the search for post-autistic public administration

another Tudor Banus graphic

All my adult life, I've had a passion for what we might call "the machinery of government" - namely the way institutions of government operated and related to citizens and their needs. When I started on the reform path - almost 40 years ago - trying to reform the bureaucracy was considered a foolhardy enterprise. Now every self-respecting government leader is into it.
But what is there to show for the incredible effort and spending on reform efforts in Europe (let alone globally) over the past 25 years? The academic judgement is that very little has been achieved (see C Pollitt 2000). Consultants, officials and politicians all have vested interests in suggesting otherwise - although few of these 3 groups actually put anything coherent into print under their own name. We are generally left with the strategy documents they have sponsored - and which have emerged from the tortuous process of collective approval.

My emergence into working life in the late 1960s coincided with the optimism of a new period of social engineering - when people began to believe that it was both necessary and possible to change state bureaucracy for the better. Some thought this could be done by internal reform - with better management systems. Others felt that it required strong external challenge - whether from the community or from the market.
One of the best writers in the business, Guy Peters, argues - in his book Ways of Governing (2000)- that the reforms can be reduced to four schools of thinking. They are - "market models" (A); "the Participatory State" (B); "Flexible Government" (C); and "Deregulated Government" (D). You can see a couple of useful tables which summarise the key components of these 4 schools in my annotated bibliography in "key papers" in my other blog.

But so much of the literature of public management (or public administration, to use the older term) complacently argued that a combination of voting in a pluralist system, good civil service and management systems, media coverage and ethics would keep officials and politicians in check.
Hardly surprising that, in reaction, public choice theory went to the opposite extreme and assumed that all actors pursued their own interests - and that privatisation and "command and control" was the way forward. Where the new approach has been implemented, the results have been catastrophic - with morale at rock bottom; and soaring "transaction" costs in the new contract and audit culture of the pst 2 decades.

Where, then, does that leave public management? Is there in fact a serious discipline - or body of work which can be read with benefit by practitioners? Or is it just a collection of stories and fashions?
The discipline of Economics is having to reinvent itself - with "behavioural economics" leading the way. No longer do the younger economists build models based on individualistic rationality - they at last recognise that human beings are social and complex. In my October 24 blog, I mentioned the establishment a decade or so ago of something called "Post-autistic Economics" - a protest in the first instance by younger economists about the false assumptions on which economics was based.
And psychologists such as Martin Seligman have (claimed to) moved that discipline away from its fixation on illness to pose question about the preconditions for happiness ("Positive Psychology").

So what is public management doing to deal with the disillusionment? The "good governance" fashion has been about the only effort to suggest a way forward. And, quite rightly, that has come in for a great deal of criticism - the most practical of which is M Grindle: Good Enough Governance . Perhaps we need a post-autistic public administration movement?
One problem is that public management is hardly a discipline per se. It is rather parasitic on other social sciences. But hundreds of university departments, courses and books use that phrase and therefore purport to be of use to those in government wanting to improve the structures, skills and tools they use. And this is one subject which cannot say it exists "for knowledge's sake" only! This is a subject (like medicine) which has to demonstrate its relevance for those in charge of state and municipal departments who are seeking the public interest.
Citizens and public staff alike are disillusioned (at least in anglo-saxon countries) with the management culture of public services. Public management needs to be reinvented. And, unlike, the new psychology's focus on the positive, that rethink perhaps need to focus more on the failures, disasters, corruption, repression and boredom which is the sad reality of government in so many countries. Scottish Review - one of the "links" on this site - gives excellent coverage to some of the more routine flaws of a system which is supposed to be advanced!

PA has long had an identity crisis - there are many academic articles about this - some of which I will try to upload to my website. And much of this is intertwined with the rise and fall of new public management which is best caught in Wolfgang Dreschler's article I have just read on "the rise and demise of new public management". Significantly, it appeared in the post-autistic economics journal all of 5 years ago!
Its argument (largely from an economic rather than PA point of view) is that NPM was a major aberration and that we can and should now return to a neo-Weberian system. In a future blog I will give some quotes from this stimulating review.

Greece and capacities to govern

What does the current Greek crisis say about the capacity of national and international policy-making processes. The impression we all have is that government systems are fast losing whatever capacity they had to deal with problems. Or is this just a British perception? The British system is easier to track than other countries – partly because it’s a relatively transparent system (so many journalists; think-tankers and academics covering policy issues and with an interest in revealing policy disasters) and partly because the language used is a universal one (it’s more difficult to track the French system in any detail).

