Chinese administrative reforms in international perspective

Exactly a year ago I was preparing to fly to Beijing – to start a major new project but I was not looking forward to the experience. Alarm bells had rung in the summer when I was first invited to go with the bid – and I told the contractors that neither the scale of the city nor the repressiveness of the regime appealed to me. Nor could I see what my experience could bring to the Chinese. What little I knew of the Chinese context suggested that it was so very different from anything I was used to.
But the temptation of seeing China was too great – and I agreed to go with the bid – not really expecting to win. We did – and the alarm bells started up again when I went to visit the contractors in November and began to realise what a gigantic bureaucracy they (let alone the EU) were! And that they wanted to offload virtually all the financial management to me as Team Leader. I prefer to focus on professional issues and let the contractors deal with finances.
I tried to put my foot down – but was still subjected to a lot of technical briefing about (expert) procurement and payment procedures which frankly bored the pants off me. When, 2 months later, we got to Beijing we were taken to the contractor’s huge offices there and subjected to the same briefing over several days with no Chinese counterpart in sight – at which point I began to realise that what was supposed to be a support system to us was in fact exactly the opposite. We were paying the local contractor’s branch office for services which were at best perfunctory - but expected to pass to them all project papers and information in a complex and time-consuming intranet system!
This was one of three factors which persuaded me to draft my resignation after only one week – the other two issues being the claustrophobia I felt in the dense mass and materialism of Beijing; and the failure of the Chinese to appoint anyone for us to work with. I had faced some difficult challenges in 7 years in central Asia (even a revolution) and a year in politicised Bulgaria - and survived and succeeded. The other key expert resigned a few months later (there were only two of us for a rather ambitious project which was another warning sign I had ignored!)
On my return home in March I took time to try to understand why I had so quickly felt so alienated on this project. Lost in Beijing was the result - in which I identified 17 reasons for my decision!!
I shared it with the contractors and some colleagues – but feel I should now put it in the public domain as a contribution to the gap in literature about this multi-billion industry which I identified recently. The paper has a few comments at the end about what I learned about public services in China – and these are developed in a separate briefing and reading and web references which I’ve also put on the website for anyone who suddenly finds themselves involved in discussions with the Chinese about issues relating to administrative reform! It’s called Chinese administrative reform in perspective - a revisionist briefing (May 1 update)and contains some provocative stuff about so-called western democracy.

Boffy has another good read on present economic issues.

Just Words?

