Thinking

A cold but gloriously sunny morning here in Sofia (although eastern Bulgaria being lashed with rain and snow) – Vitosha’s 2 peaks capped in light snow making a marvellous backcloth for cycling on the cycle lanes, up Vitosha Boulevard to the old market area in the search for a tea set for entertaining. Then on to Sofia Art Gallery to buy the best book I know about Bulgarian painters in a European language (Die Bulgarischen Kuenstler und Muenchen - whose CD I had bought earlier but was not quite legible). Its focus is the influence of Munich’s Art Academy on Bulgarian painting in the century from the 1850s and it gives more then 40 painters a few pages each– many of them unknown to me. The route took us to the University area – so I decided to have another look at the Ilya Beshkov sketches I had been shown at a favourite gallery there – and bought three (including the one shown above which would have been very suitable for yesterday's post).

A friend recently asked for my recommendations for think-tanks which covered public management issues. My immediate thought was Demos and the Institute for Government which won last year’s UK Prospect Magazine’s Think Tank of the Year award) and which published in 2009 an important paper assessing how the British civil service compared globally. Despite this comparative element, however, most of their papers are, by definition, too tied to the current British (English) political agenda – which made me wonder about European Think Tanks.
The Wikipedia entry on the subject is actually quite useful – with good historical comment and a lot of links But a real find was a special website - On Think Tanks - which tries to pick up on ongoing themes. There are apparently now more than 6,000 such bodies in the world – a far cry from my early days when only the Rand Corporation and The Brookings Institute existed (we never thought of the Fabian Society in those terms). They seem to divide into four types –
• those which are strongly linked with academia and focus mainly on economic issues
• those which are explicitly sympathetic to a political party or set of political principles (the Fabian Society; the French political clubs)
• those funded (generally on a clandestine basis) by commercial interests to make the world a safer place for their pursuit of profits – particularly the extractive and drug industries. The campaigning journalist George Monbiot wrote recently about this. And the Mother Jones journal gave some useful examples of the link between funding sources and results. One website simply tracks the right-wing thinks tanks set up quite explicitly to protect the professedly "free market” agenda.
More entrepreneurial ones (a lot of which are found in central and east Europe) which offer bright ideas from a position of apparent independence

Of course, all Think Tanks profess their independence and rigour of methodologies but it is interesting that the European Commission is trying to insist that all Think Tanks register in the Commission’s Official Register of Lobbyists (albeit in a special section)
And, inevitably, we now have global league tables of Think Tanks – drawn up apparently with a highly arbitrary methodology
Diane Stone is a good analyst on the subject (not to be confused with Deborah Stone who wrote the best book on policy analysis – Policy Paradox!) who co-authored in 2004 what looks to be a great book on the global ThinkTank phenomenon Think Tank Traditions – policy research and the politics of ideas which has chapters on the various key countries. And you can read here a list of the German ones
Finally, a couple of speculative pieces on how Think Tanks need to smarten up their act – one which focuses on methodology; the other on technology

Identifying the real culprits

I haven’t said anything in the blog yet about the Occupy Wall St protest movement - which is most remiss of me. An article in what is a new magazine for me – Orion Magazine – expresses the issues very well

What is needed is a new paradigm of disrespect for the banker, the financier, the One Percenter, a new civic space in which he is openly reviled, in which spoiled eggs and rotten vegetables are tossed at his every turning. What is needed is a revival of the language of vigorous old (US) “progressivism”, wherein the parasite class was denounced as such. What is needed is a new Resistance. We face a system of social control “that offers nothing but mass consumption as a prospect for our youth,” that trumpets “contempt for the least powerful in society,” that offers only “outrageous competition of all against all.

There’s also a good post (and discussion) on the Real Economics blogsite And Jonathan Scheel has an eloquent piece in The Nation on the subject.
And yesterday I came across the website of the marvellously-entitled Centre for the Study of Capital Dysfunctionality – set up before the global crisis at the London School of Economics by a financier who simply became disgusted with his experiences and now writes and talks eloquently about alternative systems.
He and others produced a book about the Future of Finance last year which (like a lot of others I suspect) I missed. It can be quickly downloaded hereand should be read in conjunction with the report which came from the Vickers banking commission which was set up by the UK Government in 2010

The Occupy Wall St movement is overdue (see my blog the Dog which didn’t bark) and is explained by two simple emotions – anger and impotence. Anger at the greed and wealth of a tiny group of financiers who provide no service but simply use invented money to sustain a sick way of life for themselves which impoverishes the majority. And impotence at a political system which not only gave them this opportunity in the first place – but shows no sign of wishing or being able to rein them in.

