what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label good governance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label good governance. Show all posts

Saturday, May 8, 2021

How does a country go about constructing a hopeful future?

It’s been fashionable recently to write about how countries fail – but the challenge of finding countries which have put together a winning formula and emerged as both economic and socio-political successes has proven much more difficult. Germany, Japan and South Korea are about the only cases quoted – with tiny countries such as Estonia and Singapore also being acknowledged.

But all, save Estonia, go back to the post-war period…..

Right now Bulgaria is without a government since the populist who carried the most votes wasn’t interested in forming a government and  - despite the flashy cars and new office blocks - neither it nor its northern neighbour, Romania, have made any sustainable progress in the 30 years since the Berlin Wall fell.

A couple of decades ago, global bodies were shoving “good governance down the throat of recalcitrant countries as a precondition of admittance to select clubs such as the EU – although any efforts to comply were immediately relaxed on admission.

And progress in countries such as Hungary and Poland has been in a consistently rapid backward direction – with others such as Bulgaria and Romania not even trying very hard in the first instance. Both are still (after more than a decade) subject to the “conditionalities” of the Compliance monitoring of judicial systems – with the efforts Romania has certainly made in that sector being consistently challenged in recent judgements in the European Court of Justice in what increasingly looks to have been collusion between the country’s Prosecutor and its Secret Services.

All this I have covered in posts in the last decade. But I have – like most of the literature – devoted almost no space to how such countries might end the vicious downward spiral and find ways to return some hope to their despairing citizens. Alasdair Roberts put it very well in his “Strategies for Governing” - 

We must recover the capacity to talk about the fundamentals of government, because the fundamentals matter immensely. Right now, there are billions of people on this planet who suffer terribly because governments cannot perform basic functions properly.

-       People live in fear because governments cannot protect their homes from war and crime.

-       They live in poverty because governments cannot create the conditions for trade and commerce to thrive.

-       They live in pain because governments cannot stop the spread of disease.

-       And they live in ignorance because governments do not provide opportunities for education.

Almost 3 years ago, one of Romania’s foremost analysts shared a despairing article but was least convincing when he tried to offer a way forward  

I have a list of what to do – starting with the need for an exploration of what sort of Romania we should be aiming for in the next few decades. Such a process would be moderated by professionals using proper diagnostics, scenario thinking and milestones.
It would be managed by a group with a vision emancipated from the toxic present.  

 At the time I indicated my support for such approaches embodied, for example, in the Future Search method. It’s how I started my own political journey in 1971 – with an annual conference in a shipbuilding town facing the decline of the trade on which it had depended for so long….But any venture would have to demonstrate that it can deal with the astonishing level of distrust of others shown by the fact that, in 2014, only 7% of the Romanian population could say that “most people can be trusted” (compared with about 20% in Italy and 40% in Germany)

For my money Social Trust is one of the fundamental elements of the soil in which democracy grows. From the start of the transition countries such as Bulgaria and Romania have been caught up in a global neo-liberalism tsunami which has been corroding that soil….

South Africa is the country people select when they want a recent example of positive reconciliation. Clearly Nelson Mandela was an exceptional visionary – but he did not work alone. He brought with him the support and assistance of the sort of people Dorel Sandor was referring to – professionals not associated with the “toxic present”.

But where are they to be found? What professional, religious or other groups can inspire the trust that Bulgaria and Romania need?

Earlier this year I indicated some of the toolkits available for those seriously interested in building a country back together.

But they can be used ONLY when a country has taken the first step and brought together the warring factions to forge a new future together.

Tuesday, June 18, 2019

Whatever happened to good governance and anti-corruption?

Romania’s Presidency of the Council of the EU has come – and almost gone…It has not been the disaster many people predicted not least the President of the country, one Klaus Johannis who takes himself very seriously but has great difficulties conveying much sense and has done the country no favours with his all too predictable carping from the sidelines of a so-called socialist government.
The Romanian Presidential system is modelled on the French and found an effective (if rather eccentric) performer in Traian Basescu who managed to ride out some serious challenges to his legitimacy between 2004-2014 and to embed a prosecution system which has, however, become a bit of a Frankenstein. Indeed, its anti-corruption Agency (DNA) was exposed a couple of years ago as being in cahoots with the security system; being politically-motivated in its selection of those to prosecute; and using massive and illegal wiretaps.
Its Head Laura Kovesi was duly removed from office in July 2018 by the Justice Minister (an act duly approved by the Constitutional Court) and is now the subject of criminal charges.
Half-way through Romania’s 6-month term of the Presidency of the Council of the EU, the country therefore found itself in the invidious situation of its ex- Prosecutor Kovesi (who had received the support of the European Parliament for the new post of European Prosecutor) being banned for 60 days from travelling abroad.  

