Morning surf

I gave a link yesterday to an interesting site – Musings of an Amateur Trader – which consistently gives detailed and self-confident assessments of the political and economic health of countries. Wow, I said to myself, this guy really gets around. Now I think I know why – it’s hardly a blog (it contains no profile or statement of purpose) rather the presentations from a risk agency called STRATFOR headed by a financier called George Friedman. Today’s entry is a detailed forecast of political and financial events in 2011 – with the text occasionally indicating STRATFOR’s methods or assessments (when the penny dropped). So this is the real stuff we are getting – for free!
While I was searching for info on them, I came across (a) a long and fascinating post from another forecasting blog on Stratfor reliability and also what looks to be a thoughtful blog by management consultant (!!) John Hagel.

I’m remiss in not having looked at the great Eurotribune website in the last few months – and did some catching up this morning of its diaries. It draws on a group of writers from various parts of Europe and America and does great interviews with people working at the cutting edge of social and economic development - particularly those working on food and farming issues (eg farming sovereignty) and in various African countries (a good series is the 1,000 word intros to those countries and the various garssroot initiatives they have). Good posts on Neo-feudalism and neo-nihilism; a pamphlet on the broken British economic model; and a discussion about trends in financial capitalism.

Clearly I shall have to update the list of favourite links I have on the right hand column of this site!
Now to return to the editing I have been doing of the two papers on China I have recently added to my website. The title I had originally given to my explanation for my resignation from the project there had been Mission Impossible and, when I changed it to Lost in Beijing,I had not realised there had been a steamy film with that title! I had actually been thinking of Bill Murray's Lost in Translation with the sad hotel scenes looking down on a megapolis. Right now I'm working on the other paper - a briefing note on Chinese Administrative Reform. One might ask why - since my website does not get many hits. But I am surprised by the frequency with which I can find a post of mine from this blog on a google search - so I hope that, with a suitable title, the paper (and website) might get a higher profile. Even although I say it myself, its library of papers and references seem to be unique!

Lessons in Transylvania

I've just received the latest issue of The Ecologist and it contains a great article by Laura Sevier, a freelance journalist, about traditional farming here in Transylvania. For the (few) lazy readers I have, let me reproduce the entire article here -

Transylvania has maintained traditional farming methods for hundreds of years. As it faces the twin threats of intensive agriculture and byzantine EU policies, its model of under-development is attracting the interest of policy makers. Forget Count Dracula. Deep in the heart of Transylvania, an altogether more mesmerising scene is playing itself out - a vision of what life must have been like in a medieval village. There's not a brightly coloured shop or advert in sight. Horse and carts clatter down the dirt track roads and cows wander freely. There are barely any cars. And behind the tall walls of each of the old Saxon houses is a self-contained ‘courtyard farm' complete with a wooden hay barn, livestock sheds and a small vegetable plot and fruit orchard.
In the distance are unfenced wildflower-rich grasslands and communal hay-meadows and beyond that, thick, old growth forests where bears, wolves and wild cats still roam.
This village, Crit, is one of the 150 or so well preserved Saxon villages and settlements of southern Transylvania that have remained almost unchanged for hundreds of years. The so-called Saxons were German colonists who immigrated to Transylvania in the 12th and 13th centuries and they were renowned for being hard working farmers. The smallholder lifestyle continues to flourish here today, with most villagers entirely self-sufficient.


The good lifeA typical household keeps poultry, a couple of pigs, 10-20 sheep, along with 2 or 3 cows that graze on communal village pastures by day and are milked by hand in the morning and evening in the courtyards. Fruit and vegetables are eaten fresh from the garden or preserved in pickles or jams for the winter months. As well as growing and rearing their own, villagers also slaughter and butcher their own animals. Every chimney has a special chamber for hanging meat (predominantly pork) for smoking. Many households make their own wine from homegrown vines and brandy from plums.
This self-sufficient way of life is still deeply ingrained in rural Romania, passed down from generation to generation. Farming dictates the rhythm of life here, both daily and seasonally - during the summer months, for instance, most families are out in their hay-meadows with scythes and rakes making hay for their cattle and sheep.
‘Practically everyone is a farmer in rural Romania,' says Nat Page, director of the charitable conservation foundation ADEPT. ‘Ninety per cent of villagers have land outside the village and their courtyard farms.' There are some shops but they're very basic - you wouldn't even know they were shops and most people only buy things they can't make themselves, like cooking oil, cigarettes and beer.
The food produced is organic in practice, although it's not certified because the costs of certification are too high. This low impact, ‘High Nature Value' farming allows nature to thrive. Wildflowers are abundant, and many of the mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, fish and insects present are rare or protected at national and international level, and have disappeared over much of Europe.