A recent, mainstream American book Winner Take All – how Washington made the rich richer and turned its back on the middle class explores these questions. How did the incredible inequalities arise? And why is the American political system acting so perversely – with voters apparently supporting the parties whose governments dismantled the regulatory systems and created the mess? The book shows quite clearly that American government is in bed with corporate power. No surprise there for many of us in Europe – but a bit of an eye opener for the average American reader whose access to such books is fairly limited. An excellent review (and discussion thread)summarises thus -

The book downplays the importance of electoral politics, without dismissing it, in favor of a focus on policy-setting, institutions, and organization. First and most important – policy-setting. Hacker and Pierson argue that too many books on US politics focus on the electoral circus. Instead, they should be focusing on the politics of policy-setting. Government is important, after all, because it makes policy decisions which affect people’s lives. While elections clearly play an important role in determining who can set policy, they are not the only moment of policy choice, nor necessarily the most important. The actual processes through which policy gets made are poorly understood by the public, in part because the media is not interested in them (in Hacker and Pierson’s words, “[f]or the media, governing often seems like something that happens in the off-season”).
And to understand the actual processes of policy-making, we need to understand institutions. Institutions make it more or less easy to get policy through the system, by shaping veto points. If one wants to explain why inequality happens, one needs to look not only at the decisions which are made, but the decisions which are not made, because they are successfully opposed by parties or interest groups. Institutional rules provide actors with opportunities both to try and get policies that they want through the system and to stymie policies that they do not want to see enacted.

What is particularly interesting about the review is that it sets the book in the wider context of the malaise of American academic social science -

There is no field of American political economy. Economists have typically treated the economy as non-political. Political scientists have typically not concerned themselves with the American economy. There are recent efforts to change this, coming from economists like Paul Krugman and political scientists like Larry Bartels, but they are still in their infancy. We do not have the kinds of detailed and systematic accounts of the relationship between political institutions and economic order for the US that we have e.g. for most mainland European countries. We will need a decade or more of research to build the foundations of one.
Hence, while Hacker and Pierson show that political science can get us a large part of the way, it cannot get us as far as they would like us to go, for the simple reason that political science is not well developed enough yet. We can identify the causal mechanisms intervening between some specific political decisions and non-decisions and observed outcomes in the economy. We cannot yet provide a really satisfactory account of how these particular mechanisms work across a wider variety of settings and hence produce the general forms of inequality that they point to. Nor do we yet have a really good account of the precise interactions between these mechanisms and other mechanisms.

One of the discussants in the discussion thread on the book review asked what the European literature said on the matter. The only response was a reference to Wolfgang Streeck’s new book on Germany - Re-forming Capitalism; institutional change in the German political economy. Earlier this year I mentioned a couple of recent publications which have exposed the extent of big business influence on the EU – Bursting the Bubble (Alter EU 2010); and Backstage Europe; comitology, accountability and democracy by Gijs Jan Brandsma.
The painting is (of course) by Georg Grosz - Eclipse of the sun - about the military-industry complex

Can government ever change?

The UK Select Committee on Public Administration continues to do useful work – in identifying important questions to probe about the operation of government; and attracting witnesses from all sectors of society (including academia, Ministers and senior officials) to explore the issues with the Committee’s members. A few months it produced a report about government IT projects with the great subtitle - "recipe for rip-off". It is currently exploring the capacity of the civil service to deal with the Coalition government’s ambitious plans for "turning the model government upside down” – through contracting even more of public services to social enterprises. Its initial report Change in Government - the agenda for leadership came out last month and is tough not so much on the civil service as the government itself -

The Government has embarked on a course of reform which has fundamental implications for the future of the Civil Service, but the Government's approach lacks leadership. The Minister rejected the need for a central reform plan, preferring "doing stuff" instead. We have no faith in such an approach. All the evidence makes clear that a coordinated change programme, including what a clear set of objectives will look like, is necessary to achieve the Government's objectives for the Civil Service. The Government's change agenda will fail without such a plan. We recommend that, as part of the consultation exercise it has promised about the future role of Whitehall, the Government should produce a comprehensive change programme articulating clearly what it believes the Civil Service is for, how it must change and with a timetable of clear milestones.
In short, the Government has not got a change programme: Ministers just want change to happen: but without a plan, change will be defeated by inertia.

