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 30^th 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 20^th 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

The revolutionary english

The Brits have a reputation for respecting tradition which is totally undeserved. The reality is that their government style (at least since the mid 1960s) has been one of the most interventionist – if not revolutionary – putting even Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “waves of creative destruction” to shame. A few examples -

- In the mid 1970s the system of local government was decimated – the average British local authority covers 150,000 people - more than 10 times the European average

- the system has been subject several times since then to massive upheavals

- about two thirds of British civil servants now work in relatively independent Agencies

- virtually everything that can be privatized or contracted out has been so dealt with, with almost no services returning to the municipalities as has been the trend, for example, in Germany

- the National Health Service has been subjected to a never-ending series of organizational upheavals over the past 40 years

- in the mid 2000s, New Labour totally changed the political structures of English local government, encouraging the concentration of power in the hands of a few Cabinet members or a directly-elected mayor.

I supported some of these changes so it’s not the nature of the change I want to draw attention to – it’s rather their frequency and intensity; and the fact that British governments were able to force change through with so little effective opposition. That simply can’t happen in Europe – where the French, for example, are notorious for their rebellious streak; German Governments bound by constitutional constraints and a Federal structure of power-sharing; and the Italians by inertia.

Not for nothing did a British conservative Minister describe the British system as one of “elective dictatorship”. And, in the 1980s, an American political scientist drew attention to this in a book about French and British styles of centralisation subtitled “British dogmatism and French pragmatism”

“Illusions of Adequacy”

Because of the powers at their fingertips, British government leaders develop “illusions of grandeur”. All other European leaders know they have to negotiate – whether with other political leaders, with trade unionists or with industrialists – but not the Brits who can simply impose new policies at the snap of their fingers….

Well not quite…..they have learned that many of the “tools” of government no longer seem to work…But they can go through the motions….

.It was significant that it was only as a last resort that Theresa May tried to negotiate with the Labour leadership on Brexit. In any normal country facing such a crisis, that would have been the first not the last resort…

Britain has experienced only 2 coalitions since 1945 – a brief one Labour was forced to try with the Liberals  in the late 70s; and the one David Cameron negotiated with the Lib-Dems in 2010 which lasted the full 5 years.

“Negotiation” is something the English political class doesn’t do. I say “English” because Labour had a different approach in Scotland in 1999 when the new devolved system of Scottish government got underway.. Although the electoral arithmetic didn’t require it, Labour made a critical decision that the people of Scotland needed a clear signal that the new devolved system would be more consensual than the tired Westminster one….And, since then, a distinctive Scottish approach to policy has developed – as you will see in this article.

I would suggest that we need to explore what it is in the English mentality that makes it so difficult to consider coming together for the common good….Somehow the elites prefer the “Big-Bang” approach to change…..and don’t stay around long enough to realise that it just doesn’t work!

A recent book painted a frightening picture of an elite which is totally isolated from a sense of reality - Reckless opportunists – elites at the end of the establishment; Aeron Davis (2018)

After twenty years of interrogating the managers and politicians of the UK, Davis finds their leadership to be ‘solitary, rich, nasty, brutish and short’. Leadership could and should, he feels, be ‘connected, modestly paid, nice, civilised and long’. But it is not. He provides a two-page list of reforms that might help.
Davis began by assuming that there was a functioning Establishment, with a sense of its shared interests, and decided to investigate how it worked. He was confronted by a growing body of evidence that it didn’t work as he expected. The powerful felt obliged only to look after themselves. While many spoke of their larger ethical concerns, they had to achieve immediate ‘results’ that can be ‘measured’. Davis Davis’s account shows that no one runs the country.

There isn’t an ‘Establishment’. Its demise has been evident for at least a decade. The one that Anthony Sampson describes in his famous “The Anatomy of Britain” (1980) did exist. He revisited it, for it was never monolithic, in further studies after. Now Davis’s book has made me change my mind. My view that the downfall of the system began with the triumph of late Thatcherism and the reforms of Blair. First, there was her confinement of the trade unions and Big Bang deregulation of the City and the full-scale privatisations of the 1980s. This was then followed by an expanded public sector that was crucified by New Labour with its demands for the simulated ‘competition’, of targets, outsourcing and internal markets.

 Postscript

One of the earliest books to draw attention to the hyperinnovation of the English state in the last 50 years was The British Regulatory State – high modernism and Hyper-innovation; by Michael Moran (2003). 

