Easter in Sirnea

A wet Easter Sunday here in Sirnea. My old neighbour, Lucita, brought me yesterday some small meat offerings and a couple of painted eggs; and at 08.00 this morning I received a call from Viciu down the hill which started with the greeting Hristos a înviat! (Christ is risen!) to which I was able to give the appropriate response Adevărat a înviat!(He has indeed – or does it mean His Resurrection is the truth??
The call carried an invitation to come for an Easter brunch (and small Tuica) at 09.00.
He had been up all night – at the church with the rest of the village from 01.00.-04.00! And hadn’t slept since. I felt duly ashamed.
I had noticed how few visitors there seem to be in the village this year – only one car in the hotel car-park and no sound from the guesthouse down on the mainroad from which there are normally sounds of gaiety on such holiday weekends. Viciu reports a television comment that people had been going to Bulgaria instead – cheaper and nicer!
According to tradition, there shall be no partying, no weddings, no having fun and not a great deal of anything in fact during Lent, unflinchingly observed by many in Romania, right up until midnight on April 14th. Only when the priest emerges from his church with a candle (around 00:10) to declare that ‘Hristos a înviat’ can the faithful who have abstained from smiling, sex or chocolate for the past 40 days once again indulge their desires. And then only after the biggest meal of the year. That meal will invariably be lamb (miel). Indeed, Easter is the one time of the year Romanians eat lamb, and it can easily be found in shops. Every part of the lamb is used: the head goes in the soup, the organs are used to make ‘drob’ (a kind of paté), and the legs are slowly roasted in red wine and served with roast potatoes and spinach.
You should also be prepared to eat more than a few hard boiled eggs. Before the main meal (which, we have yet to mention, gets eaten after the return from midnight mass, at around 1am) eggs are cracked.
Dyed in bright colours (often, but not always red) on Good Friday, hard boiled eggs are cracked between family members with the words ‘Hristos a înviat’ and response ‘Adevărat a înviat’. The eggs should then be eaten.

I’m not into development issues so much at the moment – but this is a good discussion of an issue which has been vexing that community recently - Results-focussed reporting. The piece is written by one of the community’s most thoughtful writers - Owen Barder – who also does a good podcast series on development issues called Development Drums. The latest interview is with Tim Harford who is a journalist at the Financial Times and the author of The Undercover Economist and, most recently, of Adapt: Why Success Always Begins with Failure. In this interview, he talks about the implications for development of his idea that successful complex systems emerge from a process of trial and error and suggests three principles -

you need to try a lot of different things; they need to be small enough that failures will not ruin you; and you need to be able to distinguish success from failure, which some systems are very ill-equipped to do.

It's politics, stupid

My mother lived to the grand old age of 101 – and was still pottering around her small flat in the supported accomodation in which she lived for almost a decade in her 90s, doing her own shopping and cooking meals for me on my visits from far-flung places. She had some difficulty understanding what it was I was doing in the countries of central europe and central asia which had, for so much of her lifetime, behind "The Iron Curtain". And it was not easy to explain – she was, after all, of that generation which actually produced things; the more effete characters who provided services in those days such as teachers, acountants, bankers, doctors had status precisely because they were in such a small minority. Since then the number of what Robert Reich called in the 90s "symbolic analysts” who do little more than manipulate words and figures has grown to scandalous proportions. Little wonder that we are all so confused!
But I have just come across a new paper which gives a clear overview of the difficulties people doing my sort of work in transition countries over the past 2 decades face; and which also captures the critique I have been conducting of it in varoius papers. It’s written by Tom Carrothers for the Carnegie Foundation and is entitled Aiding governance in developing countries – progress despite uncertainties. He has eight injunctions –
• recognise that governance deficiencies are primarily political
• give attention to the demand for governance, not just the supply
• go local
• strive for best fit – rather than best practice
• take informal institutions into account
• mainstream governance (ie don't just run it as an add-on)
• don’t ignore the international dimensions
• reform thyself

Its references pointed me to a useful summary which DfiD did recently of the findings from 10 years of funded research on governance and fragile states 2001-2010 - The Politics of poverty - elites, citizens and states
A year ago, I was working on a sceptic's glossary of administrative and political terms which really deserves wider currency

Rediscovery of political economy

I have referred several times to the radical rethinking of the economics discipline and also of psychology and regretted that there was little sign of such reassessment of basic principles in the schools of management – let alone in those of public management which continue to regurgitate so many of the hoary myths of management from the surreal world of management writing.
In fact, I now realise, some people – in and around The World Bank of all places – have been engaged in some basic reappraisals of relevant literature for administrative reform efforts and producing some very readable documents. They are those associated with the World Bank’s recent Governance Reforms under real world conditions written around the central questions for my work as a consultant -
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?