I remember the shock I had when the costs of the UK poll-tax fiasco were first revealed in the late 1980s – it was, I think, the first time the public heard the word “billions” of pounds used in a policy discussion (now we yawn at the term!).
And then there was the perversity of rail nationalisation in the UK where public subsidies of about 1 billion pounds a year were replaced by a so-called “privatised” system which, within a deacade,became user-hostile and required about 3 million a year of public financial support. For some background see here. And also the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) system which the recent excerpt from Craig Murray’s blog referred to – which multiplies the cost to the public of schools and hospitals by a factor of about 5 and gives us fairly shoddy products (see NAO reports).
And those outsiders who are supposed (according to the theory of liberal democracy) to control government decision-making (parliamentarians and journalists) are ineffective. The Scottish Executive and Parliament which were set up in 1999 (after a gap of almost 300 years) tried to go in a different direction – but adversarial political and administrative cultures die hard. And – despite such efforts as Charter 88 and the more recent Open Democracy initiatives - the English system seems impossible to change. Or, rather, “plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose”!

But what about the rest of Europe? Scandinavian, French and German systems seem to produce better (and less disputed) public services. The German and Scandinavian political systems have strong elements of consensuality built into them. New policies have to be argued through – and indeed negotiated. The British system is adversarial – and autocratic. The French civil service has retained its powers to challenge the political class – the British one made more subservient to the political class.
It is the conventional wisdom that this balance and negotiation (with and between political and administrative systems) plus decentralisation which produces policies which work.

What has all this to do with the crisis in which Greece and the eurozone now finds itself in? It was all so predictable – Greece was not ready for EU membership (let alone access to the eurozone). And the euro rules out the option of devaluation for weaker economies – who are therefore doomed them to the role of peripheral regions in a national economy. Once this is recognised, the EU needs to develop and apply stronger policy tools.
For a more technical appraisal of the Greek situation see Becker’s contribution in the excellent blog wriiten as a dialogue by 2 eminent americans - /

policy amnesia

Daily news is so deafening that we often forget significant items. Last October there was an independent report in Britain of which I've heard nothing since. It gives marvellous material for a case study in policy-making and implementation.
It was the biggest independent inquiry into primary education in four decades, based on 28 research surveys, 1,052 written submissions and 250 focus groups. It was undertaken by 14 authors, 66 research consultants and a 20-strong advisory committee at Cambridge University, led by Professor Robin Alexander, one of the most experienced educational academics in the country”

The Guardian presented the report in vivid terms -
“In a damning indictment of Labour's record in primary education since 1997, a Cambridge University-led review today accuses the government of introducing an educational diet "even narrower than that of the Victorian elementary schools".
It claims that successive Labour ministers have intervened in England's classrooms on an unprecedented scale, controlling every detail of how teachers teach in a system that has "Stalinist overtones". (Guardian 16 October 2009)
It says they have exaggerated progress, narrowed the curriculum and left children stressed-out by the testing and league table system.

To me, the most significant part of the paper’s coverage was the following sentence – “The report notes the questionable evidence on which some key educational policies have been based; the disenfranchising of local voice; the rise of unelected and unaccountable groups taking key decisions behind closed doors; the 'empty rituals' of consultations; the authoritarian mindset, and the use of myth and derision to underwrite exaggerated accounts of progress and discredit alternative views”.

It was all supposed to be so different. When New Labour gained power in 1997, the papers which flowed from their new Strategy Unit in the Cabinet Office spoke of a new dawn – “open, evidence-based policy-making”. And, since then, we have been buried by an avalanche of papers saying what progress is being made. The paper which set the tone can be found here In my more cynical moments, I wonder whether the net result of decades of reform has not been simply to give those in power a more effective language to help hold on to that power while changing as little as possible! I have a theory that the more an organisation talks of such things as “transparency”, “accountability” and “effectiveness”, the more secretive, complacent and immoral it is! Emerson put it very succinctly almost a century ago - “The louder he talked of his honour, the faster we counted our spoons!”

project management and modern work places

Guess who?
For the past 20 years my technical title has been "Team Leader" of various EU projects of Technical Assistance. I have generally enjoyed the projects - as they introduced me to new countries, cultures, friends and roles.
The last 16 months have been much more difficult.
The main reason has been the contact with the tight control now exercised on EU projects - almost daily monitoring. On one recent project there were 4 young graduates in an office nearby whose only job was to approve and monitor what we 3 key experts we were doing! I had to record what I did every day. On a draft of my first monthly timesheet, I entered a trip to the toilet just to test their vigilance - but then didn't have the courage to sustain the challenge!
So much bureaucracy, schedule planning and organisation of travel trips on most projects now!!!! Sad because, intellectually, I think I have a lot to contribute....perhaps now more as a shortterm expert?
I was so lucky with my previous projects of the past 18 years - being left alone, trusted and with excellent admin support.

