administrative evil, cultural confusions and complexity science

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In the last couple of days I’ve read about the brutal behaviour of the immigration officials processing some senior citizens on a cruiser ship which was docking for the second time up the US coastline. One couple apparently made a remark questioning this duplication – and, as revenge, the officials put the entire gaggle of old people through the administrative hoops for 7 hours – at some no little physical suffering, treating them as if they were terrorist suspects. And then look at thisaggro to a journalist by a policeman in NE Scotland who had been clearly taken his cue from Donald Trump’s minions; regarding anyone interviewing people critical of the commercial activities of the high and mighty as a terrorist - and therefore needing spoeadeagled on the bonnet of a car and having the videa camera wrested from him. What has happened to the Scottish democracy we used to be so proud of?
Officials who dance on our rights like this should be clapped immediately in the stocks – and pelted for a few hours with rotten fruit and vegetables! And again I say, this is the sort of stuff which should be the focus of public admin training!! One of the (many) unread books in my googlelibrary has the striking title Unmasking Administrative Evil and purports to show

how ordinary people, within their normal professional and administrative roles, can engage in acts of evil without being aware that they are doing anything wrong--and that this tendency toward administrative evil is deeply woven into the identity of public affairs as well as other fields and professions in public life.

Duncan Green is Head of Research of Oxfam and writes a great blog Very amusing was the table he gave recently showing not only what brits really mean by their understatements (eg that’s very interesting really means the exact opposite what complete nonsense!) but a third interpretation which is put on the first phrase by those from other countries. Very funny – and insightful!

The development community to which he belongs is doing interesting work on the implications of complexity theory for the professional field of development. The Aid on the Edge blog has put me in touch this week with what look to be 2 very important papers on the subject issued by the UK’s Overseas Development Institute – one this month, the other in 2008.
Simon Maxwell’s development blog celebrates Robert Chambers (whose work I drew on in the conclusion to my Varna paper) and has some reflections on the development field’s thinking.

Money and drugs

Disparate bits and pieces. Start with Bulgarian art and seascapes.
On my way to the Spartak swimming pool in the last few months, I have watched with interest and respect as an impressive derelict old building in South Park has been lovingly restored not – as we first thought – for yuppy residences but for an art gallery. And today all became clear – with about 10 massive scupltures adorning plinths around the building whose protective covering had been removed to reveal spanking glass walls on 2 sides. And plaques at the front door indicate that it is to be a Museum of Contemporary Art – funded by the unholy trio of Iceland, Leichtenstein and Norway! Must get an invitation to the official opening – and plead the cause for older art!!
And I hope to link forces later in the week with the curator of the great Sofia City Gallery – thanks to my friend Yassen who knows her very well and is arranging for us to meet to explore a possible joint project.

Bulgaria has a glossy English bi-monthly - Vagabond – which is always worth reading. A recent issue has a nice article on the aesthetic attractions of the Northern coastline of the Black Sea. The painting above is a Pater Boiadjiev I acquired in January - which currently ranks as the favourite in my Bulgarian collection. It is of this northern coastline

The Hungarian Spectrum blog continues its relentless and commendable exposure of the Orban government’s antics – this time with a vignette of one of its oligarch’s „thinking”

I’ve lashed out several times in recent blogs at the growing trend of commercialisation of public services; and was therefore pleased to see that the anguished LibDem Treasury Ministry in the UK Coalition (Vincent Cable) is promising an investigation into the implications for that model of the most recent farce which has arisen in that country – this time on the scandalous mess which private companies have made of residential homes for the elderly.
The Guardian also had an interview on the same subject with a great writer who now lives in a residential home which is not run for profit and is, in her late 80s, very vociferous about the need to keep the profit motive away from such places.

Think Tanks are perhaps one of the most visible signs of modernity. Initially squeaky clean – but, slowly, exposed as the sophisiticated propoganda machines most of them are. I was delighted to come across a great initiative of Colorado University which has for some time been conducting critical assessments of the Reports which come from educational think-tanks in the US . The reports can be accessed here.