But President Klaus Johannis, sadly, seems as much a criminal as the leader of the Social Democratic party Liviu Dragnea (barred from holding office due to a prior conviction for “electoral fraud”) who has just been jailed for 3 years – on an Al Capone type charge…. Johannis and his wife gained hundreds of thousands of euros from renting property which, a court judged in 2015, had been gained by them fraudulently. The full details are here

Things are never simple in Romania and the sad reality, as the country approaches the 30th anniversary of its release from communism is that very little has changed for the better and – as I explained in a series of posts last year – most serious people have now given up hope of any possibility of positive change.
I know that pessimism hangs heavily in the air these days throughout Europe ….most societies are suffering from one malaise or another……but it is the countries who broke free 30 years ago who are most at risk these days since few of their institutions are yet working in an equitable manner     
Alina Mungiu-Pippidi is one of the few people who has been trying to raise the profile of this issue - a prolific and high profile Romanian academic/social activist (with a base for the past few years in the Hertie School of Government in Berlin) who has been exploring Romanian political culture and the wider issue of corruption for the past 2 decades. In 2006 she contributed a chapter on “Fatalistic political cultures” to a book on Democracy and Political Culture in East Europe. In this she argued (a) that it was too easy for people (not least the political elite themselves!) to use the writings of Samuel Huntington to write Balkan countries off; and (b) that we really did need to look more closely at what various surveys (such as The World Values Survey) showed before jumping to conclusions….In 2007 she gave us even more insights into the Romanian culture with a fascinating and learned article - Hijacked modernisation - Romanian political culture in the 20th century 

Chasing Moby Dick across every sea and ocean – contextual choices in fighting corruption (NORAD 2011) is not the best of her writing – a bit scrappy to put it mildly - but it asks the right questions. In particular – how many countries have actually managed to shake off a corrupt system and build a credible system of rule of law? And how did they manage that feat? 
That the answer is remarkably few - and that it took many generations - should make us all pause 
A decade ago the issues of “good governance” and “anti-corruption” were all the rage for bodies such as the OECD and the World Bank - and academics. Now they look a bit sheepish if people use the phrases….Silver bullets have turned out to be duds…..But it is time to resurrect that debate...


Further Reading on Romania and institutional inertia

Academic articles/booklets on political culture and Romania
Romania Redivivus ;Alex Clapp (NLR 2017). One of the most incisive diagnoses
A Guide to Change and change management for Rule of Law practitioners (INPROL 2015) a well-written guide which assumes that a "rule of law" system can be crated within a generation!
The Quest for Good Governance – how societies develop control of corruption; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2015). One of the most up-to-date analyses which demonstrates the weakness of data-driven analysis. Difficult to see the wood for the trees....But some very sharp insights...
Hijacked modernisation - Romanian political culture in the 20th century; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2007) marvellous case-study
Poor Policy-making and how to improve it in states with weak institutions; Sorin Ionitsa (CEU 2006) One of the most acute assessments

books
In Europe’s Shadow – two cold wars and a thirty-year journey through Romania and beyond; Robert Kaplan (2016) - a fascinating book by a geopoliticist which has an element of the “Common Book” tradition about it with its breadth of reading
A Concise History of Romania; Keith Hitchins (2014) Very readable..
Mapping Romania - notes on an unfinished journey; Ronald Young (2019) just updated with posts from the last couple of years which get more and more fatalistic
Romania and the European Union – how the weak vanquished the strong; Tom Gallagher (2009) great narrative
Theft of a Nation – Romania since Communism; Tom Gallagher (2005) powerful critique
Romania – borderland of Europe; Lucian Boia (2001) Very readable and well translated

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Playing Games with a serious issue?

Part of me understands the groans (sometimes more than metaphorical!) which meet the term “public management reform” whenever it comes up in conversation…..
I have sometimes wished we could find a better phrase to do justice to what is, after all, one of the most important issues confronting countries everywherenamely how we structure and fund the rights and responsibilities we all have ...in order to help make and keep societies secure.

So this post looks at some of the efforts which have been made in the last 20 years to find a less brutal approach to public service management than that represented by New Public Management 
Just why and how the British adopted NPM – which then became a global pandemic - is a story which is usually told in a fatalistic way – as if there were no human agency involved. One persuasive explanation is given here - as the fatal combination of Ministerial frustration with civil service “dynamic conservatism” (as Donald Schoen would put it) with Public Choice economics offering a seductive explanation for that inertia….  A politico-organisational problem was redefined as an economic one and, heh presto, NPM went global 
The core European systems were, however, different – with legal and constitutional safeguards, Proportional Representation systems and coalition governments – although the EC technocracy has been chipping away at much of this.