In the blog on November 14, I summarised Zuboff's powerful critique of the alienating and ineffective nature of modern organisations. Project management is now a disease.
The (major) mistake New Public Management made was to model itself on such perversities. Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" is now transposed from factories to offices....
A nice googlebook which pursues the theme - The Book of F-Laws - Russell Ackoff and H Addison (updated commentary by S Bibb). Russell Ackoff was, of course, the guru of systems thinking in the 1960s. You can also get a summary version here.
ps the graphic is ....Albrecht Durer!

Transylvania

Sirnea
Just to give a sense of the neighbourhood. The house is modestly hiding behind the trees to the middle-right of picture (beside the redhouse) At the moment I have to park the car at the neighbours (bottom left) and struggle up the hill with the groceries et al. Good for flabby muscles!

I'm back in Bucharest for the moment - feeling so refreshed after the week there watching (and listening to) the change in season. After my return from China I had become a bit of a couch potato - with Midsummer Murders and Foyle's War staple viewing in the morning! At Sirnea, music is the only distraction.
Family and friends I try to tempt with a lyrical book on Transylvania produced recently by Bronwen Riley and Dan Dinescu (the marvellous Romanian photographer)

For those interested in hill walking, please have a look at Mountains of Romania  

performance management

Tudor Banus - a Romanian artist
One of the reasons I have lost my enthusiasm for my public admin reform assignments is because of the "Fordist" phase it is currently going through with an emphasis everywhere on performance management. Colin Talbot is one of the few people who writes sensibly about this and I'm sorry his book on the topic is not out until early summer (see Amazon)
The Institute for Government published recently a useful survey of the British experience of performance management and attitudes of civil servants and local government officials to the recent revamp. The document, however, makes no mention of the critique by John Seddon of the quasi-Stalinist targeting approach taken to public services by the British over the past 10-15 years - and this lacuna worries me. I must admit I still remain cynical about the excessive targeting - and a blog here on November 5th last year drew atention to 2 British reports which said so. One was a Parliamentary Select Committee Report; the other was Think-Tank pamphlet which recommended an abolition of the entire control regime which has grown up in Britain over the past 2 decades. Its title - Leading from the Front - reflects its basic argument that power should be returned to the front-line professionals - and the Stalinist measurement and control infrastructure should be dismantled.

One of my "favourite links" is Craig Murray's blog. In October he addressed the key question which is figuring in a major way as the general election in that country approaches – how UK public finances can deal with the massive support they have given the banking system.

"Smaller, leaner public services which simply go on with delivering the service direct, with minimal administration. This is the opposite of what the Tories would do. In particular, we need to cut out the whole complex administration of "internal markets" within the public services, where vast arrays of accountants and managers spend their wasted lives processing paper payments from the government to the government.
"Let me tell you a true story which is an analogy for the whole rotten system. As Ambassador in Tashkent, I had staff from a variety of government departments - FCO, MOD, DFID, BTI, Home Office etc. In addition to which, some staff sometimes did some work for other than their own department. This led to complex inter-departmental charging, including this:
"I was presented with a floor plan of the Embassy building, with floor area calculated of each office, corridor and meeting room. I then had to calculate what percentage of time each room or corridor was used by each member of staff, and what percentage of time each member of staff worked for which government department. So, for example, after doing all the calculations, I might conclude that my own office was used 42% of the time on FCO business, 13% of the time on BTI business, 11% on DFID, etc etc, whereas my secretary's office was used ....
"I then would have to multiply the percentage for each government department for each room, lobby and corridor by the square footage of that room, lobby or corridor. Then you would add up for every government department the square footages for each room, until you had totals of how many square feet of overall Embassy space were attributable to each government department. The running costs of the Embassy could then be calculated - depreciation, lighting, heating, maintenance, equipment, guarding, cleaning, gardening etc - and divided among the different departments. Then numerous internal payment transfers would be processed and made.

"The point being, of course, that all the payments were simply from the British government to the British government, but the taxpayer had the privilege of paying much more to run the Embassy to cover the staff who did the internal accounting. That is just one of the internal market procedures in one small Embassy. Imagine the madnesses of internal accounting in the NHS. The much vaunted increases in NHS spending have gone entirely to finance this kind of bureaucracy. Internal markets take huge resources for extra paperwork, full stop.