ThreatsADEPT focuses its work in the Târnava Mare area, 85,000 hectares in the heart of the Saxon Villages area and has had the area certified as a Natura 2000 site which gives it a basic level of protection.
There are, however, threats facing the landscape and local communities. ‘People are not being allowed to produce jams and pickles in their own kitchen because of excessive interpretation of EU law by the Romanian Food Standards Agency,' says Page. ‘They're being driven out of business and lovely old bakeries are still being closed down.' This, he stresses, is not what Brussels wants. ‘Brussels preaches diversity, flexibility and cultural traditions but it's up to the host country to implement it.'
Another problem is that 70 per cent of farmers are over 50 years old. Christi Gherghiceanu, ADEPT project manager who grew up in the area says, ‘people older than 50 are reluctant to leave their homes. They seem to be happy with their rural lifestyle. The rest of the population would rather abandon the villages because of the lack of financial opportunities in the area.'
The biggest threats to the landscape are intensive farming - artificial fertilisers would seriously damage or destroy the wildflower meadows and high stocking rates could lead to over-grazing - or abandonment of the land.


Farmers' markets‘Inevitably many of the smallest farms will disappear,' says Nat Page. ‘The average size of a farm here is 1.5 hectares. In five years time it will be three hectares. We can't say that everything is going to remain the same. But we can say we hope small- scale farming has a future in the area.'
Founded in 2004, ADEPT's main objective is to protect the fragile biodiversity of Transylvania and use it to benefit local communities. ‘We didn't just parade in with a load of money telling them what to do,' explains Page. ‘We employed local people and we've helped small farmers in the real world. If you want to conserve an area but there are no economic benefits, people are less responsive.'
ADEPT, funded by Defra's Darwin Initiative, Orange Romania and Innovation Norway, has assisted small farmers in two main ways. The first is to help them find a market by organising regular farmer's markets in nearby towns and cities and enabling producers to get their kitchens authorised (by persuading inspectors not to excessively interpret the Brussels guidance). ADEPT, based in the large Saxon village of Saschiz, also provides a modern ‘food barn' authorised by the Romanian Food Safety Authority where people can produce food. The 20 producers it works with now sell 70,000 euros worth of produce a year through markets, although ADEPT is keen to work with more. In addition, ADEPT has helped 65 small-scale farmers gain an income again by finding a market for milk. By working with them to improve hygiene and equipment, the farmers had their milk collection reinstated.
The second aspect of what ADEPT does is to help small-scale farmers get grants from the EU's Common Agricultural Policy. Many farmers own under 1 hectare, so don't receive basic Pillar 1 payments. ADEPT is dealing this at a policy level, promoting higher payments for small farmers.


To CAP it offADEPT has also helped farmers benefit from biodiversity conservation. As the area is a Natura 2000 and HNV landscape, farmers are eligible for CAP agri-environmental payments but these are not automatic - you have to opt for them. After running farm visits explaining the advantages of signing up, 75 per cent of eligible farmers within Târnava Mare have joined the scheme; this is four times the rate of uptake in neighboring areas which demonstrates the desperate need for farm advisory services in such areas.
This will too, of course, benefit plants and animals. ADEPT's botanist, Dr John Akeroyd, who often accompanies Prince Charles (a regular visitor to Transylvania) on his walks through this countryside says, ‘the grasslands in this area are uniquely rich in Europe and appear to be still in good heart thanks to continuing traditional management by local farmers'.
On a wider scale, Nat Page believes this project could even have an influence over the next phase of the CAP, 2013-2020, in favour of High Nature Value landscapes elsewhere. ADEPT has been asked to present its results at EU meetings in Brussels because it shows a way forward to protect the small-scale farmed landscapes and communities across all of Europe. The Commissioners for Agriculture and the Environment both sent encouraging video messages to the High Nature Value Grassland Conference organised by ADEPT in Sibiu in September 2010.
‘An amazing thing is happening within the EU,' says Page. ‘A few years ago everyone said these farms were irrelevant and policy favoured competitive farms. Now small-scale farms are seen as valuable for food and landscape, with massive benefits for flood and fire control, biodiversity and mitigation against climate change. They are increasingly appreciated as vital for Europe's future.'

autobiographies

A cold mist surrounded the house in the early part of the morning – but, as it slowly lifted, a wondrous sight was beholden. Each tree nearby and far was picked out - as in a touched up photograph - covered with iced snow. It was like a phalanx of phantom warriors. Question – what is the collection noun for a group of government leaders? It was none less than Harold McMillan, a Conservative UK Prime Minister in the early 1960s who gave a great answer to this question – “a lack of principals”! And, as the sun’s rays reached the branches, a rustling around the house as the icicles fell from them.

