Showing posts with label technical assistance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technical assistance. Show all posts
Friday, December 5, 2014

Why are the reflective consultants hiding?

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I referred in the last post to the tens (if not hundreds) of billions of euros spent in recent decades by international bodies on what we ...
Wednesday, December 3, 2014

The Missionary Position

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“ Getting to Denmark ” seemed an appropriate title for the collection of musings I’m trying to edit about the challenges which technocrats...
Saturday, October 15, 2011

Can political and academic leopards change their spots?

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Tempus fugit! It's time already to think about a paper for the 2012 NISPAcee Conference - which,again, will be held nearby - at Lake Oh...
Thursday, June 30, 2011

project bids, public services in hard times; and the craft of short stories

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Technical problems with blogspot prevented a post today. But my longer silence is due to my work on a bid for a project. I hate this stage w...
Saturday, May 7, 2011

Sound and fury – signifying nothing?

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I’m now at the stage of creating the slides for the 10 minute presentation of my paper at the Varna Conference on 20 May. It’s a deeply dep...
Thursday, April 28, 2011

Flesh and Blood

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The NISPAcee Conference in Varna advances apace (May 19-22) so yesterday I gave the present version to the local printer for him to run off...
Saturday, April 23, 2011

making sense of what we seem to be saying

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I’ve reached the point with my Conference paper of being able to read it as a critical outsider – interjecting, every now and then – a poin...
Thursday, April 7, 2011

Cowboys, bodyshops and backbone

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I’m on the home strait now for the paper I shall be presenting (insallah) to the Conference of the Network of Institutes of Schools of Publ...
Sunday, March 20, 2011

More thoughts about neighbourhood strategy

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I reached the limit of creativity last week with the draft of my paper for the Varna Conference of NISPAcee. The present draft (updated 9 A...
Sunday, March 6, 2011

harlots of the aid business - part IX

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I was today reminded of a useful EC forum for those interested in capacity development – capacity4dev – which has a special section on the...
Friday, February 25, 2011

uncertainty and capacity - part VIII of a critique

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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 t...
Thursday, February 24, 2011

Rethinking Technical Assistance - part VII

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The more I looked at the EC's reform of TA - the 2008 Backbone strategy - the more I realised that it is simply saying that everyone jus...
Wednesday, February 23, 2011

The context in which we work

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One of the problems about institution building in non-accession countries which I haven’t touched on is the weakness of the our understandi...
Tuesday, February 22, 2011

improving the system - part VI

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What conclusions do I draw from my belated discovery of the critical 2007 EC Court of Auditors Report on Technical Cooperation – and the re...

Guest post from Robert Chambers

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I've just come across a post by Robert Chambers which is highly relevant to my attack on the logframe. In my 1997 book Whose Reality Cou...
Monday, February 21, 2011

Fighting the logframe - part III

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There is, perhaps, a certain arrogance in the argument underlying my position about Technical Assistance – and the last few posts. My basic...
Monday, February 14, 2011

elephants in european administrative space

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I’ve uploaded to the website the paper I want to present to the Varna Conference in May of NISPAcee - the body which has, for the past 20 y...
Saturday, February 12, 2011

who knows of reforms of kleptocratic regimes?

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Three things account for my silence of the last three days – a particularly foul bout of the flu; a powerful novel 1,000 page book The Kindl...
Tuesday, January 4, 2011

Structures, systems and skills - demand and supply again

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As I said, I had a dream about deliberative structures - which got me thinking about the various mechanisms which those in think-tanks and c...