measuring one's eco footprint

An Italian woman offering “eco-holidays” in Sicily – in a neglected village on the edge of a town (Cefalu) which has been able to exploit mass tourism. It sounds a dream – with the amazing properties she owns having her personal touch not just in their design but in the way she has tried to attach the (declining) village skills and economy to the project. Visitors are taken to see (and taste!) the making of the goat-cheese, wine and bread; to use scooters and horses rather than cars. She personally has led the drive to waste recycling etc But there is a eco-downside which the article doesn’t mention – the fact that all the (highly satisfied) visitors are zoomed in and out by plane! Add the plus and minus eco columns – and out comes a negative.
I suppose she could argue that her visitors would have flown anyway and that her contribution is therefore positive. She has not only created a more sustainable environment in the village – she is also trying to demonstrate to its younger people that they don’t necessarily have to leave the village to get jobs since the old skills do, with suitable marketing, offer a sustainable life. Perhaps also she can “sell” a different vision of life to some of her visitors. But, at least for the visitors, the eco-footprint is negative – and they are being dishonest in buying their holiday as an eco-venture! Interesting issues....check it out at http://www.sicilianexperience.com/

In a small way, the issue relates to another website I came across yesterday “Front Porch Republic” which is a celebration not only of the pleasant North American architectural feature I first came across in Pittsburgh but of the social and political benefits of small towns and “smallness” generally.
http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/?p=707. I want to explore this theme of smallness – but in my next post.

tower of babel

Pieter Bruegel the elder (1563)

I ended my last post with an attack on universities. This is not the first time I have found myself attacking university over-specialisation in the social sciences. When I was struggling in the early 1970s with the appalling social and economic conditions in which almost 20% of the people in the West of Scotland lived, I could find no discipline in academia which could help suggest what we might be able to do at a local level to improve these conditions.

A few of us had to struggle to put a strategy together – the only help we received was from the Tavistock Institute in London and Rowntree Trust in York! Once we had shown the way, the universities spawned their courses and research projects – and began to present themselves as community resources.

Attacks on universities can easily be (mis)represented as leading to “burning of the books”. They also seem rather lonely if not selfish ventures. All those currently in positions of power have passed through university portals and part of their identity rests on the parchment they carry - which marks them as “physicist”, “engineer”, “accountant”, “economist” etc.
Why should they bite the hand which has given them this status? Or deny such positions to those waiting at the gates? The genie cannot, it seems, be put back in the bottle....

But, as I return to the theme 20 years later, I feel that the perspectives, terminology and career structures of the ever-spawning academic specialisms have actually contributed to social alienation and the decline of confidence in government. Why did no-one take Stanislaw Andreski seriously when, in 1971, he wrote his book “Social Science as Sorcery”? Why did it so quickly become out of print?
In the global competitive environment in which universities now operate, universities are now capitalists like anyone else – but the (unchallenged) medieval rhetoric their leaders use about their social role gives them a cloak which conceals even from themselves the evil they are doing.

What is that evil? It is in
· doing nothing to disparage the ethic of utilitarianism, individualism and private profit and
· being the major source of the development of Orwellian new-speak, technical jargon and a modern Tower of Babel.
So what might they be doing?

Basically going back to the Scottish tradition of moral philosophy and political economy – and finding the common language to allow the social sciences to communicate with one another. There are many (older) texts which could form the core of reading for such a course – eg Ivan Illich; Leopold Kohr; Michael Oakeshott; Karl Popper; Neil Postman; JQ Wilson. I will try shortly to give a more definitive list.