I’ve uploaded two papers in the last couple of days to my website – the first is a note in which I explore why my professional encounter with China last year was so brief. I will talk about this more later this week. The other paper is an updated version of my glossary which is now 20 pages long and entitled Just Words? How language gets in the way. One important addition is the list of 200 plus words which the UK Local Government Association felt it necessary to recommend in 2009 be banned. This was an expansion of an original list of 100 I’m puzzled about the inclusion of some of the words – but I have not lived in the UK for 20 years and have therefore suffered the annoyance of such jargon only from the occasional visiting HRM consultant! There is a phrase I would ban – “human resource management”. Of course, as an economics student, I was taught to consider workers as a basic resource – but I still shudder with the implications of the term. Sometimes I go overboard on this and abuse my position as team Leader – one HRM “expert” (another word I tend to discourage in my projects!) used to talk frequently about “addressing issues” which, for some reason, I found very distasteful. And I explode when I encounter such words as “cohesive” and “governance”.
I find this therefore a quite excellent initiative. It would be interesting to know what impact it had and whether it has survived the aftermath of a General election and massive public cuts. The offensive words included –
Advocate, Agencies, Ambassador, Area based, Area focused, Autonomous, Baseline, Beacon, Benchmarking, Best Practice, Blue sky thinking, Bottom-Up, Can do culture, Capabilities, Capacity, Capacity building, Cascading, Cautiously welcome, Challenge, Champion, Citizen empowerment, Client, Cohesive communities, Cohesiveness, Collaboration, Commissioning, Community engagement, Compact, Conditionality, Consensual, Contestability, Contextual, Core developments, Core Message, Core principles, Core Value, Coterminosity, Coterminous, Cross-cutting, Cross-fertilisation, Customer, Democratic legitimacy, Democratic mandate, Dialogue, Double devolution, Downstream, Early Win, Embedded, Empowerment, Enabler, Engagement, Engaging users, Enhance, Evidence Base, Exemplar, External challenge, Facilitate, Fast-Track, Flex, Flexibilities and Freedoms, Framework, Fulcrum, Functionality, Funding streams, Gateway review, Going forward, Good practice, Governance, Guidelines, Holistic, Holistic governance, Horizon scanning, Improvement levers, Incentivising, Income streams, Indicators, Initiative, Innovative capacity, Inspectorates (a bit unfair!), Interdepartmental surely not?), Interface, Iteration, Joined up, Joint working, level playing field, Lever (unfair on Kurt Lewin!), Leverage, Localities, Lowlights (??), Mainstreaming, Management capacity, Meaningful consultation (as distinct from meaningless?), Meaningful dialogue (ditto?), Mechanisms, menu of Options, Multi-agency, Multidisciplinary, Municipalities (what’s this about?), Network model, Normalising, Outcomes, Output, Outsourced, Overarching, Paradigm, Parameter, Participatory, Partnership working, Partnerships, Pathfinder, Peer challenge, Performance Network, Place shaping, Pooled budgets, Pooled resources, Pooled risk, Populace, Potentialities, Practitioners (what’s wrong with that?), Preventative services, Prioritization, Priority, Proactive (damn!), Process driven, Procure, Procurement, Promulgate, Proportionality, Protocol,
Quick win (damn again), Rationalisation, Revenue Streams, Risk based, Robust, Scaled-back, Scoping, Sector wise, Seedbed, Self-aggrandizement (why not?), service users, Shared priority, Signpost, Social contracts ,Social exclusion, spatial, Stakeholder, Step change, Strategic (come off it!), Strategic priorities, Streamlined, Sub-regional, Subsidiarity (hallelujah!); Sustainable (right on!), sustainable communities, Symposium, Synergies, Systematics, Taxonomy, Tested for Soundness, Thematic, Thinking outside of the box, Third sector, Toolkit, Top-down (?), Trajectory, Tranche, Transactional, Transformational, Transparency, Upstream, Upward trend, Utilise, Value-added, Vision

The Glossary also now includes a reference to the work of a 2009 UK Parliamentary Committee which actually invited people to submit examples of confusing language which they then reported about in a report entitled Bad Language! Paul Flynn – who is one of the few British MPs who has understood that his basic function is to represent the public and challenge the perversions of authority – gives us a nice example in the Annexes.

Remembering

The current issue of the (British) Prospect magazine carries a fascinating article about the various stresses to which inter-cultural marriages - and divorces - are subject. We all know about the difficulties Swedes or Finns are likely to have with ebullient Latins. Not so well-known are the vagaries of national systems within the EU. The French legal system emerges in a particularly insensitive light – assuming, for example, that wives will always be able to return to the labour market (despite having been absent perhaps for more than a decade) and insisting always on children being shared week-in week-out (even at the age of 3).
It is Saints who are causing some tension between this particular north-south pair. End of last week was the name-day of Ion here (John – also my father’s name). Our friend Olteanu who died in November was a Ion – so we visited his grave on Thursday (or at least D did – I gave up after an hour of trying to find it). And she duly bought and passed on to a stranger some food – as is the habit here in celebrating such anniversaries. I tried to explain that the Church of Scotland (in which I was brought up) doesn’t do Saints – and therefore name-days. And, in any event, I had rebelled against (the minimalist) religion at age 15 and am therefore clueless about the whole set-up. My clumsy attempts to try to try to understand why John the Baptist has 2 days - the first apparently for his death; and the second for his life – caused the usual tensions! And what, anyway, is the English for his status – forerunner, prophet, vanguard??
More positively, D and I had started to talk about the possibility of establishing a modest Foundation which might ensure support and publicity for what Ion valued – as an NGO activist here. Apparently his widow has also had some discussions about this – so hopefully we can come together not only within Romania but with his various friends in Europe.
And that reminded me that I have not resolved the question of how I properly fix my father in community memory in Greenock. About 18 months ago I had some discussions with the curator of the Watt Library and McLean Museum there – of which my father had been Chairman for many years. I had started with the idea of a lecture series in the Greenock Philosophical Society (of which he had also been Chairman) – but felt that this would not have a large enough impact; and was latterly considering a suggestion from the indomitable Kenneth Roy of Scottish Review of an award for Scottish youth with the Institute for Contemporary Scotland. As well as publishing Scottish Review, ICS organises such high-level awards as Scot of the Year. Clearly association with a body will have a larger impact – but it all needs careful consideration. The discussions are caught in a special note I prepared and reproduced as a blog tribute. I have only been involved with one such memorial idea – when the widow of a senior (community) education official struck down in his prime set aside a small fund for a few of his friends and colleagues to administer. We decided to make an annual award to the community group which had succeeded “despite the odds”. This led to visits, meetings and publicity which certainly kept his memory alive.