"The Private Finance Initiative is similarly crazy; a device by which the running costs of public institutions are hamstrung to make massive payments on capital to private investors. What we desperately need to do is get back to the notion that public services should be provided by the State, with the least possible administrative tail. The Tories - and New Labour, in fact - both propose on the contrary to increase internal market procedures and contracting out.
All of the Conservative vaunted savings proposals would not add up to 10% of the saving from simply scrapping Trident. Ending imperial pretentions is a must for any sensible plan to tackle the deficit"

novels I go back to

This is a self-indulgent post - recording the novels which have given me pleasure recently and indeed to which I find myself returning and emerging from them with little recollection of the first read! Few people except my kids will be much interested in this - but I do remember being disappointed at finding so little of a personal nature in the papers left behind by my father.

I read more novels in my older age. So most of these authors I came across only recently. Only Allende, Boll, Durrell, Jenkins, Klima, Marquez, Moravia, Remy, Roy and Trevor go back earlier.

I don’t apologise for Coelho’s appearance in the list. It may not be literature – and perhaps better belongs in the list of lighter reading – which would include Morris West, Robert Ludlum and Colin Harrison. But it’s still very enjoyable. And John le Carre belongs in a category of his own....
It’s interesting to see that only half the list are European writers – although the Celts may seem overrepresented, that’s simply because they do use language creatively!!

I have added at the bottom a short list of poets I enjoy. Previous blogs have given an indication of my more professional reading.

Other enjoyable reads are more difficult to classify - eg Theodor Zeldin's An Intimate History of Humanity. And then there are diaries such as those by de Beauvoir and Luise Rinse.

THE NOVELS

Alaa Al Aswany (Egypt)
The Yacoubian Building

Allende Isabel (Chile)
Eva Luna
Eva Luna’s stories

Amado Jorge (Brazil);
Gabriela – Clove and Cinnamon (1962)

Boell Heinrich (Germany)
Collected Short Stories
simple but powerful, humanistic stories of the war and immediate desolate post-war years in Germany

Coelho Paul (Brazil)
The Pilgrimage
The Zahir
The Valkries
The Witch of Portobello
Brida

Crumey Andrew (Scotand)
Sputnik Caledonia

Durrell Lawrence (England)
The Alexandria Quartet (1960s)
The Avignon Quartet
amazing use of language - the first giving a powerful sense of ex-patriot life in Egypt before and during the 2nd World War. The second giving a sense of the Nazi period in France

Faulds Sebastian (England)
A fool's Alphabet
On Green Dolphin Street
Birdsong
Human Stain
Engleby
An English writer with a strong European sense!

Gary Romain (France)
Clair de Femme
Au dela de cette limite le billet n’est pas valable

Godwin Jason (England)
The Snake Stone
The Janissary Tree
Evokes Istanbul

Houllebecq Michel (France)
Atomised
Platform

Jenkins Robin (Scotland
The Missionaries ((1957)
Love is a fervent fire (1959)
Some Kind of Grace (1960)
Fergus Lamont
Gives a strong sense of the Scotland which is past

Kazantzakis Nikos (Greece)
The Fratricides
Freedom and Death
Zorba the Greek
Report to Greco
Christ Recrucified
summons up the old rural Greece

Klima Ivan (Czechia)
The Ultimate Intimacy
Judge on Trial
Love and Garbage
For me, much more interesting than his more famous compatriot Milan Kundera

Llosa MV(Peru)
The Green House (1965)
Conversation in the Cathedral
The War of the end of the World
The last novel is the strongest description I;ve ever read of violence

Lodge David (England)
Author, author
Nice Work
Changing Places
Therapy

Mahfouz Naguib (Egypt)
Palace of Desire (1957)
Sugar Street (The Cairo Trilogy
Palace Walk
The Beggar, the Thief and the Dogs,
Autumn Quail
The Harafish
Midaq Alley
A Nobel prize winner I only got to know when the prize was announced. Such simple but evocative writing about the poor in the post-war period. To read - and reread

Marquez Gabriel Garcia (Columbia)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Love in the Time of Cholera

Mason Daniel (USA)
The Piano Tuner (2002)

Massie Alan (Scotland)
A Question of Loyalties

McGahern John (Ireland)
Creatures of the Earth
That they may face the rising sun
The older Irish writers are something else (see William Trevor)

Meek James (Scotland)
The People's Act Of Love
We Are Now Beginning Our Descent
Drivetime
Very versatile!

