) which is a good and up-to-date European perspective; and Recycling Bins, Garbage Cans or Think Tanks ? Three Myths about policy analysis institutes by Diane Stone (2007) who is the European doyenne of the field.

Then there are, of course, the EC and OECD networks and exchanges which do go into depth on the whole range of concerns of governments – whether the policies and systems of health and education; systems of public management ; or « wicked » problems such as social exclusion. But the extensive results of their work are not easily available – OECD puts most of theirs behind a paywall and few of the EC network outputs are placed in the public domain.

It is here that the mainstream media fail us. Journalists can access the OECD material free-of-charge and specialist journalists equally would have no problems obtaining copies of the EC material.

If I am right about this gap (and I appeal to my readers to correct me), this is a devastating comment on the « European project ». Hundreds (if not thousands) of millions of euros have been spent on university and cultural exchanges, communications and research – and what is there which ca answer my basic need ??

Thinking

A cold but gloriously sunny morning here in Sofia (although eastern Bulgaria being lashed with rain and snow) – Vitosha’s 2 peaks capped in light snow making a marvellous backcloth for cycling on the cycle lanes, up Vitosha Boulevard to the old market area in the search for a tea set for entertaining. Then on to Sofia Art Gallery to buy the best book I know about Bulgarian painters in a European language (Die Bulgarischen Kuenstler und Muenchen - whose CD I had bought earlier but was not quite legible). Its focus is the influence of Munich’s Art Academy on Bulgarian painting in the century from the 1850s and it gives more then 40 painters a few pages each– many of them unknown to me. The route took us to the University area – so I decided to have another look at the Ilya Beshkov sketches I had been shown at a favourite gallery there – and bought three (including the one shown above which would have been very suitable for yesterday's post).

A friend recently asked for my recommendations for think-tanks which covered public management issues. My immediate thought was Demos and the Institute for Government which won last year’s UK Prospect Magazine’s Think Tank of the Year award) and which published in 2009 an important paper assessing how the British civil service compared globally. Despite this comparative element, however, most of their papers are, by definition, too tied to the current British (English) political agenda – which made me wonder about European Think Tanks.
The Wikipedia entry on the subject is actually quite useful – with good historical comment and a lot of links But a real find was a special website - On Think Tanks - which tries to pick up on ongoing themes. There are apparently now more than 6,000 such bodies in the world – a far cry from my early days when only the Rand Corporation and The Brookings Institute existed (we never thought of the Fabian Society in those terms). They seem to divide into four types –
• those which are strongly linked with academia and focus mainly on economic issues
• those which are explicitly sympathetic to a political party or set of political principles (the Fabian Society; the French political clubs)
• those funded (generally on a clandestine basis) by commercial interests to make the world a safer place for their pursuit of profits – particularly the extractive and drug industries. The campaigning journalist George Monbiot wrote recently about this. And the Mother Jones journal gave some useful examples of the link between funding sources and results. One website simply tracks the right-wing thinks tanks set up quite explicitly to protect the professedly "free market” agenda.
More entrepreneurial ones (a lot of which are found in central and east Europe) which offer bright ideas from a position of apparent independence

Of course, all Think Tanks profess their independence and rigour of methodologies but it is interesting that the European Commission is trying to insist that all Think Tanks register in the Commission’s Official Register of Lobbyists (albeit in a special section)
And, inevitably, we now have global league tables of Think Tanks – drawn up apparently with a highly arbitrary methodology
Diane Stone is a good analyst on the subject (not to be confused with Deborah Stone who wrote the best book on policy analysis – Policy Paradox!) who co-authored in 2004 what looks to be a great book on the global ThinkTank phenomenon Think Tank Traditions – policy research and the politics of ideas which has chapters on the various key countries. And you can read here a list of the German ones
Finally, a couple of speculative pieces on how Think Tanks need to smarten up their act – one which focuses on methodology; the other on technology

Neo-liberalism hardens

Tuesday I quoted from a 2009 pamphlet about the continuing strength of neo-liberalism in British ruling circles and suggested that the authors needed to do a bit more work on how this insidious virus might be defeated. Coincidentally one of the authors – Gerry Hassan – has returned to the theme. He reveals the details of a very interesting recent conference which brought business leaders together with key members of the Cabinet to look at priorities for government. Its summary of recommendations has been given to the Cabinet and makes for fascinating reading. The tenor of the discussions is rather frightening – with the target very much being those on low incomes and, as Hassan says, no signs of humility about the role of the private sector in creating the crisis which confronts the world! His article also puts the scale of the British public spending cuts in perspective - several times greater than the radical cuts of the Swedes and canadians some years back (which are apprently serving as models)For the meat of the argument see -
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/gerry-hassan/coming-british-revolution
Apart from Hassan’s piece, the conference seems to have gone unnoticed So all credit to him for giving it the profile it warrants – but I’m still waiting for some more coherent prescriptions from him about an alternative path. Another article on The Open Democracy site offers, however, a useful framework for such a discussion. It suggests that the critiques of neo-liberalism can perhaps be divided into 4 schools - left communitarianism, left republicanism, centre republicanism and right communitarianism. For the details see -
http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/stuart-white/where-does-coalition-stand-on-new-ideological-map
The article drew my attention to another 2009 pamphlet one of whose authors is now an adviser to the Lib-Dem Deputy Prime Minister and which is apparently now required reading amongst British civil servants.
http://www.demos.co.uk/publications/theliberalrepublic
A quick skim leaves me deeply dissatisfied – it’s more a clever undergraduate essay than a serious political pamphlet and gives me the feeling that we are now seeing a new generation of think-tankers take over in England who will inflict the same clever nonsense on the dumb politicians which people such as Geoff Mulgan and Peri 6 did 15 years or so ago. That’s a bit too simplistic - I enjoyed their writing – but it did lead, for example, to the rather arrogant strategy papers of the UK Cabinet Unit after 1997 (when Mulgan was the Head) which carried the assumption that the world was a new place with no lessons to be learned from the past – and certainly nothing good about it. Although China and Britain are very similar in their neo-liberalism, they are poles apart on the issue of tradition and novelty and how new policies are to be justified. In China you have to fight for the new – in Britain “new” is elevated to a religious value. After “New Labour”, quickly came “New politics”. What next? “New man”?
Having said that, I do need to get up to speed with these new people. I have just ordered the book by one of the more intriguing of the new breed – Phillip Blond – whose Red Tory has brought praise from even Jon Cruddas the Labour MP considered to be the leader of the left in parliament. A review of the book gives an indiaction of the challenge it represents!
http://www.opendemocracy.net/michael-merrick/red-tory-liberalism-and-loss-of-liberty