the Continental Divide in Public management studies

The last post made a rather casual suggestion that “public administration reform” efforts have been analysed in very different ways in “developed” and “developing” countries respectively….I went so far indeed as to suggest there was a state of apartheid between two bodies of literature which are perhaps best exemplified by using the words “managerial” and “economic” for the literature which has come in the last 25 years from the OECD (using largely the concepts of New Public Management) whereas the UNDP and The World Bank use the language of “capacity development” and “politics” (the WB in the last decade certainly) in the advisory documents they have produced for what we used to call the “developing” world (mainly Africa).

In fact probably at least four bodies of literature should be distinguished - which can be grouped to a certain extent by a mixture of language and culture. I offer this table with some trepidation – it’s what I call “impressionistic” and perhaps raises more questions than it answers -

The Different Types of commentary on state reform efforts

Source	Culture	Occupational bias of writers	overviews which give a good sense of status of reform
Anglo-saxon;	adversarial	Academic Eg Chris Pollitt; Chris Hood, Mark Moore, Colin Talbot	International Public Administration Reform – implications for Russia Nick Manning and Neil Parison (World Bank 2004)
West European;	consensual	Lawyers, sociologists   Eg Thoenig; Wollman	State and Local Government Reforms in France and Germany (2006)  Public and Social Services in Europe ed Wollman, Kopric and Marcou (2016)
Africa and Asia	clientilist	Foreign consultants   Eg Tom Carothers	Governance Reform under Real-World Conditions – citizens, stakeholders and Voice (World Bank 2008)   People, Politics and Change - building communications strategy for governance reform (World Bank 2011)
Central and East European	clientilist	Local consultants	Public Administration in the Balkans – overview (SIGMA 2004) Poor Policy Making in Weak States; Sorin Ionita (2006) Administrative Capacity in the new EU Member States – the Limits of Innovation? Tony Verheijen (World Bank 2007) The Sustainability of Civil Service Reforms in ECE; Meyer-Sayling (OECD 2009) Democracy’s Plight in the European Neighbourhood: Struggling Transitions and Proliferating Dynasties (Youngs et al 2009)  A House of Cards? Building the rule of law in ECE; Alina Mungiu-Pippidi (2010)
South European?	clientilist	Local consultants

 People in Central Europe wanting to get a sense of how a system of government might actually be changed for the better are best advised to go to the theories of change which have been developed in the literature on international development eg the World Bank’s Reports of 2008 and 2011 which I reference in the third line of the table.  

The paper by Matthew Andrews which starts part 2 of the first book weaves an interesting theory around 3 words – ”acceptance”, ”authority” and ”ability”.

Is there acceptance of the need for change and reform within the incentive fabric of the organization (not just with individuals)?

·             of the specific reform idea?

·             of the monetary costs for reform?

·             of the social costs for reformers? 

Is there authority:

·             does legislation allow people to challenge the status quo and initiate reform?

·             do formal organizational structures and rules allow reformers to do what is needed?

·             do informal organizational norms allow reformers to do what needs to be done? 

Is there ability: are there enough people, with appropriate skills,

·             to conceptualize and implement the reform?

·             is technology sufficient?

·             are there appropriate information sources to help conceptualize, plan, implement, and institutionalize the reform?

My previous post had quoted extensively from Sorin Ionita’s Poor Policy Making in Weak States. Ionitsa had clearly read Matt Andrew’s work since he writes about Romania that 

”constraints on improving of policy management are to be found firstly in low (political) acceptance (of the legitimacy of new approaches and transparency); secondly, in low authority (meaning that nobody, for example, knows who exactly is in charge of prioritization across sectors) and only thirdly in low technical ability in institutions”

 A diagram in that World Bank paper shows that each of these three elements plays a different role at what are four stages - namely conceptualisation, initiation, transition and institutionalisation. However the short para headed “Individual champions matter less than networks” – was the one that hit a nerve for me. 

“The individual who connects nodes is the key to the network but is often not the one who has the technical idea or who is called the reform champion. His or her skill lies in the ability to bridge relational boundaries and to bring people together. Development is fostered in the presence of robust networks with skilled connectors acting at their heart.” 