Next, from Real Economics, one of the pithiest critiques of US policy and systems of the past few decades I have ever come across -

Most everything the US has done over the last thirty years turns out to have been an error. The after effects of the Cold War left America with no plan B of how to behave. Its politics were ill equipped to deal with the more modern problems of serious economic competition and commodity constraints on its life style – by which I mean higher priced oil. When faced with a challenge, the response was to huff and puff about American “exceptionalism” and to pout. Worse: American style economic doctrine, so deeply flawed as it was to turn out to be, was foisted on others.
The error, or course, was to revert to happy face politics. That was what Reagan sold the country on back in 1980. The happy face was plastered everywhere in order to avoid confrontation with fundamental issues. The idea, such as it was, being that free market magic would solve any ills. All we had to do was get government out of the way and things would work out.
What actually happened is that we used debt to paper over the fact that real growth was insufficient. We never paid for the wars we engaged in. We never paid to renew our infrastructure. We allowed our factories to decay. We cut taxes, but not costs. We pumped money into fantasy assets in any number of get rich quick schemes – the result being the succession of destructive bubbles we have lived through. Our policy leadership drifted into a zombie like self congratulatory dream world where it genuinely thought it had conquered history. Business cycle history that is. The magic worked we were all told. As recently as 2004 and 2005 top officials were slapping themselves on the back for having solved the problems of infinite growth.
Economics became a Disney like cartoon of itself. It became disconnected from the serious goal of solving problems for the benefit of all. It simply served to justify the aggrandizement of a few. It constructed utopias and imaginary worlds to explore. This was because it gave up on the more messy problems encountered here on earth. Prizes were awarded on the basis of magic and sleight of hand.
When your intellectuals leave the real world to inhabit a parallel universe and convince themselves that’s fine, no one can blame everyday folk for believing in the market magic fairy as well.
Someday someone will write a great satirical commentary on just how stupid all our clever people were. Right now all we can do is turn away in disgust. But how do you tell a whole cohort of highly educated and self satisfied people that they wasted their own and our time? Or that they led us into a dead end that will cost a generation of hard work to recover from?
Those leaders – should we even dignify them with that name any longer? – fell into a trance. They were beguiled by the great illusion that they could construct something solid on the shifting sands of finance. More importantly they totally ignored the corrosive effect of the debt being piled up in our private sector as households desperately sought to maintain a rising standard of living in the face of very mediocre income growth. These were great times if you were highly educated and well connected. Your income soared. Your wealth accumulated. For the rest? Not so much. The middle class festered in an ever increasingly vain effort to replicate the golden years of the immediate post-war era.
The disconnect between productivity and wages has come home to roost. It was severed by corporate incompetence and short sightedness: the pursuit of shareholder value came at the cost of undermining the demand that drives stock prices and real value over the longer term.
Now we learn the hard way.
Private sector debt is still far too high to allow much long term growth. It will have to be reduced. It is our Great Constraint. We did not cure our banking system. We are still infested with badly mismanaged banks lurching about the landscape capable destroying value and sinking our economy at any moment. We held back from punishing poor investment decisions by creditors. We bailed them out. So the debt remains instead of having been written off.
We persist in discussing problems that don’t exist – debt and inflation – rather than ones that do – unemployment.
The irony is that we lectured the Japanese on exactly these topics when they drifted off course decades ago. Take your medicine, we said. Close those banks. Slash you debt. Rebuild from a realistic, and smaller base. Clean up. Face reality. Did we? Are we?
Is there any hope we will?
And our leading Republican candidate for the presidency, Mitt Romney, today announces that we are “inches away from abandoning capitalism”.
Huh?
It was unfettered capitalism that drove this illusion. It was deregulation that allowed the banks to upend the economy. It was the unleashing of markets that drove bubble manias. It was capitalists, not workers, who gouged shareholders for enormous and undeserved bonuses. It was market driven finance that misallocated capital into real estate and away from factories. It was a belief in market magic that created the illusion we could borrow and not tax to pay our bills. Indeed it was that part of our leadership – that word again – who most profoundly sought to re-engineer society in the grand tradition of the neo-liberal thinkers like Hayek and his misguided or ill-informed followers, who led us furthest astray.
Institutions matter in actual economies. They matter mightily. Like the banks of our great rivers, they bind capitalism into a channel where we can extract value from it without falling prey to its anti-social extremism. We get the work. We get the energy. But we avoid most of the mayhem. When those institutions are kicked away, when the river banks are breached, the system wobbles off course. Strange and very nasty things happen. Ordinary people drown. In particular, democratic society is torn apart. Political cliques dominate over the majority. The agenda narrows to serve a few. Unrest builds. Until …
With our elite now indulging in a self-referential discussion about problems that exist only within its small and exclusive world. With the recovery clearly showing signs of slowing down. With debt burdens forcing household retrenchment. And with unsafe banking ready to undermine everything. I have to ask

