In Praise of the Butterfly

How can I tell what I think, unless I see what I write?

EM Foster (1927)

Most serious blogs I glance at have a theme – be it British literature; Marxist Economics; paintings; Brexit; French politics; policy analysis; left politics or…Scottish mountains - which the authors stick to fairly religiously with the only relief being the occasional bit of music…(eg Boffy’s Blog; or All That’s Solid)

One of the distinctive things about this blog, however, is its “butterfly approach” to subjects…..That’s usually a derogatory term – used to indicate a shallow person who wanders from subject to subject. It’s true that I have a fixation about strange things such as democracy, government policy-making and institutions, turgid academic writing…. but – like a butterfly – I alight wherever my senses are attracted by a book cover; striking painting; a wine etiquette; a piece of music; or the ambiance of a town or encounter…..        

After all, the blog started as I knew I was phasing myself out of the job market……but conscious of the unusual variety of roles and places I’ve been lucky enough to work in.

I was first elected to political office when I was pretty young; and focused my energies respectively on community action; municipal corporate management and multiple deprivation in the 70 and 80s; and “institutional development” in ex-communist countries in the period after 1990. 

I remember, for example, going to the 2 Universities in Glasgow in the mid 70s and challenging them to produce any research which could help us - in the newly established Strathclyde Region – establish some coherent policies on deprivation…..Result? Zilch

Each of these issues now has a huge literature - but, when I came to them, it was difficult to find reading material. For example Marris and Rein's Dilemmas of Social Reform (1967) and Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals (1970) were the bibles in the early days of community action and deprivation strategies; Donald Schon's Beyond the Stable State (1971) for organisational studies; 
Linz and Stepan's Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation (1996) and Elster and Offe's Rebuilding the Ship at Sea - Institutional Design in post-communist Countries (1997) were subsequently the bibles for transitilogy.....  

I had started at an early age this rather odd habit of writing (and publishing) papers and article trying to make sense of the experience – which I have continued for coming up for half a century. 

The blog has been my channel for my thoughts about these issues – talking with other people can often box you into a corner (particularly in Gallic cultures!) but writing forces you to pose questions about what you thought you knew. That’s why I use so often the saying about the “best way to understand an issue is to write a book about it”….and why I love the EM Foster quote which starts this post      

The most interesting question is not whether this blog will continue…..It will (Inshallah!!)!

The most interesting question is whether its focus should change – and if so, in what way?

Its three aims still seem to stand – but perhaps could do with some slight “tweaks” – eg

·         I am perhaps using posts even more deliberately these days as a means of getting inspiration to help me express better my thoughts on reform and social change issues….When I click open text I have been working on for some time, my creativity tends to freeze – but when I move my mind to the blog (or a blank piece of paper) the words come together to form a new perspective……

·         The world seems confronted with new problems which apparently require new thinking…….and make obsolete writings before (say) 1990?…Because I’ve kept a good record of my wide reading since 1960, I would dispute this and have therefore become more conscious of the importance of my role in giving annotated reading lists (and, even more passionately about the need for clarity of expression!!)

·         As I move through my “autumn days” and feel the approach of winter, the “settling of final accounts” (in the spiritual sense) becomes perhaps a more dominant theme 

Last year I wrote about my mother’s little “commonplace book” which we found amongst her possessions. It’s odd that, with the onset of the new technology, the idea of a commonplace book has not become more popular….one person’s record of favourite sayings of sages over the ages…….

Perhaps they were more laconic in those days - not feeling the need we apparently do these days to embellish the core of the wisdom with a lot of explanations? My posts of 2016 were collected and put in the logical order in The Slaves’ Chorus and came to 120 pages (the following year there were double the number of pages). Of course these are “musings”….they don’t try to compress and distill the components into a basic “essence”……which, in a sense, the tables I started to use last year have started to do……Now there’s a thought!

update; an academic offers some lessons from his blogging 

http://danieldrezner.com/research/APSAblogchapter.pdf

Part VIII - All you need to know about capacity development and administrative reform in 5 easy stages

My initial feeling after yesterday’s attempt to summarise the previous week’s thoughts about training in this part of the world was one of quiet satisfaction. I felt I had made a coherent and reasonable summary – all the better for having started, I felt, with the short (and memorable?) statement about “wrong focus and theory"; "context"; and "leadership”. I had made the link not only with the capacity development literature but also with the (very different and more academic) literature which has been following administrative reform in ex-communist countries. I had given a practical example which had come to me as I was wrestling with the question of how one was supposed to make any progress in regimes I had designated, in my paper at this year’s NISPAcee Conference, “impervious regimes” (impervious, that is, to public opinion). And I ended with a word of advice to those who head the various Training Institutes for public servants in the Region – effectively “courage, mon vieux, think big and reach out” – but had also recognised how difficult such cooperation is in the Region. My next step, I felt, was to look at examples of how individuals have achieved in the face of such difficulties and write an inspiring piece around that – drawing on the burgeoning literature of social innovation.