It is a complex - but brilliant - book since it adopts a rare “political economy” approach – looking at institutional changes as part of a wider and deeper change in economic and social structures. 
All previous books I’ve read about British politics (and I’ve read quite a few) focus almost exclusively on what has been called “high politics” ie the high and visible institutions of state. “Low politics” (the field of the professional associations (medical and financial), local government and all their inspectorates) is pretty technical and, although the subject of study, has flown under most people’s radar.

Since the privatization of the 80s and 90s, however, its significance has grown immensely – but this has received proper treatment in Europe only since the publication of a book by Majone in 1994. 

I appear to have read the first third of Moran's book with great interest since my copy (from almost a decade ago) is scored with strong pencil marks – but I seem to have lost interest a third of the way through. I am now going back to read it more carefully. 

As I explained earlier this year, it should be read in conjunction with a book which appeared in 2007 – The Rise of the Unelected Democracy and the new separation of powers (which, typically, I also left about one third into the reading)  

Moran was one of the best UK political scientists – whose focus was much wider than most such academics. In 2005 he also wrote a textbook which, although aimed at undergraduates, is ideal reading (even at 500 pages) for a foreign audience Politics and Governance in the UK - given the breadth of his reading and the originality of his thought.

blowing up departmental silos

It was some 50 years ago when people first started to promise the “end of bureaucracy” but centralized control has been too seductive a notion for those with power to be willing to surrender it easily.

We have talked a lot since then about people getting lost in “departmental silos” but real reform of public services (and indeed of commercial organisations) is notoriously difficult.

The early efforts made in the UK in the 1970s introduced management techniques to government but Thatcher grew impatient with that and opted instead for the outright transfer of bodies and services to the private sector and, as a second-best, the contracting-out of services – with the subsequent explosion of audit and management controls…

And New Labour’s “modernization of government” programme from 1999 turned out to be a modern version of target-driven Stalinism.

The Coalition government of 2010-15 seemed to offer greater flexibility – with a new emphasis on the role of the third sector and even of worker-cooperatives. But that soon dies the death…

So it’s understandable that people should be cynical when they encounter talk of reform…..but I’ve just finished reading a rather different sort of book……“Radical Help – how we can remake the relationships between us and revolutionise the welfare state” which has come out of someone taking the trouble to immerse herself for several years in the “Dead-end” worlds in which too many British citizens live these days – locked in an apparently never-ending cycle of despair and hopelessness.

We have all heard of these “Neighbours from hell” cases and it was with such families that Hilary Cottam then had the courage to work with – unable to accept a model which allows hundreds of thousands of pounds to be spent on them, taking up the time of dozens of welfare specialists. One example she quotes was actually visited by no less than 73 different officials from a variety of agencies!!

Slowly and patiently she built small teams to work with such families, selected by a small panel including the mother herself who then became part of “the solution” – a total inversion of the traditional model. The same, flexible approach was used for other “wicked problems” – the transition to adolescence; the search for good work; good health; and ageing well….

At one stage, the Prime Minister himself visited the project and was so impressed that he instructed the Cabinet Office to use the same approach on a wider basis. This was part of the “Big Society” idea which was reflected in ideas about “the enabling society” which The Carnegie Trust for one still seems to keep alive.

But government officials simply can’t understand that the mechanistic “scaling up” of such delicate work requires skills and methods not easily found in "toolkits" - and their efforts quickly failed

Seven years ago, it appears, Cottam was part of a small team which produced a pamphlet on the same theme - The Relational State – how recognising the importance of human relationships could revolutionise the role of the state (IPPR 2012).

Like me, she is attracted to the recent work of Frederic Laloux and also like me, she quotes favourably the liberationist work in the 1970s of Ivan Illich and Paolo Freire

But, so far, I know of only one government which has abolished Departments of State and really tried to get officials working flexibly on issues seen by citizens as problematic – and that is the Scottish government. That experience is briefly outlined in the pamphlet “Northern Exposure” you will find in the reading list attached.

A Resource

Reinventing Organisations; Frederic Laloux (2014)

Dealing with Dysfunction – innovative problem solving in the public sector (also 2014) by Jorrit de Jong

The Kafka Brigade public management theory in action; The Rise of the Enabling State (Carnegie Trust 2012)

The Enabling State; sir john elvidge (2012)

Northern Exposure – lessons from the first 12 years of devolved government in Scotland; John Elvidge (Institute of Government 2011)

Why reforming the NHS doesn’t work – the importance of understanding how good eople offer bad care. Valerie Iles (2011)

Public Services Reform – but not as we know it; by Hilary Wainwright (Unison and TNI 2009)