And finally, in the most obvious area where policy analysis fails utterly to penetrate – drug policy - comes a very important critical report from a Global Commission.
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The good German of Nanjing

I have a week or so to update the paper I delivered at the Varna Conference on 20 May – my critique of the sort of advice in institution- building which is dished out by western consultants and the procurement procedures which the EC uses for that. So this morning I was having another look at it - building in some references which I had missed (such as Tony Verheijen’s 2007 World bank paper Administrative Capacity in the New Member States – the limits of innovation?; and trying to get a more coherent ending to the paper.
This year there is no guarantee that the paper will be published – NISPAcee funds are running low. However, last week I receives a letter suggesting that I submit it as a possible contribution to The Journal of US-China Public Administration.
Some posts back, I mentioned an excellent panel discussion of central european developments of the past 20 years Is Europe’s democratic Revolution Over? Reference was made during that discussion to Ralf Dahrendorf’s prescient comment (in an extended public letter he wrote in 1990 and published under the title Reflections on the Revolution in Europe) that it would take one or two years to create new institutions of political democracy in these recently liberated countries, maybe five to 10 years to reform the economy and make a market economy, and 15 to 20 years to create the rule of law. And it will take maybe two generations to create a functioning civil society.
A Czech panellist (who had been an adviser to Vaclav Havel) suggested that

what we see now is that we have completed the first two stages, the transformation of the institutions, of the framework of political democracy on the institutional level, there is a functioning market economy, which of course has certain problems, but when you take a look at the third area, the rule of the law, there is still a long way to go, and civil society is still weak and in many ways not very efficient.

He then went on to make the useful distinction

between democracy understood as institutions and democracy understood as culture. It’s been much easier to create a democratic regime, a democratic system as a set of institutions and procedures and mechanism, than to create democracy as a kind of culture – that is, an environment in which people are actually democrats

I find most Chinese novels I get hold very gripping to read. Is this perhaps something to do with the repressions and incredible madnesses (of a Hieronymus Bosch sort) they have experienced in the past 100 years? I’ve just finished Ye Zhaoyan’s Nanjing 1937 – a Love Story which led me to check the precise location of the city – and the evil events of December 1937 when about 250,000 defenceless Chinese were massacred by Japanese soldiers. Thus I learned of The good German of Nanjing - John Rabe who (as Chairman of a hurriedly assembled International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone; and as Head of the local Nazi association) saved a similar number by creating a safe zone and facing down marauding Japanese on numerous occasions (by flashing his swastika pass). Last September I wrote about the similar courageous role played by an American (Asa Jennings) in September 1922 when Greek residents of Smyrna were being massacred. Rabe's achievement and heroism went for naught for the Brits whose actions reduced him to dire poverty in the denazification programme in post-war Berlin – but the citizens of Nanjing did not forget him and for the last few years of his life sent money and food to him in Berlin before he died of a heart attack in 1950.
Such people are the real heroes - but they are generally lost to us all. When reviewing Robert Fisk's huge book on the Middle-East conflicts, I made the comment that this should be the stuff of case-studies in public admin teaching - to remind us that we are human beings and that principles should triumph over rationalistic calculations!
The large oil painting on the Nanjing massacre was done a decade ago by Li Zijiang