But I hadn’t quite finished with capacity development – after all this was the basic framework which, I had argued, all interventions to improve public services in the Region should have. True, Bulgaria and Romania are exceptional in having Administrative capacity as one of the strands for their Structural Funds – but most new member states would readily agree they have a long way to go before their state bodies are operating as well as they might wish. What, I wondered, does the capacity development literature say about the process of building administrative capacity? Is it different from what the literature of public management (with which I am more familiar) has been saying?

It is at this point that alarm bells started to ring in my head. One of the important points in my NISPAcee paper was that we have a lot of different disciplines looking at the same issues from different perspectives (which is fine), with different names (eg state-building; fragile states; administrative reform; anti-corruption; capacity development; democracy assistance) and each apparently oblivious to and/or careless about the other disciplines(which is not fine). Was this perhaps simply an example of different people coming to the same conclusion using different words? Was it all verbal gymnastics? I began to think so when I stumbled across a free download Deconstructing Development Discourse – buzzwords and fuzzwords which was published in 2010 by Oxfam and which makes a nice complement to my Just Words – a sceptic’s glossary
But, as I puzzled over the two approaches, I began to see some interesting differences. Bear with me as I try to explore some of them.

Those who have been writing about capacity development for the past 2 decades (but particularly in the last 5 years since OECD got into the act) seem to be in the development field and working in NGOs, International bodies or development think tanks. They draw from (and try to contribute to) field experiences. I discovered a good history about capacity development only this morning – written as far back as 1997. Its concerns and focus seem to have been social - rather than institutional - development. Peter Morgan is the most coherent writer on the subject and has an excellent paper here on it. There is an excellent learning network for capacity development which published in January a very useful paper which spells out in details what the approach means in practice . I get the sense that it is change management for social development people. That is to say, they emphasise context and process - the HOW and say llittle about the WHAT.

Those who write about administrative reform focus, on the other hand and by definition, on state bodies rather than social groups (although the anti-corruption literature considers social groups critical); are usually from academia; draw on the classic literature of public administration, management and (to a lesser extent) public choice theory. They are (with the exception of the latter school) more voyeurs than actors. One of the top names is Chris Pollitt whose recent paper Thirty Years of Public Management reform – has there been a pattern? gives an excellent flavour of the topic.
An obvious question then is - If the key writers are voyeurs, who has been behind the explosion of adminisitrative reform of the past 30 years which Pollitt is writing about? The answer would seem to be practitioners, government units and consultancy companies – some of whom have subsequently written up good experiences as models of good practice. The key books are generally American eg the one which started it all off in 1992 - Reinventing Government (see also here for update on its influence in UK) - but also Mark Moore’s Public value. However the main proselytiser of change over the past 20 years has been the OECD Secretariat based in Paris – as Professor Leslie Pal has well described in this paper; a sequel he presented to this year’s NISPAcee Conference; and chapter three of this book. The significance of this is that there is, perhaps, underneath the technical words, an ideological agenda – shrinking the state. Certainly one writer suggests today there is.
At a practical level, the European Institute of Public Administration published an interesting overview of reform efforts recently - Taking the pulse of European Public Administration

So far, so good…..Give me time to look at these various references in more detail and come back to you on the question of the relationship between the two bodies of work. Clearly the latter body of work focuses more on the WHAT than the HOW - and is indeed as guilty as management generally of fads and fashions. At the moment the capacity development stream seems to be the more thoughtful…..

Culture cornerFor those who think I have been neglecting my cultural activities, let me assure that I have not been. On Tuesday I paid an interesting visit to the imposing edifice which houses the National Bank of Bulgaria – to see whether I could access their painting collection. I knew they had one because the Classica Gallery I had visited last week had a beautiful catalogue from the bank which had celebrated its 130 years with 130 superb reproductions from its collection of Bulgarian painters. You ascend a formidable flight of stairs, passing a guard and entering what I could only designate as an alternative cathedral – a design on a scale calculated to put you in awe of those who manage money! Ironically, there seemed to be an exhibition about the euro! I was met with some bemusement by the staff – but, after a wait, I was rewarded with a complementary copy of the catalogue but told that the paintings regretfully were not on public display.