Good governance ?
This became a fashionable phrase in the 1990s amongst at least policy wonks in the World Bank – although it was aimed mainly at ex-communist and “developing” countries and never really caught on in everyday conversation. One of the ingredients of the rather formulaic “good governance” goulash was anti-corruption measures - which I felt were always basic aspects of sound public management and not a novel add-on….  

“Public Value”?
Mark Moore’s Creating Public Value – strategic management in Government (1995) demonstrated how the passion and example of individual leaders could inspire teams and lift the performance and profile of public services. The decentralisation of American government allowed them that freedom.
British New Labour, however, chose to go in the opposite direction and to build on to what was already a tight centralised system a new quasi-Soviet one of targets and punishment – although this 2002 note, Creating Public Value – an analytical framework for public service reform, showed that there were at least some people  within the Cabinet Office pushing for a more flexible approach.

Measuring Public Value – the competing values approach showed that there was still life in the idea in the UK – if only amongst academics  eg Public Value Management – a new narrative for networked governance by Gerry Stoker in 2006.
Sadly Public Value; theory and practice ed by John Benington and Mark Moore (2011) offered no clarion call to a better society, it was full of dreadful jargon…..Who in his right mind imagines that networked public governance is going to set the heather alight???

“The Common Good”?
One of the things which struck me on rereading some of these references is how academic (apart from Moore’s original book) they are….For example John Bryson’s work on public strategies constitute the best writing on the subject eg Leadership for the Common Good; Crosby and Bryson (2nd edition 2005) but when I look at the indexes and bibliographies of the material on Public Value, their names and books don’t appear! This shows utter contempt for the practical side of things…..
Quite rightly, the title of their latest book Creating Public Value in Practice – advancing the common good in a ….noone in charge world; ed J Bryson et al (2015) shows that their contribution is much more valuable than that of the academics….. 

“Communitarianism”?
At one stage, I thought that communitarianism – so eloquently served by the indefatigable Amatai Etzioni – held an important key……But I soon realised that it smacked of what Orwell benignly called the sandal-wearers and others, less kind, would call the Calvin sect……

Before I finish let me bring up the neglected issue of….Service.
Like Mark Moore, Chris Pollitt’s The Essential Public Manager (2003) focused on the human aspect of public management by exploring the core attributes and values of those who used to be called “public servants”… It’s a pity that more politicians don’t see themselves as “public servants” – and indeed Pollitt might consider, for the next edition of the book, replacing the word “manager” with that of “servant”; and adding at least one chapter to deal with Ministers…. ….????? And “Public Service Reform” is certainly the better phrase since it removes that offensive word “management”….and takes me to Robert Greenleaf whose On Becoming a servant leader (1996) is a book I sometimes turn to for inspiration.
Greenleaf was a thoughtful senior manager with corporate giant AT and T who took early retirement in 1964 to set up a foundation to develop his ideas about leadership - which had a clear influence on writers such as Stephen Covey and Peter Senge. These two management gurus preached/preach in the 90s a softer approach to the subject – while avoiding the explicit critique evident in the later work of, for example, Canadian Henry Mintzberg, one of the rare management writers to break ranks  and call big business to account – in his 2014 pamphlet Rebalancing Society – radical renewal beyond left, right and center. As early as 1970 Greenleaf wrote an article which set out the main elements of his approach - The Servant as Leader (1970). His continuing influence on at least some management writing can be seen here

In conclusion
This has been quite a romp – which has taken me longer to craft than my normal post. But, from my point of view at least, has been very useful….
 “Good government”, “Public service reform”, “networked public governance”, “public value”, “communitarianism”, “the Common Good”……what is it to be????  Perhaps I should do a straw poll?

But it has left me with one conclusion….that there are two significant sets of voices we don’t hear in most of these texts – the officials who run the services and the citizens who experience them. Last week I discussed the notion of public service ventures in the shape of cooperatives; and this is an issue which really does need to be pushed more strongly…….

 Further Reading
From NPM to Public Value (2007) – a useful academic overview
Public Value and Leadership; 2007 – a mercifully short and clear paper on the subject
Public Value; conjecture and refutation (2010) – a good academic overview with an emphasis on ethical consideration
Appraising public value; past, present and futures (2011) is an excellent review of the literature in the first 15 years of the concept’s life
Stocktake of a concept (2015) – a clear exposition of the development of an idea
Designing the model of public value management; (2015) How the concept is seen in Romanian academia
Comparison of public value frameworks (2016) a good academic assessment

To be continued