In the older blog on my website, I posed the question of which book you would give to a beneficiary – for example in a central Asian or Caucasian country. My choice in Uzbekistan in 2002 for the Deputy Prime Minister I was working with was Guy Peters’ The Future of Governing - four emerging models. In Azerbaijan I gave my Minister Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power!

recovering what has been lost

I want to pursue some thoughts I found myself expressing today when trying today to explain the purpose of the blog. There seem four separate but clearly related lines of argument and I’ve highlighted the phrases which I think are particularly important to develop –
· “The restless search for novelty dishonours the work (practical and written) of the past”. And I inserted an observation in a footnote about how quickly some extraordinary books seem to go out of print.
· “the recent rhetoric about monitoring and evaluation seems to have displaced the more interesting discourse of organisational learning - but, sadly, leaves those who work in organisations cold and cynical. Few people have the chance to come together and shape things in a sustained way - to build on what has gone before”.
· “making sense of the organisational endeavours I've been involved in - to see if there are any lessons which can be passed on” to those who want to make public organisations good for both the public and those who work in them.
· To “restore a bit of institutional memory and social history”

When I sat down to make more sense of all this, I was reminded of a cartoon I had not thought of for decades and google tells me it is Jules Feiffer - who is apparently alive and well. I'm sorry I can't reproduce the cartoon - but th bubble coming out of the little boy's head says -
“I used to think I was poor. Then they told me I wasn't poor, I was needy. Then they told me it was self-defeating to think of myself as needy, I was deprived...then underprivileged. Then they told me underprivileged was overused. I was disadvantaged. I still don't have a dime. But I have a great vocabulary”.
The vocabulary changes and implies that the problem has also – so government is not held accountable for its actions on the previous problem. And a new set of experts are needed.
Whenever we get a new perspective on an issue, we invent a new specialism – with a new elite which then marginalises the message from the bloodstream of the organisation.

Government positions require degrees and post-graduate Degrees – international bodies require PhDs so they are inhabited by those who have successfully played the academic game of specialisation and who are far removed from the hoi poloi

Tolstoy and Hans Christian Andersen – and cartoonists like Jules Feiffer say it all so much better. Even TS Eliot -

……. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition -
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again; and now under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

We need a body of people who tell the universities - "enough is enough!! These specialisms must go. Some simple truths are being masked by both the jargon and terminology you encourage people to use; and the craven cowardice you encourage".

nomad in central europe and central asia

It’s not easy to give up a powerful position in such a large organisation which was doing such interesting work – let alone to leave one’s country of birth. But that is what I effectively did one bright autumn day in 1990 – when I set sail from Kingston on Hull en route for Copenhagen and what was supposed to be a short spell with the Director of Public Health for the European division of the World Health Organisation. On the basis of my presentations of our urban strategy to their Healthy City network, she had invited me to help her identify the opportunities for preventive/public health work in the newly-liberated countries of East and Central Europe; and so began a series of visits to the Health Ministries and voluntary initiatives in each of these countries. The 6 weeks turned into 6 months – and basically set me on a new career as consultant. The EU was putting together its programme of technical assistance and I was one of the first consultants to the CzechoSlovak Republic – working with their new local government system.

When that work finished in late 1991, I returned to the Region – but only as an interim measure because, by then, I was clear that my time in Scotland was over.
Margaret Thatcher was killing local government[1]. I had left my academic base in 1985 under pressure from students understandably hostile to my absences and had therefore been a full-time regional politician for 5 years. At my age (mid 40s), I could not start a new career in Scotland – particularly holding such a high profile public position. Anxiety about my future had, in fact, led me to periods of depression and the breakdown of my marriage. I had, however, used these 5 years to network in Europe[2] – and it was now beginning to pay off. In particular a German colleague recommended me as Director – of all things – of the EC Energy Centre in Prague where I passed a very happy year in 1992. The hypocrisy and exploitation I saw in that position was, however, to lead me to write a very critical paper; send it to the European Parliament and resign from the position. But, on the basis of my CV, other assignments in Romania, Hungary and Slovakia quickly followed. But I was increasingly uneasy with the nature of the EC Technical Assistance work.