I realise I keep repeating these questions (and the reference) but the questions are so rarely asked in practice let alone pursued seriously in transition countries - and the book is quite excellent. This morning, the WB drew my attention to three useful bits of training material to back up that work.
Interestingly, the displines they draw on are political economy and communications. Both are dear to my heart – the first being the neglected Scottish intellectual tradition which was (just) still alive in my university days - although this useful paper from the Asian development Bank on the subject credits the first use of the term to a 17th century Frenchman. This paper from the ODI gives examples of its use to ensure that development interventions are on a firm basis.

A new website offers an advance copy of an article on an overdue subject – corporate psychopaths and their role in the global crisis.

Contingency

Faithful readers of the blog will know that I am no friend of the model of management which underpins the European Commission system of procuring Technical Assistance; and that, indeed, I have suggested it has many similarities with the Stalinist model which preceded it in the countries in which I work. Target setting; requirements to stick to activities decided hierarchically a couple of years earlier; tight monitoring - all betraying the confidence that their planned interventions can and should conquer the complexity of the world. And that failure to do so is the fault of those (lowly) individuals trying to implement the ordered change rather than the systems in which the intervention is located (or of the leaders who maintain those systems)
Aid on the Edge- Exploring complexity & evolutionary sciences in foreign aid - is a thoughtful blog which often explores these issues and had a good post this week on the debate which is apparently going on in the development field about a "results'based" approach

On one side of the results tug of war are those calling for more and better results, more rigour in analysis and more discipline in reporting. The failure of development, they argue, is basically about the failure to focus on results. ‘Modern management techniques’, especially those that are embodied by ‘results-based management’ are seen as the answer.
On the other side are those who argue for a ‘push back’ against this approach. Such reductionist approaches are seen as only suitable for certain kinds of development interventions, and that at their worst, these approaches inhibit the creativity and innovation needed to achieve results in the first place. The danger here is that we throw out the results baby with the reductionist bathwater (see here for a previous Aid on the Edge post on this).
Appropriate strategic approaches (and by extension, results approaches) need to be based on:
(a) the nature of the intervention we are looking at, and
(b) the context in which it is being delivered.
Reading across these approaches we can suggest a preliminary framework which may prove useful in bringing together different results approaches in a productive and mutually beneficial way.
First, imagine an agencies projects and programmes being distributed across a spectrum of the ‘nature of interventions’, placing relatively simple interventions on one end, and more complex issues, at the other.
Then let’s add in a vertical axes on context. Again, think of a spectrum, this time from stable/identical to dynamic/diverse. This gives us a 2 by 2 framework for analysing and mapping different development interventions. Where exactly an intervention is positioned on this framework has implications for the kinds of results orientation we can take. In the top left corner of simple interventions in identical stable settings, is the Plan and Control zone – here ‘traditional’ results-based management approach, conventional value for money analyses and randomised control trials work well.
The bottom right corner of complex interventions in diverse, dynamic settings is what I have termed Managing Turbulence. Here we need to learn from the work of professional crisis managers, the military and others working in dynamic and fluid contexts.
In between is what I have called Adaptive Management, where either because of the nature of the intervention or the nature of the context, multiple parallel experiments need to be undertaken, with real-time learning to check their relative effectiveness, scaling up those that work and scaling down those that don’t.

Sadly, my blog does not allow me to reproduce the matrix - but it is the sort of "balanced", "appropriate" or "contingent" approach I admire. I know it's fashionable to attack a "one size fits all" approach - but I find that political and managerial leaders generally find it difficult to resist the latest managerial fashion. If only more of them could develop and use such matrices!!
"Balance" is a word I have noticed this year pops up quite a lot in my writing. It was one of the central points of my Revista 22 article which appeared this week; and the importance of getting the appropriate balance between demand and supply factors is a central part of my approach to the development of effective training systems. As I thought about this, the word "requisite" also came into my mind - and I remembered the work of the sadly neglected organisational theorist Elliot Jaques