The virus affecting our systems

One of the many dystopian themes which figure in contemporary novels and films is that of the pandemic - of a new virus being let loose in the world and causing havoc. In fact, it’s already happened – it’s called neoliberalism and its gestation can be traced back to a conference in 1947 in the Swiss resort of Mont Pelerin attended by such luminaries as Hayek and .Popper

The full story of how the corporate world has patiently, over the past half-century and more, funded the setting up of hundreds of right-wing think tanks who have unceasingly pumped out their anti-government message is told in The road from Mont Pelerin – the making of the neoliberal thought collective; P Mirowski (2009)

And it wasn’t just economic doctrine that was affected – it was also how we thought government services should be organised. Academia in particular has had a strange fixation over the past 30 years with the idea of organizational improvements of public services called..."New Public Management" (NPM)

In the late 60s I was an early “reformer” – pushing at the open door offered by the 2 Royal Commissions on Local Government which operated in the UK between 1966-68 and which led to the wholesale reorganization of that system in both Scotland and England and Wales in the mid-1970s.

The only academic discipline covering such developments at the time was that of public administration whose intellectual fare was every bit as boring as its name suggests – although my politics tutor, John P Macintosh, wrote a powerful and prescient book in 1968 on “The Devolution of Power – local government, regionalism and nationalism”. 
And another academic, John Stewart, was shortly to start electrifying a new generation of officials  at Birmingham’s Institute for Local Government (INLOGOV) with a new vision of local power - centred on a more open and flexible system of local government – which, sadly, failed to materialize.

Since the mid 1970s, the search for the silver bullet of organizational improvement (or reform) in its public services has been endless. 50 years ago we thought that the right rules (and strategies) – fairly managed by well-intentioned officials and politicians in a system of accountable power – was the way forward…

We threw that model away in the 1980s and bought into the “theory of the market” – believing that citizens would be better off being able to choose between competitive suppliers.

David Osborne’s "Reinventing Government" (1992) was the book which really opened the floodgates – with its notion of “Steering…not rowing..”

The only problem was that most of the relevant services have this basic reality of being chunky monopolies ….Overnight therefore a system of regulators had to be created – bringing forth an Audit Explosion.

By 2000 it was obvious that wasn’t working – but it took 2008 to blow the thing apart.

But although another way of organizing things, whether in the economy or government, has been actively explored for many decades we still do not have a consensus about a better way….In 2015 the UNDP published a good summary of what it called the three types of public management we have seen in the past half century. There are different ways of describing the final column but this one gives a sense of the values which have been trying to find expression..

The three types of public management

	Old Public Admin	New Public Management	New Public Service
Theoretical foundation	Political theory	Economic theory	Democratic theory
Model of behaviour	Public interest	self-interest	Citizen interest
Concept of public interest	Political, enshrined in law	Aggregation of individual interests	Dialogue about shared values
To whom civil servants responsive	Client	Customer	citizen
Role of government	Rowing	Steering	Serving, negotiating
Mechanism for achieving policy	Programme	Incentives	Building coalitions
Approach to accountability	Hierarchic	Market	Public servants within law, professional ethics, values
Admin discretion	Limited	Wide	Constrained
Assumed organisational structure	Top down	Decentralised	collaborative
Assumed motivation of officials	Conditions of service	Entrepreneurial, drive to reduce scope of government	Public service, desire to contribute

But NPM - like neoliberalism - just seems to have too strong a grip. And we still await a replacement
This is the story I try to tell in my little book “Hos did Administrative Reform get to be so Sexy?” whose current version you can access here.

Update;
I have just come across a great book which identified and explored this issue of our being taken over by a new ideology – what the French used to call “La Pensee Unique”, It is Monoculture – how one story is changing everything by FS Michaels (2011).

Real Control

I have always been a fan of companies which are managed by those who work in them. In the late 1970, I helped start up a project called the Local Enterprise Advisory Project (LEAP) which morphed in a large multi-million Community Business encouraging and supporting those living in marginalised estates to set up companies offering local services which small businesses locally wouldn’t touch.

It provided people with purpose – and services – and wages instead of welfare. But ultimately it became too dependent on government grants – and folded.

But the hierarchies which poison the atmosphere of workers in both commercial and government organisations are becoming increasingly unacceptable. Mondragon and Buurtszog are only the most famous of cooperative which inspire us to contemplate a new working model.

Reinventing Organisations (2014) by Frederic Laloux gave us a great typology and principles for self-management which should inspire us to action. Dealing with Dysfunction – innovative problem solving in the public sector (also 2014) by Jorrit de Jong is a very different sort of book but it too indicates that a different sort of cooperative approach can work.