My mind was taken back more than 30 years when, as the guy in charge of Strathclyde Region’s strategy to combat deprivation and, using my combined political and academic roles, I established an “urban change network” to bring together once a month a diverse collection of officials and councillors of different municipalities in the West of Scotland, academics and NGO people to explore how we could extend our understanding of what we were dealing with – and how our policies might make more impact. Notes were written up and circulated……and fed into a process of a more official evaluation of a deprivation strategy which had been formulated 5 years earlier.

The central core of that review (in 1981) consisted of 5 huge Community Conferences and produced a little red book called “Social Strategy for the 80s” which was of the first things a newly-elected Council approved in 1982. It was, for me, a powerful example of “embedding” change.  

It is a truism in the training world that it is almost impossible to get senior executives on training courses since they think they have nothing to learn – and this is particularly true of the political class. Not only do politicians (generally) think they have nothing to learn but they have managed very successfully to ensure that noone ever carries out critical assessments of their world. They commission or preside over countless inquiries into all the other systems of society – but rarely does their world come under proper scrutiny. Elections are assumed to give legitimacy to anything. Media exposure is assumed to keep politicians on their toes – but a combination of economics, patterns of media ownership and journalistic laziness has meant an end to investigative journalism and its replacement with cheap attacks on politicians which simply breeds public cynicism and indifference. And public cynicism and indifference is the oxygen in which ”impervious power” thrives!

The last of the assessments for central europe I have in my files is Mungiu-Pippidi’s from 2010 (!!) and most of the papers in that box of my table talks of the need to force the politicians in this part of the world to grow up and stop behaving like petulant schoolboys and girls. Manning and Ionitsa both emphasise the need for transparency and external pressures. Verheijen talks of the establishment of structures bringing politicians, officials, academics etc together to develop a consensus. But Ionitsa puts it most succinctly – 

 ”If a strong requirement is present – and the first openings must be made at the political level – the supply can be generated fairly rapidly, especially in ex-communist countries, with their well-educated manpower. But if the demand is lacking, then the supply will be irrelevant”.

 

Getting Government Reform taken seriously

We are increasingly angry these days with politicians, bureaucrats and government – and have developed an appetite for accounts and explanations of why our democratic systems seem to be failing. The Blunders of our Governments; and The Triumph of the Political Class are just two examples of books which try to satisfy that appetite.

The trouble is that the academics and journalists who produce this literature are outsiders – so it is difficult for them to give a real sense of what scope for manoeuvre senior policy-makers realistically have. Political Memoirs should help us here but never do since they are either self-congratulatory or defensive – with the Diaries of people such as Chris Mullen, Alan Clark and Tony Benn being exceptional simple because they were outside the magic circle of real power.

Two rare and brave attempts by politicians to pull aside the curtain of power in a systematic and objective way are How to be an MP; by Paul Flynn and How to be a Minister – a 21^st Century Guide; by John Hutton

Various problems make it exceedingly rare for British senior civil servants to publish memoirs.

This leaves the important category of consultants and think-tankers to turn to – with Michael Barber’s How to Run a Government so that Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers don’t go Crazy (2015) and Ed Straw’s Stand and Deliver – a design for successful government (2014) being recent examples. John Seddon’s Systems Thinking in the Public Sector – the failure of the Reform regime and a manifesto for a better way (2008) and Chris Foster’s British Government in Crisis (2005) are older examples.

Barber’s should be the most interesting since he has made such a name for himself with his “deliverology” but I find it difficult to take him seriously when he doesn’t include any of the other authors in his index. 
Straw’s is an angry book which fails even to include an index – let alone mention of Seddon’s or Foster’s books. 
The Unspoken Constitution was a short spoof published in 2009 by Democratic Audit which probably tells us as much about the British system of power as anyone….

And, however, entertaining “In the Thick of it”; and the British and American versions of “House of Cards”, they hardly give a rounded account of policy-making in the 2 countries.

Curiously, those wanting to get a real understanding of how the British (and other) system of government might actually be changed for the better are best advised to go to the theories of change which have been developed in the literature on international development eg the World Bank’s 2008 Governance Reform under Real-World Conditions – citizens, stakeholders and Voice; and its People, Politics and Change - building communications strategy for governance reform (2011) - in particular the fold-out diagram at the very end of the 2008 book

The diagram gives the lessons of New Labour's efforts to reform public services - showing what it identified as the key forces of change. Consultants leached off the process - as you can see here

How Change Happens

Yesterday’s post was sparked off by a book and a paper with this title. Kzarnic’s paper was written in 2007 (although I came across only yesterday in the book) and is simply the best introduction to the topic I have come across – identifying what for him are the core approaches which the various intellectual disciplines offer to explain change – whether that change is described as “technical”, “economic”, “political” or “organizational”. And adding some multi-disciplinary approaches for good measure….