Moravia Albert (Italy)
Contempt (1954)
Boredom (1960)

Nabakov Vladimir (Russia)
The Stories of Vladimir Nabakov

Nassib Selim (Egypt)
I loved you for your voice (2006)

Trevor William (Ireland)
The Old Boys (1964)
The Boarding House (1965)
The Love Department (1966)
After Rain (1996)

Pamuk Orhan (Turkey)
My name is red (2001)
Snow
A modern Proust - very tantalising

Remy Pierre-Jean (France)
Une Ville Immortelle

Roy Claude (France)
Le Malheur d’aimer

Shields Carol (Canada)
Larry's Party
The Collected Stories
The Republic of Love
Happenstance

Welsh Irvine (Scotland)
The Bedroom Secrets of the master chefs

Yates Richard (US)
Young Hearts Crying
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates

Yehoshuova (Israel)
A Woman in Jerusalem
The Liberated Bride


Poetry
Norman McCaig; WS Graham (both Scottish); Bert Brecht (Germany); Marin Sorescu (Romania)

cookbooks and desert islands

I have hundreds of books about public admin reform in my library (mainly in my virtual library). But what beneficiaries want to know is - "What's the bottom line? We know that academics talk a lot of shit Just tell us what we should do. Give us a manual...."
I am always excited when I discover such manuals. And I will shortly try to put onto the website some of the more useful texts I have found in my work. However, when I was asked recently to bid for a project which would have required me to draft about 10 such manuals, I declined.
Let me explain why.
I love cooking - and have quite a collection of cookery books. I think 50 at the last count. They get increasingly attractive and popular. Millions of copies are bought. (They also seem to be getting heavier! I use one as a door stopper - The Cook's Book - step-by-step techniques and recipes for success every time from the world's top chefs).
The curious thing, however, is how little I actually use them to cook with! They are nice to glance at. They certainly get the juices and inspiration running. But I then will do one of two things. Often, from laziness or fear of failure and ridicule, I will return to my tried and tested recipes. But sometimes I will experiment, using the recipe as an inspiration - partly because I don't actually have all of the ingredients which I am told are required but partly because it's more fun! There's a moral there!
Or think of all the self-help (and diet) books which have been published in the last 50 years. I have a fascinating book 50 self-help classics - 50 inspirational books to transform your life from timeless sages to contemporary gurus. Have they made people happier, slimmer?? Can they?

The word "manual" comes from the world of military, construction or do-it-yourself. Manuals give (or should!) clear and logical descriptions of the steps required to assemble a machine or artefact. Human beings and organisations are not, however, machines!!
There are no short-cuts to organisational change - although the project cycle management approach which is the basis of EC Technical Assistance would have us believe there are!!
A marvellous book appeared in 1991 (sadly long out of print) and set out and classified 99 different - and mutually inconsistent - principles and injunctions which various serious writers had offered over the decades for helping managers in the public sector operate it effectively!
And more than a decade ago, two books ridiculed the simplistic nature of the offerings of management consultants in the private sector. Management Gurus - what makes them and how to become one appeared in 1996 (one of my googlebooks) and The Witchdoctors-making sense of the management gurus (also 1996). If the books had any effect, it was only to drive consultants into the more gullible public sector! (see Daid Craig's "Plundering the Public Sector" for proof that I'm not joking!)

I used to criticise the EC for not giving any intellectual leadership to those working on its programmes of technical assistance. Well, they have certainly made up for lost time in the last few years. At the last count I had 12 substantial manuals in my virtual library from them, the last one with the curious sub-title of " backbone strategy" (for improving the operation of their PIUs). But, in my view at any rate, they are not fit for much.

One of the longest- running and appreciated radio programmes in the UK is BBC's Desert Island Discs. The format is simple. A famous person is interviewed about his/her life and, on the belief that they have been shipwrecked and have to select the most important music and a single book to keep them company. Excerpts of their favourite music are played. At the end, the question is asked "Apart from the bible, what book would you wish to take with you??"!! (Presumably they now add "or Koran"?)

The question for today is what single book would you put in the hands of your beneficiary?
In Uzbekistan I gave the Deputy Prime Minister I was working with either Guy Peter's The Future of Governing; four emerging models or Chris Hood's The art of the state (see my google books). I think it was the former. Both books suggest that all writing on government reform can be reduced to 4 schools of thinking. This sort of classification I always find helpful.

In Azerbaijan, I gave my beneficiary (who was subsequently appointed Minister for the new Civil Service Agency which came from my work) a Russian version of Robert Greene's "48 laws of power"! Greene is a modern Machiavelli. And life for a reformer is tough in Azerbaijan!

And, in the mid-1990s, I used to buy and distribute Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Effective People since it was about the only title in those days translated into central european languages.

If you had to choose one book for your beneficiary, what would it be??