And this in one of the OECD’s “best governed countries” – according to a 2008 World Bank assessment. What chance, then, for the sort of cooperation between policy-makers, senior officials and academics in transition countries called for by the various analysts I quoted yesterday?
The report goes on to set out what it would expect to find in a reform plan -

62. We consider that a number of key factors for success specifically relevant to large-scale Civil Service reform are vital to the success of change programmes in Whitehall:
a) Clear objectives: there must be a clear understanding of both what the Civil Service is being transformed from and to, as well as the nature of the change process itself. This requires both a coherent idea of the ultimate outcome, but also how clarity on how to ensure coordination of the reform programme and how to communicate that throughout the process.
b) Scope: The appropriate scope for the reforms must be established at the outset; with focused terms of reference, but also wide enough to be able to explore all necessary issues.
c) Senior buy-in: A political belief that reform is needed must be matched by the same belief within the Civil Service and ministers, and both should be clear on their roles in delivering it. Sustained political support and engagement from all ministers is crucial.
d) Central coordination: Either the Cabinet Office or reform units such as the Efficiency and Reform Group must drive the change programme. This requires good quality leadership of such units and a method of working which ensures collaboration with departments, and Prime Ministerial commitment.
e) Timescales: There must be a clear timetable with clear milestones to achieve optimal impact and to ensure political support is sustained. The lifespan of the change programme should include the time taken for reforms to become embedded. Two to three years is likely to be the most effective; beyond this period reform bodies may experience mission creep.
63. Measured against the factors for a successful change programme, the Government's approach to Civil Service reform currently falls short. There is no clear or coherent set of objectives, nor have Ministers shown a commitment to a dynamic strategic problem solving approach to change. The Cabinet Office have signalled their commitment to change the culture of Whitehall, but we have not yet found sufficient evidence to imply a coherent change programme. In the absence of leadership from the Cabinet Office, departments are carrying out their individual programmes with limited coordination and mixed levels of success. Without clear leadership or coordination from the centre, setting out, in practical terms, how the reform objectives are to be achieved, the Government's reforms will fail

.Useful stuff!
We were snowed upon this morning in Sofia!
The painting is another Yuliana Sotirova which I have my eye on. Has a certain appropriateness for the theme of the post.....

Can political and academic leopards change their spots?

Tempus fugit! It's time already to think about a paper for the 2012 NISPAcee Conference - which,again, will be held nearby - at Lake Ohrid in Macedonia.
The two previous papers I have presented at NISPAcee Conferences (in 2007 and 2010) were about the role of Technical Assistance in building the capacity of public bodies in transition countries. They basically argued that –
• Technical Assistance based on the logframe approach and competitive tendering is fatally flawed - assuming that a series of “products” procured by competitive company bidding for discrete projects can develop the sort of trust, networking and knowledge on which lasting change depends
• The EC's 2008 "Backbone Strategy" has not improved matters – the audit which led to the review was narrowly focused on procedural issues in the procurement process and the Backbone strategy continues with this bias.
• Few comparative and longitudinal studies have been carried out of administrative reform in transition countries – and in particular of the effectiveness of the various tools in the technical assistance cupboard of administrative reform. The myriad evaluations which the EC commissions of its institution building projects in the Region are formalistic and difficult to find – largely because of the commercial basis on which most technical assistance in this field is carried out.
• we are, to put it mildly, rather hypocritical in our expection that tools which we have not found easy to implement in our own countries will work in the more politicised contexts of East Europe and Central Asia.