Green’s book focuses on one very small part of the picture - “people power” in poor “developing” countries, emphasizing right from the start that - 

Activists seeking social and political change usually focus their efforts on those who wield visible power, presidents, prime ministers and CEOs, since they hold apparent authority over the matter at hand. Yet the hierarchy of visible power is underpinned by subtle interactions among a more diverse set of players. Hidden power‘ describes what goes on behind the scenes: the lobbyists, the corporate chequebooks, the Old Boys Network.

Hidden power also comprises the shared view of what those in power consider sensible or reasonable in public debate. Any environmentalist who has sat across the table from government officials or mainstream economists and dared to question the advisability of unlimited economic growth in a resource-constrained world will have met the blank faces that confront anyone breaching those boundaries.

I’m long enough in the tooth to have seen many times the “conventional wisdom” of everyday conversation become a forgotten tale and am constantly amazed by how easily people move from one discredited world view to another without beginning to develop some scepticism about that conventional wisdom……    

Yesterday’s post tracked my own journey of discovery about “change” and power – first as a Scottish politician working with community groups, political colleagues, official advisers, academics and journalists; and, since 1990, as a consultant working to European bureaucracy and with Central European and Central Asian technocrats and politicians – local and national – all the time trying to keep up with the burgeoning relevant literature in fields such as “managing change”, “institutional reform” and “developing capacities”   

This experience suggests that there are actually four very different bodies of thinking and writing about “change – and how it happens” - each using different language and each with different audiences and loyalties…..

- Managing Change – the “management of change” literature was written by management consultants looking for markets and hit a peak about 15 years ago. The ultimate business guru book is an excellent introduction to the people and ideas on which that genre drew.  Critical management studies (CMS) was an interesting (if badly written) radical academic response to the overfocus of those writings on senior business executives with power and authority.  

- People Power – the literature of what we might call “Social change” is diverse and developing fast as the sense of crisis develops. It includes such fields as self-help, community enterprise and social movements and, for me, offers the best written and least self-serving material. Ronald Douthwaite’s Short Circuit – strengthening local economies for security in an unstable world (2003) is still one of the best arguments for social enterprise.  Tarrow’s Power in Movement: Social Movements and Contentious Politics is a good summary of the last group. International Charities (such as Oxfam) also make an important contribution to thinking….  

- State Reform – it’s amazing to realise that Public Sector Reform (PSR) is only about 25 years old….the writings come almost exclusively from academics and consultants and either ape that of change management; or of the deconstructionists of CMS. Increasingly the literature on “change” has been coming from state bodies (national and international) such as The World Bank, OECD, Asian Development Bank, ODI etc and is addressed to senior officials, academics (and journalists?)…

- The White Heat of Technology – everyone’s great hope in the face of the environmental and financial disasters (which people have eventually understood) now face the world….We are overwhelmed by the books which all sorts of people have been pouring out in the past decade giving us the stories of the technological, economic and social forces which produced (and change) the world in which we now live.    

Coincidentally, the first thing I found in this morning’s surfing was a presentation by Chris Martenson’s about his Crash course – a full version of which can be accessed here. That single hour’s viewing told me more than I had learned in the several hours it took me last week to read Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything.

The presentation nicely complemented last week’s reading of Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations - a book which has apparently been making waves in Europe. His basic argument is that the wave of the future is joint-ownership and his book celebrates those companies (some quite large) which have adopted that principle and identifies some of the preconditions, systems and procedures which seem to account for its success.

Stand and Deliver - a new design for successful government??

A week ago I mentioned Ed Straw's “Stand and Deliver - a new design for successful government”.

In this – and a future post – I want to examine its analysis and claims.

It is an angry book - which reflects the public’s loss of trust in the political system….. but has attracted surprisingly few reviews - so let me start with the BBC coverage which, as you would expect, is simply a summary of the book’s blurb they were given -

The thrust of Ed Straw's book is that the current system of government is too adversarial, fails to include any feedback on whether policies have succeeded, gives little choice to voters and suffers from a civil service which hampers politicians' attempts to get things done."Between elections, the places where power resides are the news media running their various agendas, good and bad, political and business - large companies and industries with expert preferential lobbyists and party funders, dealing with a political and civil service class mostly ignorant of their business," he says.