The It’s About Time blog continues to delight - with its rediscoveries of (to us) unknown European (women) painters from the early part of the last century generally – for example a Finn/Belge Helene Schjerbeck and Lotte Laserstein.
And BBC’s Through the Night continues to excel – for example the Romania Radio Concert Orchestra playing Sarasate, Pablo de [1844-1908] Zigeunerweisen for violin and orchestra (Op.20) (you have to move the timing to 4 hours 20 minutes to get the piece – and only for another 5 days!)
For those intrigued by the title (changed from this morning's rather negative one), I am experimenting since I see that I have not so many hits today - and yet it is, for my money, one of the most useful posts for some time (with all these references). I still don't understand what we need to do to get more hits - people tell me I should twitter - but I don't have a good voice. So I'm now trying a more positive title - with some key words.
And the painting is heavily symbolic - Moutafov's "Rescue at Sea" from the National Bank's collection - and chosen with cunning reference to British political philospher Michael Oakeshott's famous metaphor of politics/government as a sea journey. The rescuers are, of course, the consultants. You certainly get your money's worth on this station!

Leadership central europe - part VII

Reflecting further on the 5 posts, my concerns about the effectiveness of training programmes in transition countries can perhaps best be summarised in 4 words – "wrong focus" and "wrong theory"! And the way ahead can be summarised in two words – "context" and "leadership".

Wrong Focus
• The EC has funded (in Technical Assistance) and continues to fund (under Structural Funds) too many training projects in transition countries with insufficient focus on building a training capacity. Indeed it undermines national training institutes by the resources its projects gives to private trainers and companies under its procurement rules.
• these programmes have, in addition, concentrated on the supply side (training individual trainers; drafting course material; and funding course) to the almost total exclusion of the demand side (helping organisational managers define their real needs and building stronger inderstanding of and pressure for quality training)
• they focus on lower rather than higher levels of organisations. (It’s the easy option – senior management will rarely admit its deficiencies and need to learn).
• And the programmes assume knowledge rather than skill needs. (It’s easier to provide – through traditional rote learning).

Wrong theory
Most of the training programmes I’ve seen implicitly assume that the performance of state bodies (insofar as it measured in transition countries) can be improved by better knowledge of junior staff. This may be true of the sort of training project I’m currently involved with – aimed at those municipal staff who handle bids for EC funds and manage such projects – but is not true of the general management course which National Training Institutes run. And the mission of such Institutes is surely to help improve the performance of state bodies.
Poor organisational performance is generally due to a mix of poor management systems, lack of strategic leadership and political interference. And Improving them is more a matter of skills and attitude than knowledge!

I am not alone in questioning the effectiveness of the programmes to train public officials.. I was very encouraged a few months back by the publication of a paper - Training and Beyond; seeking better practices for capacity development by Jenny Pearson - which, in a much more referenced (but sometimes turgid) way, expresses the same concerns and indicates the number of people who now seem to share them in what, in the last decade has become the up-and-coming field of capacity development.

Context, context, context
All interventions should therefore start from proper contextual analysis of existing administrative capacity – and constraints. The focus then should be on organisational change – not training - to ensure that proper consideration is given to the full range of possible interventions, of which training is only a small part (see pages 33-37 of the Pearson paper for a good overview). Of course this is not easy – but, if this is not the starting point, then people will fail to pose the correct questions; to learn the required skills; and therefore to waste a lot of money.
Official documents have begun to recognise this in recent years. The EC’s Backbone Strategy admits that its projects need to be better grounded in the context; in its "drivers of change" work, the UK's ODI has pioneered ways of identifying power constraints; and the World Bank’s recent Governance Reforms under real world conditions is written around the sorts of questions which have given my work as a consultant its real edge-

1. How do we build broad coalitions of influentials in favour of change? What do we do about powerful vested interests?
2. How do we help reformers transform indifferent, or even hostile, public opinion into support for reform objectives?
3. How do we instigate citizen demand for good governance and accountability to sustain governance reform?

The paper I wrote earlier in the year for the Varna Conference (Time for the long game - not the logframe) drew attention to the crumbling of key building blocks of administrative reform in many of the EC’s new member states in the last few years. Francis Cardona’s Can Civil Service Reforms Last? The European Union’s 5th Enlargement and Future Policy Orientation – published in early 2010 - is just the latest evidence. It shows how appointments are becoming politicised again. In 2007 Tony Verheijen had published a paper for the World Bank entitled Administrative capacity in the new member states – the limits of innovation which painted a fairly bleak picture. So in 2009, did Meyer-Sahling’s paper for SIGMA - Sustainability of civil service reforms in central and eastern Europe five years after accession. Sorin Ionitsa and Tom Gallagher have painted a vivid picture of the fate of administrative reform in one of these countries – Romania – and offered different levels of explanation for it.