At the 2012 Conference, I propose to elaborate the latter part of this critique; with respect to three issues -

a. Can the leopard change its spots?
One common thread in those few assessments which have faced honestly the crumbling of reform in the Region is the need to force the politicians to grow up and stop behaving like petulant and thieving magpies. Nick Manning and Sorin Ionitsa both emphasise the need for transparency and external pressures. Cardona and Tony Verheijen talk of the establishment of structures bringing politicians, officials, academics etc together to develop a consensus (see section 10.4 of this paper on my website). As Ionitsa put it succinctly –

The first openings must be made at the political level – the supply can be generated fairly rapidly, especially in ex-communist countries, with their well-educated manpower. But if the demand is lacking, then the supply will be irrelevant.

This seems to imply an emphasis on civil society and democratisation – rather than institutional development.

b. Over-specialisation and lack of dialogueDepartmental silos are one of the recurring themes in the literature of public administration and reform – but it is often academia which lies behind this problem with its overspecialisation. For example, “Fragile states” and “Statebuilding” are two new subject specialisms which have grown up only in the last few years – and “capacity development” has now become a more high-profile activity. But the specialists in these fields rarely talk to one another – not least because of the professional advantages in pretending that theirs is a new field, with new insights and skills.

c. The superficiality of public managementInstitutions grow – and noone really understands that process. Administrative reform has little basis in scientific evidence (See the 99 contradictory proverbs underlying it which Hood and Jackson identified in their (out of print) 1999 book. The discipline of public administration from which it springs is promiscuous in its multi-disciplinary borrowing; new public management (still alive and well) is based on a mixture of dubious managerialism and theoretical eccentricities. Traditional PA was at least aware of politics and history. Technocratic NPM denies both.

My ambitious proposal for the 2012 NISPAcee Conference is to present a paper which will explore these issues through–
• A literature review of comparative assessments of administrative reform in the Region – and of the experience and lessons of the specific tools used
• A tentative exploration of the basis and contribution of the various “disciplines” to our understanding of institutional development

The painting is of St Joan Church on Lake Ohrid - by the esteemed Bulgarian Atanas Mihov (1879-1974)

Grim times for forgotten people

The house in the past week has been busy with guests – so not much chance to blog but lots of good conversation….wine and rakia. All of which needed in the colder and damp weather now being experienced here. So yesterday saw a trip to Teteven, nestling in the heart of the Balkan mountain range with the crucial aim of picking up local rakia from an old friend of Sylvie – my ex-landlady. After a speedy 80 kilometres on what must be the most scenic highway in the Balkans, a 3rd class road took us 18 kilometres through a lovely plain marked by signs of decline – but the industrial dereliction of Teteven still shocked us. The town straddles along a river and must have about a dozen derelict plants – of which the picture is typical. The only sign of economic activity is an Italian furniture factory. And a sad story of hopelessness emerged over the superb lunch which awaited us. Elections are in a few weeks – but the political class is seen as irrelevant and venal. I got the impression of a return to Hobbesian conditions – with youngsters having neither jobs nor hope; old people expected to live on a pension of 100 euros a month; and the European Union’s agricultural policy having shafted much of the rural self-sufficiency which produced such superb food in the past.

musical and visual tributes, visit to Dionysus shrine

First some musical tributes – sparked off by the very sad news that a guitarist legendary in my young days, Edinburgh-born Bert Jansch, has died - in his late 60s. I hadn’t realised he had an association with the Pentangle group which was a favourite of mine.
Billy Connolly, the great Scottish comedian, did a nice video on Jansch some years back.
Going down memory lane, I googled two other favourites of mine then - Pete Atkins (with words by the famous Clive James)and the Renaissance band

I visited Perperikon on Tuesday – an amazing medieval fortress topping a high hill with a superb 360 degree panorama (in the south to and beyond the Greek border). It was built in the place of an ancient Thracian sanctuary, related to the cult towards the Thracian equivalence of the Greek god of wine and feasts, Dionysius (known as Zagrey among the Thracians). It was discovered fairly recently; is still being excavated and is reckoned to have been built some 3,500 years ago - used for ritual sacrifices of animals and people. You have to be pretty fit to scramble up a steep trail for almost a kilometre – and then climb the stone staircases. I'm suffering today (knees)

Yesterday I had just over an hour’s drive to Blagoevgrad to visit a workshop on private-public partnership. Chatted with a couple of the participants and the trainer – then off to see the gallery of my favourite contemporary Bulgarian artist – Yuliana Sotirova. She is a very versatile painter – attracted to old buildings but good also with figures. She is also a sculptor (life size stuff). Before my visit, I had 6 of her paintings – including a magnificent oil one she did of my father from a black and white photograph which now hangs in my study in the mountain house. She must have more than 200 paintings in her studio – but after an hour she had 6 fewer.