He says governments "limp on with a mixture of muddle, error, howlers and the occasional success" and politicians "rarely work out before getting power that it's bust". He says he has come to the conclusion that the civil service cannot be reformed on its own, because reform would involve transferring more power to the government, which would "make it worse because they have too much power already". 

So his solution is a revamp of the whole system of government. The better-known reforms that he wants to see include proportional representation and state funding of political parties - with a ban on large donations - to promote competition among parties and make sure that individuals or interests cannot buy influence.Swiss-style referendums would be held on a more regular basis, while governments would be limited to four-year terms and prime ministers not allowed to serve more than eight years (to stop the "autocracy cap" where a leader with pretty much unchecked power becomes autocratic and "wants to stay for ever because you can't imagine life without that power"). 

His more radical ideas are based around bringing in new feedback systems into the working of governments.He likens government at present to a gardener planting seeds, telling people what the garden will look like but then never actually checking whether or not they have grown as planned (instead spending lots of time checking on the sharpness of a spade or the water efficiency of a hose).That is in contrast to the private sector, which checks on the outcomes of spending continually.

A similar discipline needs to come into government, he says.There has been progress with the National Audit Office, the Office for National Statistics and select committees, he says, but he wants them all brought under the umbrella of the second chamber (the House of Lords at the moment) becoming a "Resulture" able to score policies and kill off those ones which are not working. 

The civil service would be radically revamped with it retaining a smaller administrative role, but in other areas there would no longer be a permanent civil service. Instead specialists with knowledge of, say, the railways, would be brought in to contract, manage and regulate that industry. 

Ed Straw says that his application of organisational theory onto how the UK government works is unique. He has also strong views on the Labour Party's structure. He says a lot of Labour's problems could have been avoided if they had a better process for challenging or replacing a leader, saying the Conservative system is much more efficient. It would have allowed Mr Blair to be removed before the 2005 election, for Gordon Brown to have gone within a year of taking office and John Smith to have led Labour in 1992 rather than Neil Kinnock, he says.But whatever the changes within parties, he says that successive governments have shown that nothing much will change without the wider reforms he is suggesting.

Most Brits will find all of this very acceptable….although I personally am a bit disappointed that his book doesn’t make any reference to the voluminous “What’s Wrong with British Government” literature.

- Chris Foster (academic, government adviser and fellow PWC consultant) wrote in 2005 an important paper Why we are so badly governed? – an enlarged version of which can be found in his book of the same year British Government in Crisis 

- Kate Jenkins was an active participant in the changes of the 1990s and wrote an important book in 2007 about her work Politicians and Public Services which is admittedly more descriptive.

- But others – such as John Seddon – have offered a more systemic approach
- and most British Think Tanks at one time or another have written critiques containing fairly radical proposals for change in the government system.

So it would have been useful if Straw had given some indication of exactly how his approach differs from others. But all we get is a short sentence saying his approach is “unique”!

 Apparently this is because his is an “an organizational perspective” (page 10) But what exactly does he mean by this? 

He seems to mean the “contestability” brought by competition between commercial companies (when it is allowed to exist) thereby raising a couple of critical questions - the first being the hoary question which occupied some of us in the 1980s – the extent to which it was possible to apply the same management principles in  public and commercial organisations. One the Professors on my MSc programme wrote one of the classic articles on this – with a strong warning about the scale of the difference between the two contexts and their measures (“profit” and “public interest”)

The second question is - Has the contestability factor not been at the heart of New Public Management (NPM) which the UK has had for the past 20-odd years?  
Ed Straw has been a senior partner in the Price Waterhouse Cooper (PWC) Management Consultancy for many years – and gave evidence to the British Parliament’s Select Committee on Public Administration in 2005 which included strong support,for example, for the privatization of the Prison Service…and talked loosely about the need for further “politicization” of the Civil Service. In the name of “accountability”…..

His Demos pamphlet of the same year – The Dead Generalist – spelled out in more detail what he meant. Apparently he wants more contestability…..but his book is not happy with NPM – on page 36 he says simply that 

“the developers of NPM omitted some essential components of the original conception”. On the same page he refers to the “countless diagrams attempting to represent the unified field theory of public sector reform developed in central units like the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and Delivery Unit from international management consultancies…..some are worth reading and some so limited as to be aberrant”. 