If that is the context, how does one get around it? Clearly politicians in these countries need to grow up and stop behaving like petulant and thieving magpies. But how does that happen?
Manning and Ionitsa emphasise the need for transparency and external pressures (civil society) to try to get politicians to act more seriously.
Verheijen and Cardona talk more idealistically of the need to establish structures which bringing politicians, officials, academics etc together to develop a consensus. It happened, certainly, in the Baltic states – but there are always dangers in holding up one country as an example. When things go wrong, as they generally do, the corrupt and incompetent use this to damn reform. And one of the difficulties so many transition countries have is the inability of its elites to work cooperatively.

I have to wonder whether there is not a place now for the sort of initiative which impressed me when I visited Pittsburgh more than 20 years ago. As an old industrial city, it was experiencing social and economic dislocation – and someone started a quiet movement which brought the potential leaders of tomorrow in its various sectors (commerce, political, administrative, trade union, religious etc) into a regular academic setting to confront the city’s problems. Leadership Pittsburgh has been replicated across other cities and has had 2 profound effects – it forged crucial personal links of respect and understanding; and it made most of those who attended think about their wider responsibilities and the needs of the city.

Going back to the Director of the Training Institute - my advice to him would therefore be - Think Big! Reach out! Have passion!

making training effective - Part II

Part I suggested that the billions spent by the EC on training public officials over the past decade or so in ex-communist countries have not created sustainable training systems there - ie centres for training public officials whose full-time staff contain both trainers and specialists in the field of public management – and who actually play a role in helping state bodies operate effectively. Most of the new member and Accession states have a central training Institute – but its staff are small and (in all but a few cases) administrators who bring in public officials and academics for a few hours to deliver lectures. Little "needs assessment" can be carried out (an annual schedule is negotiated between the Institute and the Council of Ministers); Ministries have a training budget and pay for the attendance of those officials it allows to attend selected courses (whether at the Institute or other centres). It is virtually impossible for such a system to carry out serious evaluation of course content and of trainers – its staff lack the specialist knowledge (and status) to question, challenge and encourage. Such a system also focuses on individual needs – and is unable to input to discussions about the development of state capacity or help state bodies tackle their organisational problems.
In the older member States, such Institutes have played an important role in setting a vision for the improvement of public services; in monitoring developments and assisting the exchange of experience. At the time, however, such bodies were being established in the ex-communist countries, the new fashion amongst western consultants was for slimline, competitive training; the academic community in the east simply had no relevant experience to offer; and governments were offloading rather than building functions. The result was underfunded training centres.
With budget cuts of the past few years, the EC Structural Funds are being increasingly used to substitute for mainline funding. Given the competitive basis of the procurement, what this means is that private companies (rather than the Institute) are being paid to act as the administrators – undermining the possibility of the national Institute developing its capacity. One other result is an endless repetition of training the trainers programmes and Manual drafting. Whatever happened to the previous trained trainers and drafted manuals?
Of course, the picture is slightly more nuanced. Some countries have Institutes on the French model – which combine undergraduate teaching with short courses and have therefore a core of academic staff. Poland is the prime example (that academic bias can, of course, bring its own problems!) And Ministries of Finance and Justice tend to have their own training centres, staffed by experts in the relevant field. But the general picture stands.

Is there a different model – in these times of crisis? Only on three conditions -
1. if the development of state capacity is taken seriously – by officials, politicians and academics
2. if there is greater clarity about the role of training in individual learning and organisational development
3. if some academic sacred cows are sacrificed

I assume all new member states have the sort of EC-funded Operational Programmes which Bulgaria and Romania have – with themes such as Administrative Capacity and Human resource management (to mention two). Hundreds of millions of euros are allocated to private consultancies to carry out projects of training and capacity building with state bodies as the clients.
In highly politicised countries such as Romania, however, building capacity is not taken seriously. As Tom Gallagher’s most recent and powerful book on the country vividly shows, there are more private agendas at work eg loyalty to the figure who put you in your position. And those academic social scientists who have resisted the temptation to go into consultancy are, understandably, more interested in achieving status with their western colleagues than in making forays into the real world of public administration. Again I speak generally – and from my knowledge more of southern than northern new member states.
As far as training is concerned, it is remarkable (given how much money is spent on it) how little discussion there is of its role and practices in new member states. Training can be effective only under certain circumstances. The very language trainers use – "training needs assessment" – begs the question of whether training is in fact the appropriate intervention. It is the easy option – it assumes that it is the lower levels who are deficient whereas the real issue may be organisational systems or the performance of higher management. I was recently in charge of a project designed to give such an institute the capacity to assist public officials at regional and local levels in the effective implementation of the complex EC Acquis (eg the various legal requirements of safety, consumer rights, equal opportunities, environment). The project was designed as a training project when, for me, the issue was totally different. I tried to develop my argument in several discussion papers but could not, for various reasons, reach the right people for a discussion. Amongst the points I was trying to make were -