The blind leading the blind?
Nobody had ever lived through a triple transformation (Markets, nations, democracy) ever before. People had been writing profusely about the transition from capitalism to communism – but not the other way around. The collapse of communism was a great shock. Few – except the Poles and Hungarians[3] - were at all prepared for it. And understanding such systems change requires a vast array of different intellectual disciplines – and sub-disciplines – and who is trained to make sense of them all[4]? The apparently irreversible trend toward greater and greater specialisation of the social sciences places more power in the hands of technocrats[5] and disables politicians from serious involvement in the discourse of the international bodies whose staff therefore engage in the reconstruction of other country’s state systems with no effective challenge – from any source. Strange that these are the very people who preach about accountability and corruption!!!
Those of us who have got involved in these programmes of advising governments in these countries have a real moral challenge. After all, we are daring to advise these countries construct effective organisations – we are employed by organisations supposed to have the expertise in how to put systems together to ensure that appropriate intervention strategies emerge to deal with the organisational and social problems of these countries. We are supposed to have the knowledge and skills to help develop appropriate knowledge and skills in others!

But how many of us can give positive answers to the following 5 questions? -
- Do the organisations which pay us practice what they and we preach on the ground about good organisational principles?
- Does the knowledge and experience we have as individual consultants actually help us identify and implement interventions which fit the context in which we are working?
- Do we have the skills to make that happen?
- What are the bodies which employ consultants doing to explore such questions – and to deal with the deficiencies which I dare to suggest would be revealed?
- Do any of us have a clue about how to turn kleptocratic regimes into systems that recognise the meaning of public service?[6]

These were the questions I posed in a paper I drafted and presented to the 2007 NISPAcee Conference. You can find the paper in "key papers" on my website.

[1] By three strategies – legal limits on spending; transfer of functions to other sectors; and abolition of municipal bodies. She killed the Greater London Council in 1986; the English counties a bit later – and her successor John Major abolished the Scottish Regions in 1996.
[2] I was one of the British group on the Council of Europe – the Standing Conference for local and regional authorities; member of a IULA research group which produced a book on public participation in 1988; and member of the Ricardo Petrella ROME group on urban change
[3] who, with other countries admitted in 2004, had experienced these systems earlier in the 20th century!
[4] Elster and Offe were early in the field – but do not seem to have followed through
[5] JR Saul is one of the few who have tried to expose this – in his tour de force “Voltaire’s Bastards” (1992). And Harold Perkin’s "The Third revolution – professional elites in the modern world" (1996) is a more moderate argument about the self-seeking nature of professional classes. Why is it rarely get the chance to read books which are more than 5 years old?
[6] Anti-corruption strategies have, of course, become very fashionable in the international community – but seem to me a good example of a mechanism which serves the interests of donors (jobs) and beneficiary countries who have such strategies wished upon them. For the latter it gives the pretence of action and also fits with the traditional culture of rhetorical exhortation.

ten rules for stifling innovation

In the authoritarian cultures I work in (and who doesn't - these days?), I find my training sessions are enlivened when I have a translated version of the "rules" which Professor Rosabeth Kanter ironically put into her book which reviewed (in the early 1980s) how large organisations (like General Motors and IBM) were trying to restructure themselves to deal with the challenge they faced from small fast-moving and innovative companies.
Basically she found a lot of rhetoric and new structures concealing old behaviour.....Give me please a painting to convey this message!!!!!
"TEN RULES FOR STIFLING INNOVATION"
1. regard any new idea from below with suspicion - because it's new, and it's from below
2. insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other layers of management to get their signatures
3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticise each other's proposals (That saves you the job of deciding : you just pick the survivor)
4. Express your criticisms freely - and withhold your praise (that keeps people on their toes). Let them know they can be fired at any time
5. Treat identification of problems as signs of failure, to discourage people from letting you know when something in their area is not working
6. Control everything carefully. Make sure people count anything that can be counted, frequently.
7. Make decisions to reorganise or change policies in secret, and spring them on people unexpectedly (that also keeps them on their toes)
8. Make sure that requests for information are fully justified, and make sure that it is not given to managers freely
9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off, move around, or otherwise implement threatening decisions you have made. And get them to do it quickly.
10. And above all, never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.

reinventing the broken wheel

Ilia Beshkov (1901-1958 Bg)

In 1970, SM Miller published a short article - "Reinventing the Broken Wheel" - Lesson-Drawing in Social Policy" - which drew from experience of a variety of Government programmes supposedly aimed at dealing with poverty and inequality. The points should be pinned up in every Cabinet Office throughout the world - viz

· How a programme starts is important: what it promises, the expectations that it raises. The poor are frequently both suspicious and deceivable - expectations can rise very rapidly and collapse suddenly.