And that’s it! He divulges no more – except to tell us to read Norman Dixon’s “On the Psychology of Military Incompetence” (1976), Peter Drucker, Charles Handy, Michael Porter, Peter Senge and 3 others I have only vaguely heard of….

So what are the "essential components" of the NPM model which the British designers missed? We’re not told….

footnote; the subtlety of the book's  main title may be lost on some of my foreign readers - it is the demand that came from the highway robbermen of the past when stopping stage-coaches - "deliver your valuables......" But "delivery" (implementation) is also the bit of policy-making which governments (let alone consultants) have been identifying for decades as the key weakness of the government process

A Call to Arms!

I have been reading these past 2 days an important tract which appeared last year and which pillories the state of British government - Stand and Deliver. It suggests that the performance of the British government system is so poor as to require a total overhaul and indeed formal “Treaty”. The BBC gives good coverage to the author in this piece

His more radical ideas are based around bringing in new feedback systems into the working of governments.He likens government at present to a gardener planting seeds, telling people what the garden will look like but then never actually checking whether or not they have grown as planned (instead spending lots of time checking on the sharpness of a spade or the water efficiency of a hose). That is in contrast to the private sector, which checks on the outcomes of spending continually.

A similar discipline needs to come into government, he says. There has been progress with the National Audit Office, the Office for National Statistics and select committees, he says, but he wants them all brought under the umbrella of the second chamber (the House of Lords at the moment) becoming a "Resulture" able to score policies and kill off those ones which are not working.

I call this a “tract” since it is not the normal “run of the mill” academic, political or technocratic treatise. Its author is thoroughly familiar with the political and technocratic worlds (less so the academic) and is very angry with what he has experienced……

So it is a very individual take on the British system of government – despite his consultancy experience in other countries and his emphasis on the need for “benchmarking”, only the Swiss system really seems to rate for him.

My first reaction as I read the opening pages was to try to remember when I had last read such an onslaught…… Simon Jenkins’ “Accountable to None – the Tory Nationalisation of Britain” (1996) and Thatcher and Sons (2006) were both powerful exposes of the excesses of the 1979-2006 governments; Christopher Foster’s British Government in Crisis (2005) was more measured and brought his particular rich blend of academia and consultancy. It took a search of the latter’s book to remind me of the title and author of the famous expose of civil service waste which had first attracted Margaret Thatcher’s attention - Leslie Chapman’s Your Disobedient Servant (1979). And 2005 saw the launching of the Power Inquiry into the discontents about British government……

Oddly, however, none of these books appear in Straw’s three page and rather idiosyncratic bibliography.

The book itself promises to give an “organisational” rather than political take on the subject – which suited me perfectly as this has been my perspective since I first went into “government” (local) in 1968 – absorbing the more radical challenge to hierarchies and power…..Faced in turn with the challenge in 1975 of becoming one of the senior figures on the new Strathclyde Region, I used my position to develop more open and inclusive policy-making processes – extending to junior officials and councillors, community activists. With a huge Labour majority we could afford to be generous to any opposition! And, even under Thatcher, the Scottish Office Ministers were conciliatory – “partnership” was the name of the game we helped develop and was most evident in the success of the “Glasgow” revival. Straddling the worlds of academia and politics, I was able to initiate some important networks to try to effect social change

It was this experience of cooperating with a variety of actors in different agencies I took with me when I opted in 1990 to go into consultancy work in central Europe – to help develop the different sort of government capacity they needed there……then, for 8 years in Central Asia. I was lucky in being allowed to operate there to take advantage of “windows of opportunity” and not be hogbound with the stupid procurement rules…but I became highly critical of the EC development programme as you will see in this 2011 paper The Long Game – not the Logframe

Throughout this entire 45 year-period, I have been keeping up with the literature on change and public management – so am intrigued by this book of Ed Straw’s which promises to bring an organisational perspective to the frustrations we all have with government systems…….  

It was published more than a year ago; has a dedicated website but, from my google search, seems to have gone down like a lead balloon. Tomorrow I hope to present his arguments and explore how well the book fares on the following tests -
-  “resonating” with the times?
-  a “convincing” argument?
-  demonstrated “feasibility”?  
-  opposition identified?
- sources of support?