• Organisations (state bodies) perform only when they are given clear (and limited) goals – and the commensurate resources and management support. This requires the systems and skills of strategic management.
• This can be developed only through senior management being properly encouraged to prioritise and draft realistic action plans – based on project management principles.
• The core mission of Institutes of Public Administration should be to encourage and help senior management acquire these skills
• But they cannot do this as long as they are trapped in an administrative role – and traditional teaching philosphies

What I remember is the anger I aroused at our final conference from a Professor of Law when I dared to say that state bodies should recognise they cannot implement the acquis in its totality (even with the few opt-outs negotiated) and should prioritise.
I will continue the argument in a future post.

Culture cornerI’m glad to say that art galleries continue to open here in Sofia. I had been disappointed earlier in the year to encounter a nearby gallery which seemed to have closed down but yesterday discovered that it had, some months ago, re-opened under new ownershop and is a charming visit. It is Gallery-Museum" CLASSICA" at 32 Venelin Str., Sofia near the football stadium at Eagle Bridge. Its old website can still be seen here with some of the paintings still on offer. Young Leta and her mother are delightful guides and hosts.

Capacity development

In fact I didn’t think much of the OECD Guidelines paper on Fragile states I mentioned yesterday. It seems a good example of technocracy – full of jargon and giving little sense of the moral and existential issues involved in this work. I was more stimulated by a paper I was sent last week from the Learning Network on Capacity development entitled Training and Beyond; seeking better practices for capacity development by Jenny Pearson. Her paper echoes many of the points in the definitive paper I wrote on training in late 2008 after my three years of experiences of leading training projects in Kyrygzstan and Bulgaria. It was the former work which introduced me to the concept of capacity development.
It’s one of the pleasures - indeed privileges - of my work that it has given me the chance to learn about subjects about which I know so little. Academics, for example, think that training is a dawdle – so they generally make bad trainers. At least I knew I wasn’t a trainer – I find it difficult to shake off the habit of pontification (I call it brainstorming!) which both academia and politics developed in me. So I chose to look at what my training specialists were saying (and sometimes doing); at what the books said; reflected; encouraged experimentation; had it discussed; changed direction; reflected; wrote it all up; and, if I was lucky, was able to build on whatever insights emerged in my next project.

And I was lucky after I wrote this paper on the development of municipal capacity in Kyrgyzstan to be able to build on the insights for my next project in Bulgaria (where I learned the literature of implementation of the European Acquis - which uses the giveaway word "compliance"!)
Capacity development was in fact the focus of the critical 2007 European Court of Auditors’report on EC Technical Assistance – and I’ve made the comment that the EC response (its Backbone strategy) indicated they had not really grasped the importance of this concept.

I will be taking a final copy of my Varna paper to the printers here in a few days – so that I can distribute the paper to the NISPAcee conference participants. And there is one issue I have not yet properly resolved in my thinking. Everyone seems to agree that there are too many cowboy companies getting business from the EC’s multi-billion euros Technical Assistance budget. Most companies allowed to tender have a „take the money and run” attitude. I can name the number of companies who have a serious interest in knowledge development and transfer on the fingers of one hand. The Americans have an interesting model which has allowed a high-quality think-tank (The Urban Institute) to win long-term contracts in several countries to assist municipal development. This approach has several advantages
• You are buying proven quality
• The contractor’s basic asset is their reputation – fear of losing it acts as powerful incentive to ensure it recruits and offers good experts (unlike the present system)
• the contract gives the flexibility to negotiate adjustments from time to time.

This perhaps gives us some clues about a possible alternative to the present procurement system the EC is currently using - which arguably gives us the worst of all worlds.

Today's Bulgarian painter is one of my favourties Dobre Dobrev (1898-1973). Born in Sliven and graduated 1925 from Prague Fine Arts Academy. Until 1938 he had lived and worked in Republic of Czech. Afterwards he came back to Bulgaria and to 1954 he lived in Sliven (then highly industrial) and afterwards in Sofia. He created paintings revealing the life in villages. He painted landscapes, daily scenes, figurative compositions. His preferred topic are the markets in his native town of Sliven