A new book has just appeared in the UK in the same spirit which I hope to report on soon - Radical help – how we can remake the relationships between us and revolutionise the welfare state; Hilary Cottam (2019)

The OECD is not my favourite body – it peddles neo-liberal solutions and the dreaded New Public Management.

A few years ago it set up something called the Observatory for Public Sector Innovation which has just produced a report with a lot of examples of how cities are working together to use Big Data to produce local solutions.

But as befits a group of technocrats their language is impenetrable – and they clearly cater for an academic audience since every second line has 2 or 3 academic references which completely breaks the rhythm of the reading, The report is Transformation of Public value – cities as the playground for the future; (OECD 2019)

Those wanting to see how public services can work for ordinary people should really read Public Services Reform – but not as we know it; by Hilary Wainwright (Unison and TNI 2009) is a rare readable case study of a bottom-up approach to reform.

As far as the process of improving local services is concerned, I would strongly recommend Creating Public Value in Practice – advancing the common good in a ….noone in charge world; ed J Bryson et al (2015), 

The last 3 books can all be accessed in full by clicking the hyperlink…..

Let the Fingers Do the Talking

One of the reasons why this blog continues is that the physical process of writing words – whether on a keyboard or on the pages of a notebook – somehow releases thoughts that take me in unexpected directions.

Let me give an example….On Thursday I came across an article which annoyed me – it was in something called the Stanford Social Innovation Review – so I should have known better!

It seemed to be about community-based solutions to perennial problems like homelessness - but talked of

 “the urgent need to eradicate social and economic ills rather than just manage them”.

Three things annoyed me on my first skim of the article – first the sheer arrogance of such an approach particularly when, secondly, it made no reference to any previous efforts to find such a "silver bullet". And, finally, that a serious university (Hertie in Berlin) seemed to take it seriously enough to offer the authors a platform – who were also claiming in aid a recent British book “Radical Help”.

Bingo, I thought….here’s a peg on which to hang a post about the importance of decentralized approaches – but not before I clear the ground to spell out some of the efforts which others have made to supply alternatives to the centralized delivery of services….

Hence the two previous posts – the first which started with Ralston Saul’s quote about democratic structures being more important than technocratic; my own critique (from 1977) of managerialism and pluralism; then the technocracy of New Labourism; and, finally, the hypocrisy of the Conservative “Big Society” and “mutualisation” programmes from 2010.

The second post was a reminder of the significance of Frederic Laloux’s book on “Reinventing Organisations” and its celebration of worker self-management…

The Kafka Brigade  

But, as I prepared for what I thought would be a detailed critical post about the article The New Practice of Public Problem Solving, I did my usual surfing and came across an amazing book with an unusual title - Dealing with Dysfunction – innovative problem solving in the public sector by Jorrit de Jong (2014). It's written by a Dutchman who had, a decade earlier, been a member of a team called “The Kafka Brigade” (!) - whose work is described in this excellent short article The Kafka Brigade – public management theory in practice; M Mathias (2015). 
This has elements of “action-research” – to which I’ve always been attracted – shades of “learning while doing”……The opening chapter of his book (see title link) puts it more precisely -

“using a bottom-up diagnostic approach, collaborative inquiry, creative problem-solving techniques and a pressure-cooker environment, the Kafka Brigade has tapped into the knowledge and experience of hundreds if public officials and clients”  

At this stage, I would normally clear my throat a bit ironically……but, hey, we all have to make a living …and the jargon isn’t all that difficult …..And he and his team readily accept that his approach has yielded both failures and successes……it is indeed a pragmatic learning process. Indeed he quotes one of the first academics to devote a full-length book about “bureaucratic dysfunctions” – Herbert Kaufman - who wrote (in 1977) that -

“what we need is a detailed clinical approach rather than heated attacks, the delicate wielding of  a scalpel rather than furious flailing around with a meat axe”!

And the heated attacks since then have included (successful) calls for “Deregulation”, “smaller government”. “stronger professional input” and “private sector models of management”.

De Jong makes it clear his approach was influenced by Mark Moore’s concept of Public Value which I discussed (all too briefly) in this post last year about the struggle in the past 20 years to offer a better model for public services than New Public Management

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???

My post also looked critically at some other competing ideas which had been offered – such as “good governance”, the “common good”, “communitarianism”, “service” and “stewardship”

All these concepts have problems – as does “Dealing with Dysfunction” (!!) – but “The Kafka Brigade”?,,,,,now there’s a powerful image!!

I warned you at the start of this post that, more than anything else, I would be trying to “showcase” (what an awful word!!) how I approach the blog first thing in the morning. 
I let the fingers do the talking…..