The mask of reform

A rereading of yesterday’s questions for a Skype discussion today was quite salutary – particularly the first one – “What were the forces which helped reform the state system of the various EU member countries?” Talk about begging the question! In what sense can we actually say the British or French state system has actually reformed in the past 40 years – let alone in a “better” direction?? Of course the rhetoric of reform is in place – which it certainly wasn’t 40 years ago. I vividly remember the writing of organisational analysts such as Charles Lindblom in the 1970s who invented phrases such as “disjointed incrementalism” to demonstrate the impossibility of modern public oganisations being able to change radically. Suddenly in the late 1980s, the language changed and everything seemed possible – “Total Quality Management” was a typical phrase. Thatcher has a lot to answer for – in creating the illusion that private management (concepts and people) had the answer. And, perversely, the greater the chaos it caused, the greater the need for management.
After several waves of major public sector reforms in Britain, a lot of people would say that things have gone backward – or, more nuanced, that any improvements are down to technological and financial rather than managerial developments. And “managerial” covers elements of both macro structures (like Agencies) and management hierarchy and behaviour - which has certainly got worse as the ethic of public service has disappeared. But who is best placed to make such judgements? Using what criteria? Do we rely on public surveys? But survey work is so profoundly influenced by the sorts of questions asked – and interpretations. Politicians, managers and professionals all have their vested interest in the stance they take – although the older “coalface” professional is perhaps in the best position to judge.
We have a lot of comparative indicators these days about both individual public services (France regularly tops the league tables for health; Finland for education) and governance systems. But they don’t seem to have much link with the experiences of ordinary people. This is where the efforts of a small journal like Scottish Review are so important – in putting spotlight on the greed and incompetence of leaders of public services in Scotland. Today its indefatigable editor watched the behaviour of the 2 most senior people of Glasgow University (my alma mater) during a at a public meeting of students trying to understand the heavy-handed police raid (which included a helicopter) on students occupying a building. Last Tuesday, 15 students were occupying the Hetherington Club, the police despatched to the scene between 40 and 80 officers (the number varies from account to account), up to 18 vehicles and the Strathclyde helicopter. As Kenneth Roy writes "What was all that about? The police made themselves look more than a little foolish". A combination of education and media exposure has made the british public lose its traditional deference to those with authority. But increasingly those in public positions are exposed for lacking the basic character (let alone competence)for the job. And, increasingly, managerialism (and the salaries which go to the top echelons)seems to be at the root of the problem. I therefore return to the question I posed in my 2006 paper to the NISPAcee Conference - how can those of us who come from such culture dare to give advise to those struggling in "transition" countries? And should these countries bother anyway about transition to such systems? They were in the neo-liberal heaven (everything for sale) long before us - in the mid 1990s when their taxation systems collapsed and their elites realised what a great legitimisation for their corruption the new Western Weltanschaung gave them!

Either the University Principal knew and approved what was about to happen, in which case he showed extremely poor judgement; or he was unaware of the invitation to the police until the helicopter was buzzing overhead, in which case he had lost control of his own staff. Either way there is an issue of personal responsibility. In the meeting in Bute Hall, we saw a microcosm of the more general failings of Scottish public life: the largely meaningless incantation of a duty of care; the feebleness of non-executives even, as in this case, an elected one; the reluctance of those in power to acknowledge their own errors; the tendency in a crisis to consolidate the crumbling position of the strong while failing to protect the vulnerable; the absence of wit and forensic ability

The politics of reform

I’ve had sadly little feedback on my paper on Chinese Administrative Reform (although I do get an occasional “hit” on my blog from there). But one friend gave me a great two page commentary on it which made, amongst other points, the following interesting comments –
• it’s difficult to absorb in one paper so much stuff both about how the Chinese public services seem to work and the reform efforts of Western European countries in the past few deadaes. Make it two separate papers!
• Although its apparent focus is China, it can be read with benefit by all public admin people (which would perhaps argue for keeping its ambitious focus on both China and the Western experience?)
• It draws (like almost all public admin literature) too much on anglo-saxon experience. What about India, South America, Indonesia for example??