EC Structural Funds

I’m quiet because I’m busy! Swimming first thing in morning – with refreshing walks through Sofia’s great South park with Vitosha Mountain above always offering a fascinating artistic backcloth, with or without clouds. Wednesday the sky was as spectacular as it gets hereabouts – stormy greys and blues…with thunder rolling around in late afternoon as we scurried home protectively clutching the latest painting acquisition. Our fifth Milcho Kostadinov – but first seascape – which has rich hues of green, blue, grey and crashing white foam. This is it - above.
I’m also thinking about a possible bid for a project in Bulgaria’s Structural Funds (SF) (Administrative Capacity) – whose terms of reference are, naturally, in Bulgarian. But the more I learn of the detail, the less enthusiastic I get. The project I am currently involved in is required to train 2,800 local officials (in aspects of bidding for and managing SF) in a 12 month period. That’s one workshop every day – somewhere in one of Bulgaria’s regions. Understandably, the process is more about ticking boxes than developing the sort feedback, learning and quality needed for sistainability. The new project I’m looking at would require 5,000 officials to be trained in 6 months! That’s almost 4 workshops each day!! Impossible - unless it is all done at a regional level, when it does become manageable. But companies bidding would have to put money upfront – and hope that the authorities would honour the receipts. No wonder so little money actually gets spent!
Yesterday I visited a workshop we were running on Communications and Information – for 20 municipal officials – and chatted with the 2 trainers. I was fascinated to learn that the Gates Foundation is funding work with the local library system here – Bulgaria has 900 of them! And, given the parlous demographic state of many of the villages here, it is not suprising that few have computers or internet connections.
A year ago - some comments about education.

Opening the dark recesses of Sofia City Gallery

The special exhibitions of Sofia City Art Gallery play an important role in Bulgaria in bringing together the paintings of people like Dobre Dobrev, Nikolae Boiadjiev (to mention 2 recent events) from the various municipal and private museums in the country. But the Sofia gallery boasts the best collection of Bulgarian art (7,000 artefacts) and how therefore to ensure that they see the light of day? The Gallery curator Dr. Maria Vasileva has different ways of dealing with the issue - first collections around themes such as "the window"; the "artists's studio and model" and "portraits of artists"(to mention three recent themes).
The Gallery has also started a series of exhibitions (and booklets/discs)(“The other Eye”) which involves opening up the gallery's large collections to selected outsiders - who are invited to comb the dungeons of the gallery where the collections are stored, strip off the protective covering and select some paintings for public display.
I missed the first two exhibitions of such works – selected by an artist Luchezar Boyadjiev and a philosopher Boyan Manchev. The small booklet which accompanied the second exhibition tells of Manchev expecting to find a large section of the museum’s collection covering major events – whether historical or personal). Instead

“the representation of various aspects of people’s private world obviously prevails, there being, conditionally speaking, an “idyllic” thread running through the works, which unifies all those aspects through the representation of elements of everyday living, which are not directly related to either big moments in history and monumental events, or to essential existential and metaphysical issues such as life, death, birth, violence, suffering, etc.”

It says a lot about the richness of the Bulgarian painting tradition that only the first four of the following names selected for the exhibition are on the list of more than 140 painters I have selected for the booklet on Bulgarian painting I am working on! Naoum Hadjimladenov, Bencho Obreshkov, Dechko Ouzounov, Kiril Tsonev, Vera Nedkova, Vera Loukova, Ivan Nenov, Lika Yanko, Sami Bidjerano-Sabin, Georgi Bawev, Nadezhda Kouteva, Samouil (Suli) Seferov, Dimiter Voinov, Dariya Vassilyanska, Nadezhda Deleva, Andrei Daniel, Zina Yourdanova, Luben Kostov, Nina Kovacheva, Ivan Moudov, Nikola Mihov, Stoyan Sotirov, etc.
Of the new names, I found Loukova, Nedkova and Nenov most attractive.

And a third exhibition has just opened – The Choice - of artefacts this time selected by 43 prominent Bulgarian art and cultural historians belonging to different generations and fields of work (lecturers, researchers, museum curators, directors of art galleries, museums and nongovernmental organizations, art critics, curators and freelance researchers. The project aim is defined in very ambitious terms

• to look into the factors that single out an artwork as valuable and important for the development of Bulgarian art from today’s perspective;
• to establish whether selection criteria have changed as compared to the ones applied in decades past;
• whether the best textbook examples of artworks have stood the test of time;
• whether the language of art criticism has changed; what is the personal stance of the most prominent Bulgarian art historians.