· Social Policy cannot substitute for economic policy and actions. Many poverty programmes have attempted to avoid this issue - only to stumble late on this finding.

· General economic expansion may not present jobs for the low trained, particularly when dual or segmented labour markets exist. They made need additional help to get and keep jobs or to raise their inadequate incomes.

· If social policies do not control major resources in their areas - eg financing in housing - they will be severely limited in what they do

· The task is not to integrate the poor and unequal into existing structures eg schools. These structures have gross inadequacies and defects. They must be changed as well - frequently also benefiting the non-poor.

· Programmes should be aware of this danger of building up dependencies - and look for ways in which their users can assume responsibility for the programme and themselves.

· One-shot, one-time programmes will have limited affects. While the complaint is often made that the poor are handicapped by a short time-span, they who are more frequently handicapped by the short time-span of public policies as policy attention wanders from one issue to another.

· Organisation is fateful. How programmes are organised affects what happens to those who deal with them. Where programmes are aimed at the short-run, have uncertain funding, high staff turnover and poor planning and organisation, it will be difficult for people to accept or benefit from them.

· People live in communities, in groups, in families. Programmes cannot successfully help them if they are treated as atomistic individuals.

· Ambitious, conflicting programme goals and activities lead to trouble. Most programmes have this problem.

· A programme is what it does; not what it would like to do or was established to do. The distribution of funds and staff time are good indicators of what an organisation actually does rather than what it believes it does or tries to convince others that it does

Local authority services were designed to deal with individuals - pupils, clients, miscreants - and do not have the perspectives, mechanisms or policies to deal with community malfunctioning. For that, structures are needed which have a "neighbourhood-focus" and "problem focus".
The Strathclyde strategy did in fact develop them - in the neighbourhood structures which allowed officers, residents and councillors to take a comprehensive view of the needs of their area and the operation of local services: and in the member-officer groups.

But we did not follow through the logic - and reduce the role of committee system which sustains so much of the policy perversities. That would have required a battle royal! After all, it took another decade before the issue of an alternative to the Committee system came on the national agenda - to be fiercely resisted by local authorities. Even now, the furthest they seem to go in their thinking is the "Cabinet system" - which has been offered as an option several times over the past 30 years (Wheatley; Stewart) but never, until now, considered worthy of even debate. The system of directly elected mayors - which serves other countries well - still does not command favour. One of the great marketing tricks of the English is to have persuaded the world of our long traditions of democracy. The truth is that our forefathers so mistrusted the dangers of unacceptable lay voices controlling the council chambers that they invented a range of traditions such as the one creating a system of dual professional and political leadership in local government. As the powers of local government increased in the post-war period - this became a recipe for confusion and irresponsibility. Little wonder that local government was called "The Headless State" (Regan). Chairmen of Committees have been able to blame Directors; and Directors, Chairmen.

In the 1990s it was interesting to see some local authorities now organised on the basis that was beginning to appear obvious to some of us in the late 1970s. The more progressive councils now have three different political structures -
· One for thinking and monitoring - ie across traditional boundaries of hierarchy, department and agency (our Member-Officer review groups)
· One for ensuring that it is performing its legal requirements (the traditional committee system) · One for acting in certain fields with other agencies to achieve agreed results (Joint Ventures for geographical areas or issues)