This is one of a series of small paintings she has done of various church interiors - this one in Salonika. I will post others as space allows in the next few days.

The Guardian is the only UK newspaper I look at and was instrumental in Rupert Murdoch's recent humiliation. The Editor delivered recently a stirring (and rare) statement of the importance of a strong and free presswhich everyone should read.

And, if you are a cook and use garlic, this is a must-see video clip on how to peel a clove in 10 seconds flat without all the usual hassle (as a purist) I threw away my garlic crusher years ago

Rhodope charm again

I had hoped to be reporting on the great trip to Smolyian and Kardjali at the beginning of the week in the borderland with Greece – but was a bit knocked today by the cowboy behaviour of my Romanian village mayor. Perhaps its the just rewards for the positive Bulgarian postings I have been making! I was nicely received (as always) in the Smolyian Gallery on Monday - which has a very large space (3 floors) and a great collection but almost no money for maintenance. My colleague, Belin (who was leading the workshop) is an architect by training; now an academic; and was, in the late 1990s, a Deputy Minister for Regional development. He explained for me the ambitious agenda of the socialist government in the 1970s when they merged 3 villages there (as they did elsewhere) and created urban systems which are now tottering. He also suggested a possible reason for the very diffferent fates of villages in post-socialist Bulgaria and Romania. He suggests that land ownership was more completely collectivised in Bulgaria than in Romania – and that there was therefore no base left in Bulgarian villages post-1989 for the sort of self-sufficiency which still survives for example in my village amongst the old.
A marvellous journey on Tuesday through and over the mountains to Kardjali – quite amazing to see the isolated homesteads clinging so high up to the mountainsides! And all the minarets – most new. Kardjali has all the bustle and townscape of Turkish town. I was able, with some difficulty, to locate the art gallery – rather small and pathetic despite some great paintings - including the great Atanas Mihov (above)
and this delightful Stefan Ivanov.

RIP The Ceaucescu legacy lives on

Ceaucescu is alive and well and living on the Transylvanian border! I have just learned that at least a one metre footage of the land in front of our garden has been siezed by the municipality to build a 4 metres wide tarmac road to serve a one kilometre stretch with 7 houses – only 3 of which are permanently occupied and none of whose residents have a car or drive. The picture shows the stretch in question.
There has been no consultation. I was in the house for 7 weeks in the summer - left only on at the end of September and noone even mentioned it. The mayor phoned Daniela yesterday to ask her permission – assuring her that the fence would be restored – but the more we talked, the less attractive and sensible an option it seemed and an unhappy Mayor was duly told. But a telephone call to the old neighbour has just revealed that the work has in fact started. Amazing that a man in an official position can lie so brazenly - knowing that he will be found out! Such is the culture of arrogance which rules. Ironic that I am just finishing Tom Gallagher’s most recent book on Romania which reveals the succesful resistance the political elite fought against the basic EU requirement of Rule of Law. The illegal demolition of traditional old buildings by the Bucharest Mayor have been well documented by Sara in Romania and showed how the spirit of Ceaucescu was alive and well there. It seems he has now moved his attentions back to the rural areas.
There are several issues at stake -
1. illegal seizure of property
2. logic of the project; cui bono? Probably the hotel which is a carbuncle in the area and who encourage its younger guests to career around the tracks in the go-carts or whatever they are called
3. The lack of consultation
4. The poverty of imagination of politicians - who cannot see that they are destroying a priceless heritage. Poeple in the west would kill for the beauty and tranquillity of the village. Of course things cannot stand still; but there are better ways of attracting income than encouraging young vandals.
Watch this space.......