In my google searches I came across first the website of the church in which my father served as Minister for 50 years; then a nice collection of photos of my hometown (even some shots of the McLean Museum) and the superb landscapes all around it
And finally a nice site on less well-known Scottish painters which included a neighbour of ours in Greenock - James Watt - one of whose paintings the family bought for my father and which has now temporary residence in a Brussels supurb.

In praise of austerity

The art blog I mentioned yesterday reproduces a range of quiet interior paintings by a 19th century Danish artist Hamersoi in which our attention is drawn to the starkness of the décor – wooden floors and minimal wall hangings. D’s response was that this must say something about the poverty of even the middles classes in Scandinavia in those days. I tried to suggest that it had more to do with the influence of Protestant values (Lutheran I think) which have had such a powerful influence on social and political developments in these countries – let alone on notions of interior design. Austerity is getting a bad name these days – when I googled to try to find something about this aspect of Scandinavian societies all I got was articles on the latest European fiscal crisis - one of which acctually bears the title Beyond Austerity . As a child of the war years (who still has his ration book) and raised in a Scottish Presbyterean household, I have great respect and affection for austere ways of living (providing wine is accepted as a basic requirement – from the barrel of course!). Tony Judt used that last painful period of his life to reflect about his life in powerful short pieces in New York Review of Books – and some of them celebrated the immediate post-war period in Britain which is so often viewed in a negative light. My surfing put me onto a recent book Austerity Britain which appears to take a more positive view. /

The eyes have it

Entry to the National Gallery here is free the first Wednesday each month and we had wanted to visit the special exhibition they have of the 1930s school of Belgian (Wallonny actually) painters who used the name NERVIA and were in the business of celebrating the traditions of the area and also to encourage younger painters in that part of the world. They were unknowns for me - but I am a fan of belgian painting. And it proved to be a wonderful exhibition – with the styles variously reminding me of Renaissance; the great Belgian master Constantin Meunier; and more modern Clydeside painters. The new Glasgow boys are only part of the story - my friend Duncan Goldthorp has a relative who painted stunning realist industrial landscapes before the heavy industry disappeared from the West of Scotland.
In the course of searching the internet for some pictures of the members of the school (it’s Louis Besseret’s painting which heads the post) I found a great art blog - It’s about time.
After the exhibition, we dropped (hardly surprisingly) into the Anthony Frost English bookshop and were warmly received by the staff – a cup of coffee no less! I picked up a copy of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States and a Thomas Hardy novel. Zinn’s is one of the extremely few bits of radical writing one can get in the States and sparked the thought about the methodology of the global freedom indices. Patently the USA authorities place major restrictions on the availability of alternative world views which are allowed not only in schools, universities and libraries but even in bookshops and publishers – let alone the printed and visual media. On that basis it should be scored badly – but such things are difficult to measure and therefore are not part of the methodology used for these league tables. A diagram could usefully developed to identify the different areas of freedom – unfortunately this blog doesn’t allow me to insert diagrams.

And while we’re on the subject of the media Farewell Fourth Estate is a good overview.