part VI - trying to tame the system

I realise that I am breaking the rules of blogging (and writing) by using it to serialise a longer paper. What you are reading first on a blog is the last thing written - and, at the moment, these "blogs" have references which can be properly understood only by looking at earlier "blogs".
But it's a useful process for me - since placing the text on the internet (accessible to everyone and anyone) forces me think of the reader and therefore helps editing. Generally, my first thought is for the ideas - and this is very obvious by the size of the original paper from which the text is excerpted is key paper 5 on my website which you will find on "links" (publicadmin reform).
And I do have to be clear why I bother to draft these papers (on "key papers" on the website) about the lessons from the various initiatives I've been involved with - and, in particular, about events of 30 years ago. Part of the answer, I suppose, is that international consultancy is a lonely business. You don't get the chance to take part in internal seminars - so you have to talk to yourself! That may explain the more recent papers - but not the accounts of earlier events. I suppose the reason why I still think and write about these older events is because so few others do. Those who write books are pursuing the modern - which carries with it the implication that what went before was useless. And few books are written about the work done by the hundreds of thousands of officials and councillors at the coal-face. I do feel that our sense of who we are requires us to have an historical perspective - particularly about our working lives. Who was it who wrote that without a sense of history, we are doomed to repeat all the mistakes??

In those days (the 1970s) the mythology was that the urban ghettos (which were actually the new housing schemes on the periphery of the towns and cities) had a disproportionate amount of money spent on them. The opposite was in fact true: it was the middle class who benefited disproportionately from state spending - particularly education and housing subsidy.

Up until then the attempts of a few of us to persuade our political and officer colleagues that (a) the conditions in the housing estates were unacceptable and (b) that there were better ways of using local authority resources had met with indifference and hostility. There was, we were patronisingly told, nothing we could do to change the behaviour of such people.
In 1975, however, a national Report (Born to Fail) gave us proof that the conditions were much worse in the West of Scotland than in the rest of the UK: each town had its collection of housing schemes which were seen as problematic. They could not therefore be fatalistically accepted. They were not God-given!
And, furthermore, this was not an internal report with confidential status and restricted circulation. It was a public report which had aroused the interest of the regional and national press. It could not be ignored. Some sort of response was called for.
In trying to develop a response we faced strong resistance from two sources - first the left within the Labour Party who argued that economic realities meant that there was nothing that could be done at a local level (and in this they were joined by Keynesians). Growth and redistribution were matters for national Government.
The second difficult group was the staff of the public sector whose loyalties were to their particular profession rather than to a local authority, a neighbourhood or policy group! And many staff had deeply-held prejudices about the capacity of people in these areas - and the desirability of working participatively with them - let alone other professional or local politicians.
How we devised a policy response - and its focus - had to be sensitive to these attitudes. The search for policy was also made immediately more difficult by the absence of any "experts" in the field. We knew there were none within the Council: and appeals to the local Universities produced no responses in those days.

We could, however, vaguely see four paths which had not been attempted -
· Positive Discrimination : the scope for allocating welfare State resources on a more equitable basis had been part of the "New Left" critique since the late 1950s (Townsend). Being a new organisation meant that it was to no-one's shame to admit that they did not know how exactly the money was being allocated. Studies were carried out which confirmed our suspicions that it was the richer areas which, arguably, needed certain services least (eg "pre-school" services for children) which, in fact, had the most of them! And, once discovered, this was certainly an area we considered we had a duty to engage in redistribution of resources - notwithstanding those who considered this was not for local government to attempt.
· Community Development : one of the major beliefs shared by some of us driving the new Council (borne of our own experience) was that the energies and ideas of residents and local officials in these "marginalised" areas were being frustrated by the hierarchical structures of departments whose professionals were too often prejudiced against local initiatives. Our desire was to find more creative organisational forms which would release these ideas and energies - of residents and professionals alike. This approach meant experimentation (Barr; Henderson; McConnell).
· Inter-Agency Cooperation : there needed to be a focussed priority of all departments and agencies on these areas. Educational performance and health were affected more by housing and income than by teachers and doctors! One agency - even as large as Strathclyde - could not do much on its own. An intensive round of dialogues were therefore held in 1976/77 with District Councils, Central Government, Health Boards, Universities and Voluntary Organisations: it must be said that considerable time elapsed before there were material results from this eg it was 1984 before the Joint Area Initiatives in the larger Glasgow Housing Schemes were up and running.
· Information and Income-Maximisation : the Region could certainly use its muscle to ensure that people were getting their entitlements : ie the information and advice to receive the welfare benefits many were missing out on. The campaigns mounted in the late 1970s were soon pulling millions of pounds into these areas: and served as a national model which attracted the active interest of the Minister at the time.