Book on Bulgarian painters

When I was in Sofia in January 2011 I realised that there was a need for a booklet in English on modern Bulgarian painting. Nothing exists for the visitor - who could spend many pleasant hours (days) traversing the charming centre, visiting galleries, talking with the owners and painters – and, ultimately, buying. I had made a short list of the painters I knew – mainly as a checklist for my visits but which (if consulted surreptitiously) also gave me the air of a cognoscenti and therefore better treatment! My friend Yassen of Konus Gallery was very helpful in suggesting additional painters – what was 2 pages grew quickly to five. And I decided that, as I had the time and the passion, I might as well try to produce such a booklet – on the excellent principle that the best way to learn about a subject is to write a book about it. Of course, discovery is part of the pleasure – and too detailed a book would deny visitors that pleasure – so I don’t have to be ambitious.
It’s not too difficult to get pictures from the net - mainly from the Archives of the Victoria Gallery (which is holding another auction on 31 march – a particularly bumper one it looks) - but what is not so easy is to get some biographical detail.
If I’m lucky the Viktoria Gallery site (or the great Catalogue of the Sofia City Gallery) will give me the date and place of birth and death – and the artists under which the painter in question studies. If I’m very lucky, they will tell me that they spent a few years studying in Munich, Paris or France. But that’s all.
Having worked intensively on the subject in January and produced an outline of the sort of booklet I had in mind. I gave the matter a rest. I have more than a hundred names – and should start the preparation for the month I plan to spend in Sofia shortly. So perhaps a couple of entries a day will encourage my friends in Bulgaria to give me some feedback – and data?
What basically do I need to know? Dates; place of birth; influences; genre; price range, patrimony (how easy to export?)
Let me start with someone who arrived on my list only in January - Abadjiev (Petko) (1903-2004) who was a friend of Bulgaria’s greatest painter of the mid 20th century, Nikola Tanev (whose charming landscape paintings now fetch for about 10,000 euros). You can see a couple of Abadjiev’s paintings on the Viktoria Gallery site (a 25x20 oil can be had for 400 euros at the 31 March auction). So I’m missing quite a lot of info about him.
Alekov, Napoleon is an old favourite of mine (1912-2002). A seascape specialist, there are a fair number of his paintings available on the Viktoria site (a nice shipyard scene 50x40 went recently for only 350 euros). But that’s all I have on him.
The painting at the top of this post is a new artist for me – but very striking - Alexandrov (Zdravko) (1911-1999) This large (80x70) went for only 1,000 euros

UPDATE; On 24 April 2012 I duly lodged a 60 page booklet (and CD Rom with almost 1,000 pictures) with a young design team in Sofia and copies of the booklet are now available - try the Elephant Bookshop.

A year ago I was thinking about post-autistic public administration.
A lot has been recently about capacity development - a lot of it interesting and useful. But the best on the subject has just been issued - and focuses on the practitioner. Very helpful!

uncertainty and capacity - part VIII of a critique

It’s been a tough few days as I completely revamped my Varna paper in the light of the EC papers of 2007/2008. The focus has shifted from the neglected role of consultants and politicians to the capacity of the EC policy-making system; instead of a cri-de-coeur, it’s become a case-study and has therefore a new title “Reforming the reformers”.
I was initially happy – to discover (however belatedly) that the criticisms some of us had been making about the system had been recognised and acted upon. Ironically, however, it made me realise that my 2006 analysis had not gone far enough and, in particular, had not followed through on the issues embodied in my later 5 questions•

"Do the organisations which pay us practice what they and we preach on the ground about good organisational principles?
• Does the knowledge and experience we have as individual consultants actually help us identify and implement interventions which fit the context in which we are working?
• Do we have the space and skills to make that happen?
• What are the bodies which employ consultants doing to explore such questions – and to deal with the deficiencies which I dare to suggest would be revealed?
• Do any of us have a clue about how to turn kleptocratic regimes into systems that recognise the meaning of public service?”

The very language of Technical Assistance assumes certainty of knowledge (inputs-outputs) and relationships of power – of superiority (“experts”) and inferiority (“beneficiaries”). What happens when we start from the following assumptions?
• Technical Assistance built on projects (and the project management philosophy which enshrines that) may be OK for constructing buildings but is not appropriate for assisting in the development of public institutions (Such criticism has been made of Technical Assistance in the development field – but has not yet made the crossing to those who work in the (bureaucratically separate) world of institution-building in post-communist countries)
• Institutions grow – and noone really understands that process
• Administrative reform has little basis in scientific evidence – just look at the 99 contradictory proverbs underlying it which Hood and Jackson identified in their (out of print) 1999 book. The discipline of public administration from which it springs is promiscuous in its multi-disciplinary borrowing.
• Once one accepts the world of uncertainty in which we are working, it is not enough to talk about more flexibility in the first few months to adjust project details. This is just the old machine metaphor at work again – one last twist of the spanner and hey presto, it’s working!