Structures, systems and skills - demand and supply again

As I said, I had a dream about deliberative structures - which got me thinking about the various mechanisms which those in think-tanks and consultancies have pushed on unsuspecting governments in the past few decades – both in developed and transition countries. But let me start with the dream - which took me back to two periods in my political life. First – 40 years ago (!!) – when I was operating in a highly charged atmosphere of political conflict with a group of Liberal councillors who had just wrested power from the Labour establishment which had ruled a small shipbuilding town for about 25 years. At the age of 26 years I had been elected (in a bye-election) to represent a poor part of the town – and, facing a re-election within 12 months, had to forge a distinctive identity for myself before I faced again the 4,000 odd voters of the “ward” I had been elected to. (There were 9 such wards – each with 3 councillors - one of whom was subject to election each year. The system was discontinued in 1974 and – with all the current concern about democracy – its restoration might perhaps be considered). It was 1968 and not surprising that the distinguishing feature I developed was a strong participative (and community action) impulse which threatened not only the Liberals but my own political colleagues. But, within three years, I had managed to manoeuvre myself to the Chairmanship of an important new committee (Social Work) which was a joint one with a neighbouring town still within Labour control. The Social Work legislation passed for Scotland by the Wilson Labour Government of 1964-70 invited these new committees to “promote social welfare” and I was therefore able to use that position to develop community conference processes.
That stood me in very good stead a few years later when a giant new Region was formed – and the reputation I had gained propelled me to a central position in the new ruling Labour group.
Section 3.4 of this paper on my website describes how some of us quickly invented an inclusive process of policy deliberation. I was quite hostile to the committee structure which was then the mechanism used for political decision-making. I saw and called it strongly as a front for officer power. Our new system (called “member-officer groups”) embraced members of the opposition parties and junior officials – and the groups were invited to look critically at services which fell between the cracks of departments. Our experience attracted wide interest and was in the vanguard of a wider rethink about the process of decision-making in local government which took place more than a decade later in England – which culminated in legislation encouraging municipalities to set up cabinets and a directly-elected mayoral system. A good picture of this can be found here.

This experience gave me an insight into the role of various stakeholders – ruling party, opposition, senior officers, junior officials, citizens – which few consultants are lucky enough to obtain. It showed me how the structures we use so often pervert the potential insights each of these parties possess (one of the reasons perhaps to explain why I am disposed to the “balance” theory I offered recently). There had to be a better way of making decisions!

When I was a politician, I put the emphasis on new structures – but my more recent experience helps me understand that structures are only part of the picture. A lot of recent technical assistance in which I am involved has required the drafting of (and training in) policy analysis processes and skills - but these are not much use if they are inputed to a political process which does not operate on “rational” lines (I put this word in inverted commas simply because politics at its best has its own rationality from that of the pretensions of administrative rationality!). Effective technical assistance (TA) should to be based on a systems philosophy – bit is trapped in a project management (logframe) ideology. Of course the latter is supposed to be firmly based in the former – but never is! A nod is given in the drafting of Terms of Reference to “General and specific objectives”; but the role of the project in achieving the objective (and the other factors influencing policy outcomes) are never discussed).

A real systems approach to policy analysis in TA would (a) craft a map of the entire system – in this case
• The locus and system (formal and informal) of policy analysis and proposals
• The structure and protocols (formal and informal) of decision-taking
• The interaction between the two

And then (b) demonstrate exactly how the selected mechanism (new or amended structure, process or legal regulation; training etc) could act as a catalyst for positive change.

Good advice

"I always pass on good advice", Oscar Wilde has a character say - Ït's the only thing to do with it".
The use of consultants by British Governments over the past 15 or so years had become an increasing scandal – with annual spending running at well over a billion pounds. One positive result of the austerity measures, however, is a significant scaling back. But the big consultancies have become hooked on the connection and the money – and can’t kick the habit. So now they are offering to do the work for free! At least one of them - KPMG - has offered to work for a year on what it calls a charitable basis!
Three factors contributed to New Labour fascination with such external “advice”. First the employment of quite a few leading Labour MPs by the Big Consultancies in the 1990s when Labour was in opposition; then the natural suspicion a new Government has of the civil servants who had (by 1997) faithfully served another party for 13 years. And, finally, the social engineering tendencies of even New Labourites and the 1999 modernisation programme they pursued. For some reason The National Audit Office (NAO) – which is supposed to be the nation’s financial watchdog – started to look at the issue of consultant use only in 2005 – but has, since then, issued various reports exposing the bad practice and issuing both recommendations, guidelines and the inevitable “toolkits”.
Their most recent report( issued in October for the new government) gives a useful overview of issues - and one of the annexes to the significant 2007 report is a helpful set of guidelines on increasing the commitment of clients and consultants during the projects.