Paul Theroux is a travel writer who apparently arouses some feeling – his observations apparently offend some people. I find this genre an interesting one but personally prefer Colin Thubron. Theroux has reached the age of 69; started to write his autobiography; got to 500 words; and then realised he couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth about himself and found justification for closing his notebook on the venture by looking at the reliability of autobiographies over the centuries. I suppose blogs make a lot of us diarists if not autobiographers these days. One of the papers on my website attempts what one might call an intellectual autobiography - Search for the Holy Grail - Lessons from 40 years of fighting bureaucracy.

Simon Jenkins had a good piece on the issues behing the uncovering of an undercover policeman who was playing a prominent if not agent-provocateur role in the ecology movement.
And I've recently come across a blog - Musings of an amateur trader - which, like Boggy's blog - gives useful mini-lectures and country vignettes. This week on banking.

An everyday encounter

Over the weekend I stayed at Ploiesti - some 50 kms north of Bucharest on the main road to Brasov; within sight of the Carpathian foothills; and easy reach of the Dealu Mare vineyards. For most of the 20th Century it was the Romania’s oil base – but the oil has now been bought up by foreigners and apparently put on reserve. As a result the City is now very pleasant – at least in its physical surroundings!
But Romanian petrol has become in the last 6 months the most expensive in Europe – the subject of some intense debate but for reasons for which I am none the wiser. If it interferes with the driving habits of the young Mafia here, I will be well pleased. We encountered one of the high Testerone guys on Monday – his smoked windows black Audi was dumped across the pavement leaving us only a body width to scrape through. We get very angry with this insensitivity – and swung our bags around as we passed – and a screetching dervish duly emerged to hurl insults at D who reciprocated. Testerone Ted (all of 24 years old – how can he own such a car???) came chasing after D – and physically prevented her from continuing her way – paintwork after all is their virility symbol. I returned to lend her moral support – just as a 50 year-old was telling her that if it had been his car he would have knocked her to the ground and trampled on her! Our protestations about illegal parking were brushed aside – even by a couple of cops who were summonsed after the guy grabbed my throat after his floosy objected to my banging my fist on his car. At my age I can (if I control myself) react passively - unlike the TTs. D and I were driven to the police station – with D facing a charge of vandalisation (for a hair scratch) but me prepared to counter-charge TT with assault. I was told that – as a foreigner – I could not enter the police station (!) and one of the PCs stayed with me. He was in his mid 40s – had been fairly hostile to us during the encounter – but now seemed to relax (good training??) and share my concerns about TTs.
When I was eventually allowed in, it was to meet the very impressive station boss – Tiberius no less – who spoke English and adopted a very common-sense approach – apparently threatening TT with both a parking charge and assault. He took D and me into his office and, while D was writing her testimony, told us about his various initiatives. A good guy – although D feels that the treatment had a lot to do with my being a Brit (and of a certain age)!

The next day – despite the overcast sky – I headed north to the mountains and D to Bucharest. The higher I climbed the more the sky cleared but immediately I hit the plain again at Rasnov I was into pea-soup mist again. The village, however, had not only clear sky but no snow! Rare for 1,400 metres in mid-January.
A box of Fassbinder films was waiting for me – as well as the news that one of my neighbours had died (88 year old husband of the small bent woman who chases her chickens and occasionally drops in for a coffee and biscuits. Duly lit the bedroom stove – and discovered that a leak has sprung in one of the bath taps (yes, I do have a bath – if no TV or fridge!). But I took the easy way out; turned off the water again and relied on the traditional water pitcher and bowl I bought recently. Assembled one of the marvellous standard lamps (with additional reading light) which IKEA is selling for only 10 euros – and settled down to read a fascinating book about the 3 Himmler brother written by a granddaughter of the youngest (Heinrich was the middle brother). How Nazism took hold of such a civilised country as Germany is a fascinating question which I have never seen dealt with adequately – it’s usually passed over in a perfunctory manner to get to the more exciting and shocking aspects of Nazism with which (as Peter Watson rightly points out in his recent book) the Brits have an unhealthy fixation. A lengthy, sympathetic but balanced story of the interaction of the stable family circle and unstable social and economic environment in which someone like Himmler grew up is an important aspect of our understanding of that period. Most of us know about the feeling of betrayal when the 1st world war was suddenly lost (The Kaiser had been hiding the truth); the communist putches in the various cities in the immediate aftermath and the recruitment of young soldiers to the Freikorps-type organisations which were created to put down these revolutionaries; the hyperinflation – but it is rarely told from the perspective of the ordinary person. Himmler’s father was a respectable Headmaster – and The Himmler Brothers by Katrin Himmler paints a powerful picture of how such people’s worlds crumbled.
And, finally, a good sample of recent coverage of China.

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. /