I very much agree with the last point – and have indeed myself complained about the bias of so much of the material. Spanish-speaking academics are in a better position to help us understand interesting developments in the past decade in the various countries of Latin America – and indeed a bit of a search can unearth relevant material in English about that continent’s experience. For example, a recent 200 page book (which can be completely downloaded) on the various global efforts to make countries more democratic contains three chapters on Latin American experience. The book also has a chapter on the recent decentralisation in India; on Indonesia; and Lebanon. And a useful overview by Philippe Schmitter (whose 2004 paper for the Council of Europe on the democratic deficit in European countries I had missed)
But a 2001 paper by Patrick Heller on the politics of decentralisation in Kerala, South Africa and Porto Alegre is much more focussed on these issues. The purpose of Heller’s article is to - The paper rightly emphasises that effective reform of state organisations is political – and comes from external pressure (not from within). For examples, strong local government has historically come from working class pressure but this does not necessarily lead to social change and justice -

especially in an era when globalization has weakened the ability of nation-states to deploy the regulatory and redistributive instruments through which European states evened social opportunities and incomes in the mid 20th century.
Equity-enhancing reforms in both South Africa and Brazil have, for example, been frustrated. And even in Kerala, where working-class mobilization has a longer history and has wielded significant redistributive results, disappointing economic growth, the pressures of liberalization, and the declining service efficiency of the state have all combined to threaten earlier gains in social development.
This leads us to the second problematic of democratization, namely the institutional character of democratic states. Even where formal democracy has been consolidated, the question arises as to just how responsive these democracies are. Developing states have become politically answerable through periodic elections, but have the bureaucratic institutions they inherited from authoritarian or colonial rule become more open to participation by subordinate groups? Have they really changed their modes of governance, the social partners they engage with and the developmental goals they prioritize? Is the reach and robustness of public legality sufficient to guarantee the uniform application of rights of citizenship?
Decentralization in the developing world, especially when driven by international development agencies, has more often than not been associated with the rolling back of the state, the extension of bureaucratic control, and the marketization of social services.
Because such a project is tantamount to fundamentally transforming the exercise of state power, it requires an exceptional, and in most of the developing world improbable, set of political and institutional opportunities.
In South Africa, the Indian state ofKerala, and the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre, new political configurations and underlying social conditions have converged to create just such a set of opportunities.
Most visibly, left-of-centre political parties that were born of popular struggles have come to power and inherited significant transformative capacities. The ascendancy of the African National Congress (ANC), the Communist Party of India–Marxist (CPM), and the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) have all been associated with the formulation of clear and cohesive transformative projects in which the democratization of local government was given pride of place. Although the parties in question have captured power at different levels of the state—the national, provincial, and municipal, respectively—they have all enjoyed, and indeed used, their authoritative powers to initiate fundamental reforms in the character of local government.
If a committed political agent is a necessary ingredient for administrative and fiscal devolution, the democratic empowerment of local government is critically dependent on the dynamics and capacities of local actors. Again, the cases examined here are quite exceptional. All three boast a rich and dense tapestry of grassroots democratic organizations—the historical legacy of prolonged mass-based prodemocracy movements—capable of mobilizing constituencies traditionally excluded from policy-making arenas, and dislodging traditional clientalistic networks.

But the building of local democratic governmentrequires not only that a favorable political alignment be maintained but that a delicate andworkable balance between the requirements of institution building and grassroots participation be struck.
Subtle differences in political configurations and relational dynamics can thus produce divergent trajectories.
In the cases of Kerala and Porto Alegre, initial reforms that increased the scope of local participation have been sustained, and have seen a dramatic strengthening of local democratic institutions and planning capacity.
In contrast, in South Africa a negotiated democratic transition that has been rightfully celebrated as one of the most inclusive of its kind, and foundational constitutional and programmatic commitments to building “democratic developmental local government” have given way to concerted political centralization, the expansion of technocratic and managerial authority, and a shift from democratic to market modes of accountability.
If democratic decentralization in Kerala and Porto Alegre has been conceived as a means of resurrecting socially transformative planning in an era of liberalization, local government in South Africa has become the frontline in the marketization of public authority. Given the similarity of favorable preconditions—capable states and democratically mobilized societies—we are confronted with an intriguing divergence in outcomes.

Finally, a nice fable from the Real Economics blog.

explore the conditions under which a distinctly democratic variant of decentralization—defined by an increase in the scope and depth of subordinate group participation in authoritative resource allocation—can be initiated and sustained.
Across the political spectrum, the disenchantment with centralized and bureaucratic states has made the call for decentralization an article of faith. Strengthening and empowering local government has been justified not only on the grounds of making government more efficient but also on the grounds of increasing accountability and participation. But to govern is to exercise power, and there are no a priori reasons why more localized forms of governance are more democratic.
Indeed, the history of colonial rule was largely a history of decentralized authority in which order was secured and revenues extracted through local despots.