Robert Chambers writings have been so very good at exploring alternatives – which is why I gave that excerpt of his a few posts back. And my 2006 critique used an excellent table of his at page 12 table 4 which indicated the direction in which Technical Assistance needed to go
I found it interesting that the Court latched on to capacity development (giving appropriate references) in its 2007 paper whereas the EC response was a bit sniffy about that perspective and made no attempt to pick that concept apart (as the Morgan paper I referenced does). I vividly remember my own discovery of the “capacity” concept in 2006. That should give a clue to the inadequacy of TA work – I am a well-read and conscientious consultant and yet I had to reinvent the wheel of capacity development. It was only after I had developed the diagrams you will find at the end of the 2006 paper that I discovered the literature and debate on capacity development – at the same time it seems as the EC.

Success in spite of the logframe - Part II

I'm revisiting some of my projects - trying to show how the successes came in spite of rather than because of the project management system the EU uses.


In February 2005 I arrived in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan to start an 18 month project working with a Minister (without Portfolio) to develop the local government system. We actually had three offices – one in the capital and 2 in our 2 pilot Oblasts – and our job was to a mixture of policy advice and training. It also required us to produce a Roadmap for the development of local government (although there was already a decentralisation strategy). Just as I was finishing the Inception Report, I had to flee the country because of unrest which swept the President from power. I returned after a week to a bit of a political vacuum – but the municipalities were still there so we proceeded with the initial needs assessment which we did through focus group discussions.
I had a basic question – we were a short project in a field where there were already 2-3 donors (eg UNDP; Urban Institute) who had carved out an important role over the past 5 years and more. What, I wondered, was the distinctive contribution our small and brief project could make? The project design did not seem to have considered this question.
The first answer was that, unlike the other donors, we had a base in the field – 2 local offices – which gave us some special insights into the needs of remote village municipalities. Our intensive focus group sessions (see para 6 of this paper) and the drafting of the Roadmap also helped keep our minds constantly open to new ideas – and made me realise that one of our potential roles was to help ensure that the voice of remote people was heard in the capital. I got a bit angry, for example, with all the talk there about the “lack of municipal capacity” – and therefore wrote a whole new 100 page document on the issue of capacity development, turning the argument into one which rather questioned central commitment and capacity How do people measure municipal capacity? I asked and then suggested

that question can strictly be answered only in relation to the delegated tasks – since patently municipalities do not currently have the resources or the personnel to begin to perform “affairs of local significance”. And state bodies may therefore seem to be in the best position to answer the question since they delegate so many of their tasks to municipalities - for example the task of collecting national taxes . But it is hardly fair to give an organisation tasks it doesn’t want and for which it is not paid - and then blame it when it doesn’t carry them out “properly” (in the view of state bodies)! We argue later that the capacity of an organisation is built as it has the opportunity to take decisions for itself and learns from doing. It is exactly the same process as good parenting. Of course inexperienced young people will make mistakes – but it is the job of responsible parents who care about their children to create the conditions in which their children learn for themselves – at minimal cost to themselves and others. And some of the qualities therefore needed in those purporting to offer support to local government are care and compassion.

We held 70 workshops for the municipalities – with 1,500 participants. Motivation and appreciation was very high (the photo is a session in Atbashy). Early on in the project’s life, however, we took the view that training activities were transient events and that we should attempt to encourage a local learning capacity. Training is sustainable only if we work with motivated people – if they can then apply what they have learned and have follow-up. Initially we wanted to focus on target groups (eg newly-elected municipal Heads) but the elections took place in December 2005 and events meant that we were unable to start that particular work until May 2006, a few months from the scheduled end of the project (although I got a 6 month extension). We therefore started to focus on the entire (village) municipality – and in April 2006 experimented with a new more holistic approach to training
• A practising and successful German mayor carrying out interviews the day before the workshop with both municipal people and community activists
• His then making an initial presentation at the workshop to all staff, councillors and activists about the issues which had emerged from those interviews – and some examples about how these issues had been dealt with in other places
• Participants then going into working groups to develop options
• The full group then assessing which options to develop
• The project then organised regular follow-up, monitoring visits

This proved to be a very successful formula – with its focus on practical problems; encouraging people to work together on them; giving examples of where and how successful initiatives had been taken; and following up with regular visits to discuss progress. The spirit this created contrasts with that which often accompanies traditional training courses. The project’s Developing Municipal Capacity publication identified 10 factors which made it difficult to practice traditional training – and offers a typology of learning.
We did not initially understand the significance of the concept of a Roadmap – and it is one also which our beneficiaries also had some initial problems with. But, as we explain in the introduction to the readers of the document,

“A road map does not suggest a route – YOU choose the route. A roadmap simply locates the key features (mountains, rivers and swamps) you need to be aware of when trying to travel from the A to the B of your choice. So this is not an attempt to force foreign models on the local situation. Another point about a road map is that it cannot cover every changing detail nor tell you how you should approach certain situations – sometimes a large bump in the road or impatience can have fatal consequences. So a road map is only a guide - local knowledge, judgment and skills are needed to get you to your destination! And, like a map, you don’t have to read it all – only the sections which are relevant for your journey!”