The accompanying booklet (only 5 euros) allows each of the 47 to analyze their choice both in view of its specific features and the features it shares with other works belonging to the same historical period. Alongside the collection’s masterpieces there appear somewhat forgotten names, as well as some totally unfamiliar ones; alongside classical artists there stand young artists. For my taste, there is too much contemporary crap – collages and multi-media. And the text which accompanies each artefact – which could have been informative to lay people like myself – is too often self-indulgent and uninformative.
The displays which impacted on me were –
• A still life from a forgotten - Patriki Sandev (1881-1959)
• A portrait by Konstantin Shturkelov (1889-1961)
• A portrait by Kiril Tsonev(whose greatness I am only now beginning to appreciate)
• The famous Haymaking-Rest by Zlatyu Boyadjiev (1941)
• Village scene (Muslim Bulgarian women) by Simeon Velkov (1885-1966)
• Zlatin Nuriev’s harrowing scuplture Window (1985) of an eyeless Pomak (carved during the “Revival Process” when those of Turkish descent were forced to take Bulgarian names.

Perhaps I can persuade the Gallery to let me into its depths?? And I wonder whether the Regional Galleries have the same policy. I hope to visit the Stara Zagora Gallery on Sunday. The painting is an Ivan Milev - who died so young.

Taking on the system - credit where credit is due

I try to avoid references in this blog to personalities and „hot” news and issues – whether DSK, the Arab risings, Wikileaks, the financial crisis etc – on the basis that this is what most blogs and media focus on and there is nothing useful for the rest of us to say. But one article about Sarah Palin I have to share – since it puts a very different slant on her work and raises the interesting question of what might have happened if she had stuck to her own initial script rather than the one the extreme Republicans gave her after her nomination as the Republican’s VP Candidate.

Palin’s achievement was to pull Alaska out of a dire, corrupt, enduring systemic crisis and return it to fiscal health and prosperity when many people believed that such a thing was impossible. She did this not by hewing to any ideological extreme but by setting a pragmatic course, applying a rigorous practicality to a set of problems that had seemed impervious to solution. She challenged supposedly inviolable political precepts, and embraced more-nuanced realities: Republicans sometimes must confront powerful business interests; to govern effectively, you have to cooperate with the other side; you sometimes must raise taxes to balance a budget; and doing these things can actually enhance rather than destroy your career, whatever anybody says. True reform—not pandering to the base—established Palin’s broad popularity in Alaska. This approach is sorely absent from most of what happens in Washington these days.

The full article - The Tragedy of Sarah Palin - in the current issue of the Atlantic tells an amazing story of how she (a) came to take head-on the Oil Giants and corrupt Alaskan politicians they had in their pocket; and (b) put together an unlikely coalition with opposition politicians to pull off an incredible deal for the State. And some of the corrupt politicians were duly arraigned and imprisoned. The article give suseful chapter and verse.
Political systems these days need individuals who are prepared to take on the strong financial interests which are destroying us – and it is indeed a tragedy that she ran on a completely different ticket!
OECD insights has a useful post on this very subject of battling graft (corruption)

What are public admin scholars up to?

I don't want to offend - but this is a 16th Century Albrecht Durer sketch - which seems quite appropriate for the theme.

Strange but refreshing weather in Sofia – starts well, then in late afternoon scudding grey clouds, wind and thunder.
I’m reading at last Basic Instincts – human nature and the new economics by Peter Lunn (who has academic qualifications first in neuroscience then in economics (with a considerable spell as broadcaster in between) and whose book gives a good critique of mainstream economics and introduction to the new behavioural economics which has been developing in the past decade and which already has many books, blogs and, as of last week, a world-wide Association of 3,500 members.
In March last year I suggested that, as both mainstream economics and psychology were undergoing major challenge, it was time that the scholastic discipline of public management had this sort of overhaul The only popular book on the subject I can think of was Reinventing Government (1991) by David Osbourne and Ted Gaebler – which did not, however, attempt an overview of the topic but was rather proselytise for neo-liberalism. For a book which had such a profound effect, it’s curiously absent from google scholar and those not familiar with it will have to make do with this useful riposte to its approach.