Technically I have been a consultant for the past 20 years – but hate the term. I was about to say they are parasites (they are) but have just thought of an even better definition which I’ve now placed in my glossary – “a con-man who operates like a sultan”. Not only are the two separate words retained in the definition – but the Sultanic parallel covers both the rewards and airs of consultants and the way they expect the client to jump to their orders in data-collection etc.
Of course, the consultancy work I do in programmes of “Technical Assistance” in transition countries is of a different nature than that in Western Europe. And the giveaway is the use of terms – “beneficiary” rather than “client”. A client is assumed to be in control (although the NAO reports show how little British Ministries actually are in control!) – whereas a beneficiary is a passive recipient of a project he may neither want nor need! After all, he doesn’t pay for it (it’s a freebie) – and has played little part in drafting its specifications! Here is another example of a system needing a proper balance between its demand and supply sides - an issue which "donors" have recognised in recent years with their talk of demand-driven strategies (The OECD Development Assistance centre issues interesting papers from the donor network it supports - see, for example,a recent paper which summarises some approaches and draws out some lessons). For some people (not only William Easterley), however, the only way out of these dilemmas is to remove the donors and donations.
The amount of money spent on consultancy (by Governments on their own structures and by international bodies on Technical Assistance) surpasses 100 billion euros (accroding to a 2006 OECD report) and yet how little has been written about the whole industry - let alone by anyone in it! I'll try to track down some references for a future post. And given the number of consultants in the world, isn't it about time that novels and satires were written about this??

I woke up this morning in the middle of a dream about the process of deliberation (I kid you not) which set me thinking about the lack of systemic perspective in so much of the work we are asked to do to improve the deliberative capacity of governments in transition countries. I will develop this tomorrow.......

The balance of power

My blog managers have suddenly added a statistics button which tells me the number of people accessing the site. Quite salutary to learn that the most popular entry was one in which I said absolutely nothing – merely gave a link to the Ideas Festival!! What was that about? And do I have to conclude that “least said best said”? Probably – since I have also noticed that it tends to be the shorter Amazon book reviews which are rated most highly. Talking of which, I am still not able to use my Amazon site – perhaps one of my readers can help me? Amazon certainly can’t – they gave me some obtuse advice about my cookies. I started to look in the oven – but did eventually manage to find a cookie-editing facility on the laptop and adjust it but it made no difference.
During the cold war, the phrase “balance of power” became unfashionable in liberal circles - and remains so. I never succumbed to that liberal fallacy. I had meant to devote my last post of 2010 to the principle of the golden mean – since I’ve been reminded a couple of times recently about the importance of “balance” in development. First was some work I was doing for a project bid. I had to draft something about building up the training system for civil servants and I remembered some consolidated thoughts on this issue I had drafted a couple of years ago – building on what I had learned from three years setting up a training centre for civil servants in Uzbekistan; 2 years’ work with Kyrgyz municipalities; and a year developing training in Bulgaria to help “the implementation of European norms” (to use the dreadful jargon. Most technical assistance works on the supply side – training trainers and helping establish training institutions. However useful this is, the main factor which will ensure training effectiveness is a clear demand from the organisation in which the “trainees’ work. A Polish friend and colleague on the latter project (Jacek) helped me understand the relevance of “learning outcomes” - and another friend and colleague (Daryoush) and I had developed a diagram which showed that effective training required input from 4 different groups – client, training manager, instructor and learner. Very slowly in the west, power has shifted from the suppliers to the consumers – but the best system is one in which there is a balance of power.
Then there was the thought-provoking start to Henry Mintzberg’s 2000 article on the management of government
“It was not capitalism which triumphed when the Berlin wall fell – it was balance.” the article began – going on to set the “strong private sector, strong public sector and strength in the sectors between” against the lack of balance and of “countervailing power” in the so-called communist societies.
A recent paper from the Compass Think-Tank Time for a new socialism made the point that thinking about the best point of balance between the various sectors shifts cyclically.

Historians like Arthur Schlesinger and theorists like Albert Hirschman have recorded that every thirty years or so, society shifts - essentially, from the public to the private and back again. The grass, after a while, always feels greener on the other side. The late 1940s to the late 1970s was a period of the public, the late ‘70s to now, the private. Now the conditions are right for another turn, to a new common life and the security and freedom it affords, but only if we make it happen by tackling a market that is too free and a state that is too remote.