The Roadmap contains powerful insights into the difficulties being experienced by the country in policy implementation.
To be continued

case study in sustainability

The EU project I spoke about yesterday was supposed (in the jargon) to „develop the capacity of the Institute of Public Administration to design and manage training to assist the implementation of the EU Acquis”. I have to confess that I struggled to see the logic of the project as it had been designed. The Institute consisted of about 20 administrative staff – the trainers they used were a mix of civil servants and academics. We had to appoint 6 regional coordinators who would select, train and manage appropriate trainers. The Institute did not have the budget for additional staff (even for their existing staff) so the 6 coordinators would be temporary appointments - responsible to the project - and not, therefore, help develop the Institute’s capacity. More seriously, most of the topics of the acquis (food safety; consumer protection; environment) are technical and specialised and do not obviously relate to the core mission of an Institute of Public Management. The project was also supposed to help the Institute set up training centres in 6 Regions – but, again, had no budget for this. Finally, for reasons too complicated to explain here, our project staff (7 key experts!) were not able to develop close working relations with the relevant Institute staff – and little or no „technical transfer” (and therefore capacity development) took place. Sure, we delivered on the tangible outputs – the training manuals; the E-learning platform; the training of trainers; more than 500 local officials trained; and the formal, signed documents for 6 regional centres – but there was absolutely no sustainability. And how could there be from a 12 month project – which, for various political reasons, was actually 6 months? My frustration showed in the Executive summary of the final Discussion paper I left behind-

• The Bulgaria state system is suffering from “training fatigue”. Too many workshops have been held – and many without sufficient preparation or follow-up. Workshops with these features are not worth holding.
• There seems little to show from the tens of millions of euros spent by projects here in the last decade on training of public servants. Training materials, standards and systems are hard to find.
• Training is too ad-hoc – and not properly related to the performance of the individual (through the development and use of core competences) or of the organisation (through, for example, strategic management)
• Laws do not implement themselves. They require political and managerial commitment and resources.
• Such commitment and resources are in limited supply. Organisations (state bodies) perform only when they are given clear (and limited) goals – and the commensurate resources and support. This requires the skills of strategic management. Helping senior management acquire these skills is – or should be - the core mission of the Institute of Public Administration.
• A serious effort needs to be undertaken to establish a network of training suppliers (or community of learners) which can, for example, share experience and materials - and help develop standards.
• It is not enough, however, to operate on the supply side. Standards will rise and training make a contribution to administrative capacity only if there is a stronger demand for more relevant training which makes a measurable impact on individual and organisational performance.
• In the first instance, this will require Human Resource Directors to be more demanding of training managers – to insist on better designed courses and materials; on proper evaluation of courses and trainers; and on the use of better trainers. A subject specialist is not a trainer. We hope this book (and the project’s paper on assessment tools) will help give some benchmarks.
• It is critical that any training intervention is based on “learning outcomes” developed in a proper dialogue between the 4 separate groups involved in any training system (funder; training managers, trainers and learners)
• senior management of state bodies should look closely at the impact of new legislation on systems, procedures, tasks and skills. Too many people seem to think that better implementation and compliance will be achieved simply by telling local officials what that new legislation says.
• Workshops have costs – both direct (trainers and materials) and indirect (staff time). There are a range of other tools available to help staff understand new legal obligations. These are outlined and briefly assessed in section 9 of the final discussion paper
• Workshops should not really be used if the purpose is simply knowledge transfer. The very term “workshop” indicates that exercises should replace lectures – to ensure that the participant is challenged in his/her thinking. Suitable exercises force the participant to examine their own (all too often hidden) assumptions and create an environment in which presentations about legal and policy frameworks become more alive and meaningful. This type of workshop aims at extending self-awareness and is generally the approach used to develop managerial skills and to create champions of change.

It was interesting to talk with the new Head of the Institute - who was our official counterpart on day to day matters. After our departure, the Institute was transferred from the "Ministry of State Admin and Admin Reform" to the Ministry of Education where it languished until it was tranferred to the Council of Ministers from which it had departed some 5 years before! Four upheavals in the course of 5 years! And during these last 2 years it has had to dispense with about 20% of its staff and operate for a significant period of time with no budget!! But shortly it will face the headache of having to manage a 10 million euro project - the 5th or 6th "capacity-building"intervention it's had in the last decade.
The painting (Les Aveugles - blind leading the blind) is one by the Walloon, Anto Carte, whose school of paintings I wrote about some weeks back