Economics and psychology, of course, are subjects dear to the heart of everyone – and economists and psychologists figures of both power and ridicule. Poor old public administration and its experts are hardly in the same league! As I said in yesterday’s post, not only does noone listen to them – but the scholars are embarrassed to be caught even writing for a bureaucratatic or political audience. And yet the last two decades have seen ministries and governments everywhere embark on major upheavals of administrative and policy systems – the very stuff of public administration. But the role of the scholars has (unlike the 2 other disciplines) been simply to observe, calibrate and comment. No theory has been developed by scholars equivalent to the power of the "market”, "competitive equilibrium” or "the unconscious” – unless, that is, you count Weber’s "rational-legal bureaucracy” or Robert Michels "iron law of oligarchy”. Somehow Lindblom's "disjointed incrementalism" never caught on as a public phrase!
Those behind the marketising prescriptions of New Public Management (NPM) were not from the public admin stable – but rather from Public Choice Economics and from the OECD – and the role of PA scholars has been map its rise and apparent fall and (occasionally) to deflate its pretensions. At its best, this type of commentary and analysis is very useful – few have surpassed Chris Hood’s masterly dissection of NPM 20 years ago. This sets out for the first time the basic features of (and arguments for) the disparate elements which had characterised the apparently ad-hoc series of measures seen in the previous 15 years in the UK, New Zealand and Australia – and then goes on to suggest that the underlying values of NPM (what he calls the sigma value of efficiency) are simply one of three clusters of adminstrative values – the other two being concerned with rectitude (theta value) and resilience (lamda value). 
Table 2 of the paper sets this out in more detail.

The trick (as with life) is to get the appropriate balance between these three. Any attempt to favour one at the expense of the others (NPM) will lead inevitably to reaction and is therefore unstable. This emphasis on the importance of balance was the focus of a very good (but neglected) paper which Henry Mintzberg published in 2000 (which I’ve mentioned before on the blog) about the Management of Government which starts with the assertion that it was not capitalism which won in 1989 but "the balanced model” ie a system in which there was some sort of balance between the power of commerce, the state and the citizen. Patently the balance has swung too far in the intervening 20 years!

Hood elaborates on these three sets of values in the book he published at the same time with Michael Jackson - Administrative Argument (sadly out of print) - when he set aut 99 (conflicting) proverbs used in organisational change.

In 2007, Russell Ackoff, the US strategic management guru, published a more folksy variant of this proverbs approach – The F Laws of management a short version of which can be read here We desperately need this sort of approach applied to the „reformitis” which has afflicted bureaucrats and politicians in the past 20 years. A book is needed which –
• Is written in a clear and accessible way
• Sets out the history of public admin thought (already available in many academic texts)
• Sets out the thinking which has dominated practice of the past 20 years; where it has come from; and what results it has had (already well done in academia see the Pal paper on the role of the OECD I referred to a few posts back)
• Gives case studies – not of the academic sort but more fire in the belly stuff which comes, for example, from the pen of Kenneth Roy in the great crusading Emag he edits and which today tells a tale which should be shouted from the rooftops of the collusion of so many public figures with the activities of the cowboys who run privatised companies which are trying to muscle in on (and make profit from) public services.

Perhaps I should try to produce such a book?

Speaking truth to power

The last session of the NISPAcee Conference on Saturday afternoon came back to the Conference theme of Public Administration of the Future - with a slightly over-the-top intro to Professor Bouckaert, suggesting that governments listened to him and acted upon his advice. Netherlands may, of course, be an exceptional case – but the sad reality is that few public admin scholars even see government as an audience. There is the odd occasion when a Ministry does commission some scholars – Finland did it in the early 2000s and Denmark also.
It would be great to see a paper from some academics which tried to summarise the lessons from the last 20 years of frenetic administrative reforms in a way which made sense for political leaders in central europe (let alone Western) eg a presentation for junior Ministers. Even more helpful would be an advice note on how they should handle the latest recommendations from management consultants! I have actually never read such a paper. Chris Pollitt’s stimulating 2004 paper on Buying and Borrowing Public Management Refoms is as close as I can get to such a paper. In 2006 he actually addressed the issue of consultancy - but from a rather shamefaced point of view"Academic Consultancy What is its nature, place, value within academia?" The paper is useful, however, in separating out eight possible roles which academics can usefully play - including "court jester" and "sparring partner". And Chris Pollitt is the guy who actually produced, in 2003, a book written for officials - The Essential Public Manager.
Even a literature review could be useful but the PAR literature now is so vast that noone (to my knowledge) has attempted it – although there are useful literature reviews on more specialist areas such as anti-corruption work (many); performance management etc.
One of the best policy analysts was Aaron Wildavsky who actually made the budgetary process a sexy topic - and gathered his various papers together in the late 1970ss in a book called "Speaking Truth to Power". It's time for this tradition to be reborn!