THE EMERGENT STRATEGY
45 areas were designated as "Areas of Priority Treatment" (APTs); to try to work differently in these areas; and to learn from that.
Basically the approach was that local residents should be encouraged to become active in the following ways -
· have their own local forums - where, with the local politicians and officials, they could monitor services and develop new projects.
· have access to a special local initiative fund - The national "Urban Programme" Fund. It was not a lot of money - 10 million dollars a year from a total development budget of 300 million and had problems referred to in section 11.1 below. But without it, there would have been little stomach for the innovative (and risky) projects. At the best of times, senior management of most departments would have been a bit ambivalent about locally designed and managed projects: and these were not the best of times!
· have their own expert advisers (more than 300 community workers and more specialist advisers (in such fields as housing, welfare benefits, credit unions, community business) in what were initially 45 designated priority areas of, on average, 10,000 people with unemployment rates of about 20%)

Such an approach allowed "a hundred flowers to bloom" - and the development in 1982, after an intensive and inclusive review of the experience of the first five years, of the principles and framework of the Social Strategy for the Eighties.

part V - more open and creative policy-making

I have written an extensive paper about the innovative work I was involved in from 1975-1990 in the Region trying to make its policies, structures and staff more sensitive to the needs and aspirations of those who lived in its poorer areas. It is paper 5 of “key papers” of my website. Here I just want to focus on the structural aspects of our work – how we tried to get officials, councillors and community activists working more productively with one another to solve problems.
This entry talks about our member-officer groups -the next entry looks at how we tried to "make a difference" in the poorer areas.
At the end of Strathclyde Region's first year of existence in 1976, a major weekend seminar of all the councillors and the new Directors was held to review the experience of the new systems of decision-making. The exhilarating experience a few of us had had of working together across the boundaries of political and professional roles first to set up the new Departments and second on the deprivation strategy was something we wanted to keep. And other councillors wanted that involvement too.
Our answer was "member-officer groups" (Young 1981). These were working groups of about 15 people (equal number of officials and councillors) given the responsibility to investigate a service or problem area - and to produce, within 12-18 months, an analysis and recommendations for action. Initially social service topics were selected - youth services, mental handicap, pre-school services and the elderly - since the inspiration, on the officer side, was very much from one of the senior Social Work officials.

The member-officer groups broke from the conventions of municipal decision-making in various ways -
· officials and members were treated as equals
· noone was assumed to have a monopoly of truth : by virtue of ideological or professional status
· the officers nominated to the groups were generally not from Headquarters - but from the field
· evidence was invited from staff and the outside world, in many cases from clients themselves
· the represented a political statement that certain issues had been neglected in the past
· the process invited external bodies (eg voluntary organisations) to give evidence
· the reports were written in frank terms : and concerned more with how existing resources were being used than with demands for more money.
· the reports were seen as the start of a process - rather than the end - with monitoring groups established once decisions had been made.

The achievements of the groups can be measured in such terms as -
· the acceptance, and implementation, of most of the reports : after all, the composition and the openness of the process generates its own momentum of understanding and commitment !
· the subsequent career development of many of their chairmen
· the value given to critical inquiry - instead of traditional party-bickering and over-simplification.
· the quality of relations between the councillors : and with the officials

With this new way of working, we had done two things. First discovered a mechanism for continuing the momentum of innovation which was the feature of the Council's first year. Now more people had the chance to apply their energies and skills in the search for improvement.
We had, however, done more - we had stumbled on far more fruitful ways of structuring local government than the traditional one (the Committee system) which focuses on one "Service" - eg Education which defines the world in terms of the client group: of one professional group and is producer-led. And whose deliberations are very sterile - as the various actors play their allotted roles (expert, leader, oppositionist, fool etc).