Four basic questions

The glorious weather of the last few weeks here in the mountains seems at last to be changing. And I shall be heading down to the plains tomorrow – slightly ashamed at not having the fortitude to share the rigours of winter with my old neighbours. But my better half calls – and, now that the car is equipped for the winter (I spent most of yesterday at the garage as they rectified a few faults the car had developed as a result of the 10,000 kilometre battering I gave it in the early summer) we may well head to Sofia soon. The paintings and friends beckon.
In my recent (and rather long) lament about political impotence, I mentioned Will Hutton (and his latest book Them and Us – Changing Britain – why we need a fair society) as one of the people who has the wide inter-disciplinary reading necessary for anyone to have anything useful to say to us about how we might edge societies away from the abyss we all seem to be heading toward. I’ve used the verb „edge” because the calls for revolution which come from the old leftists are unrealistic (if not self-indulgent) but mainly because, historically, significant change has rarely come from deliberate social interventions. It has come from a more chaotic process. More and more disciplines are applying chaos theory in recognition of this – even management which is less a discipline than a parasite! So the call these days is for paradigm shift to help us in the direction of the systemic change the world needs to make in its move away from neo-liberalism. And close readers of the blog may recollect that I suggested that any convincing argument for systemic reform need to tackle four questions -
• Why do we need major change in our systems?
• Who or what is the culprit?
• What programme might start a significant change process?
• What mechanisms (process or institutions) do we need to implement such programmes?

Most books in this field focus more on the first two questions – and are much lighter on the last two questions. The first two questions require pretty demanding analytical skills – of an interdisciplinary sort which, as I’ve argued, the very structure of universities actively discourages. Hence the limited choice of authors – perhaps the two best known being Immanual Wallerstein and Manuel Castells. Both offer complex systemic views and, given the nature of their study, the writing style is not very accessible. Susan Strange made a great contribution to our practical understanding of Casino Capitalism as she called it - until her very sad death a decade ago.
Sadly, two other well-known names with a much more accessible writing style – Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein – tend to focus a lot of their energy on rogue states such as the USA.
William Hutton’s The World We’re In (2002) was as powerful and accessible of the limitations of the anglo-saxon model as you will ever read – and, with his stakeholder concept, carried with it a more optimistic view of the possibilities of reform. David Korten’s various books also offer good analysis – although his focus on the American corporation does not easily carry to Europe (See William Davies' recent Reinventing the Firm for a recent attempt). You can read Korten’s review of a Soros book here. Archdruid offers a contrary view here - although I’m not quite sure what to make of this particular blog – archdruid indeed!!
Most commentary on the recent global financial crisis has identified banks as the culprit – and those governments who made the move in recent decades to free banks from the regulation to which they have been subject. Marxists such as David Harvey have reminded us that government and banking behaviour is simply a reflection of a deeper issue – of surplus capital.
Hutton’s latest book (which I had abandoned a few weeks ago for its rather abstract opening treatment of fairness but dragged from the bookshelf at 04.30 this morning) does gives fairly good treatment to the first 3 questions but does not really even begin to answer the final question. And this is particularly pertinent for Hutton since the stakeholder analysis he brought with his 1995 book The State we’re In chimed with the times; did persuade a lot of people; and seemed at one stage to have got the Prime Minister's ear and commitment. It did not happen, however, and Hutton surely owes us an explanation of why it did not happen. The Management of Change has developed in the past 2 decades into an intellectual discipline of its own - and Hutton might perhaps use some it in a future edition of the book to explore this question. He might find Change the World: How Ordinary People Can Achieve Extraordinary Results particularly stimulating (I certainly did)
I would also have wished him to give us some comment on other takes" on our global problems eg the work of David Korten (above); Bill McKibben's Deep Economy: Economics as if the World Mattered; Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias (which instances the amazing Mondragon cooperatives); and David Harvey's The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism. Although he is very generous in his attributions of research work, Hutton is perhaps less so in his recognition of the work of others who are trying to answer what I’ve suggested are the four big questions. There are more and more people trying to understand the mess we are in - and how do get out of it - and more and more books each with its own underlying set of ideological assumption. Will Hutton is one of the few people able to help us make sense of it all.
Finally a site with superb photographs which capture many aspects of Bucharest and Romania.