open government; government structures and roles

My resolution of reading each day at least one Googlebook and one of the countless articles I’ve downloaded and hoarded is not easy to keep. Surfing is addictive and distractive. What treasures are there! When looking at the extensive (39 pages!) summary report which the World Bank had prepared on a 2007 workshop it held on “Social accountability measures”, I googled the name of one of the presenters to see if I could find the full paper I did! But I also very quickly found 4 relevant books of more than 250 pages each –
Beyond public scrutiny (OECD 2007) which gives many examples of citizen involvement in the scrutiny of public services; Public Services Delivery looks a useful guide to performance management issues for public managers; Briefing Book on Decentralisation in Kosovo is an amazing compendium from a cooperation between WB and Soros writers. And finally a book on Participatory Governance UN 2006);
So – one step forward and four backwards as far as making an impact on my library is concerned! I need to install one of these protective buttons on the laptop which prevents my access to google scholar!

I am, however, steadily getting through the World Bank’s book on Governance Reform under real world conditions . It takes what is, for it, a new angle – the “communication perspective” which cynics might summarise as - thinking about the context in which you are working; and adjusting your tactics/ messages accordingly! “Stakeholder analysis” has become the usual (ugly) way to describe the process.
In an early chapter a journalist who was a staff member of WB India recounts some tasks he was given to prepare briefing notes explaining the negative reaction to WB projects. The piece starts with one of the best accounts I’ve ever read of the messy reality of the policy process. When I used to do training on political roles – I used a simple matrix I devised a long time ago – which identifies the 4 worlds (and therefore sets of pressures) a local politician lives in – local electorate; party or interest group to which he owes most of his chances of reelection; elected political colleagues and officials of the council; the personal. I would the suggest that his perceptions of the pressures from these worlds determined the sort of role he played – “populist”, “ideologue”, “spokesman” and “maverick” .
The journalist’s account also reminded me of the way I first encountered the machinery of (local) government 40 years ago – as consisting of bunches of specialists who are first trained and then structured to see the world in very different ways – whether engineers, economists, lawyers, social workers, police etc
In the 1970s we thought that corporate management was the answer ie a new breed of people who could be independent from the fray and help us politicians cut through the these different perceptions and special pleading..But the Chief Executive Departments just set up their own separate power system in turn. And that was the start of the dreadful management revolution which has stamped itself on the face of professionals and patients for example in the health system. Official figures show that the number of managers in the NHS has doubled over the past 10 years – and Kenneth Roy in Scottish Review recently exposed the scandal of their rising pay.
Perhaps, I thought all of 35 years ago, the answer lies in the political system – at a local level in the committee system which, I argued, was just a front for the power of the permanent official. So we set up member-officer groups to look at the neglected issues which straddled the boundaries of departments (marginal). One of the papers on my website is a paper I wrote more than 10 years ago to try to pull out lessons from that experience –
“Local authority services” I argued in the paper “ were designed to deal with individuals - pupils, clients, miscreants - and do not have the perspectives, mechanisms or policies to deal with community malfunctioning. For that, structures are needed which have a "neighbourhood-focus" and "problem focus".
“The Strathclyde strategy did in fact develop them - in the neighbourhood structures which allowed officers, residents and councillors to take a comprehensive view of the needs of their area and the operation of local services: and in the member-officer groups.
“But we did not follow through the logic - and reduce the role of committee system which sustains so much of the policy perversities. That would have required a battle royal! After all, it took another decade before the issue of an alternative to the Committee system came on the national agenda - to be fiercely resisted by local authorities. Even now, the furthest they seem to go in their thinking is the "Cabinet system" - which has been offered as an option several times over the past 30 years (Wheatley; Stewart) but never, until now, considered worthy of even debate. The system of directly elected mayors - which serves other countries well - still does not command favour. One of the great marketing tricks of the English is to have persuaded the world of our long traditions of democracy. The truth is that our forefathers so mistrusted the dangers of unacceptable lay voices controlling the council chambers that they invented a range of traditions such as the one creating a system of dual professional and political leadership in local government. As the powers of local government increased in the post-war period - this became a recipe for confusion and irresponsibility. Little wonder that it was called "The Headless State" (Regan). Chairmen of Committees have been able to blame Directors; and Directors, Chairmen.
“It is now (1999) interesting to see some local authorities now organised on the basis that was beginning to appear obvious to some of us in the late 1970s. The more progressive councils now have three different political structures -
• One for thinking and reviewing - ie across traditional boundaries of hierarchy, department and agency (our
Member-Officer review groups)
• One for ensuring that it is performing its legal requirements (the traditional committee system)
• One for acting in certain fields with other agencies to achieve agreed results (Joint Ventures for geographical areas or issues)"

In fact the “review” process caught on so much it seems to have become part of the audit culture. In English municipalities, certainly, “scrutiny” committees became all the rage (I'll try to put a paper about this on my website)
And the new Scottish Executive (and some other countries) have gone further and actually set up Ministries which focus on clients/problems/opportunities rather than the boundaries of intellectual disciplines and bureaucrats.

Most people now, however, would argue that the critique of professional expertise and assertion of the power of managers and politician has gone too far.
“Stakeholder analysis” at least makes sure that some legitimacy is given by policy-makers to the various voices which need to be heard by those in government. But this is not just an ad-hoc process. Governance Reform helps us explore the central challenge - which is how to devise structures which allow the voice of professionals and the citizen to be heard in the policy process. The role of politicians is arguably more that of a referee at the design stage and to signal when things are going wrong - and of the manager to make sure the implementation runs smoothly?

Lists

In one of my blogs I referred to the pleasures of the lists – the Seven Deadly Sins; Seven Habits of Effective People (Covey); Ten Commandments (God); and Ten rules for stifling innovation (Kanter) seem just about manageable. When I was working in Central Europe in the 1990s I used to buy multiple copies of the Covey book in the local language - Hungarian, Slovak and Romanian – since it was one of the few books I knew in English which was also available in the local language and was useful as a means of professional conversation. The principles were/are -
- be proactive
- begin with the end in mind
- put first things first
- think win/win
- seek first to understand : then to be understood
- synergise
- "sharpen the saw" - ie keep mentally and physically fit

When I moved to Central Asia and Caucasus in 1999, I found that presentation of Rosabeth Kanter’s Ten rules for stifling innovation was a marvellous way to liven up a workshop with middle-ranking officials. She had concocted this prescription as a satiric comment on the way she discovered from her research that senior executives in US commercial giants like IBM, General Motors were continuing to act in the old centralised ways despite changed structures and rhetoric.
1. regard any new idea from below with suspicion - because it's new, and it's from below
2. insist that people who need your approval to act first go through several other layers of management to get their signatures
3. Ask departments or individuals to challenge and criticise each other's proposals (That saves you the job of deciding : you just pick the survivor)
4. Express your criticisms freely - and withhold your praise (that keeps people on their toes). Let them know they can be fired at any time
5. Treat identification of problems as signs of failure, to discourage people from letting you know when something in their area is not working
6. Control everything carefully. Make sure people count anything that can be counted, frequently.
7. Make decisions to reorganise or change policies in secret, and spring them on people unexpectedly (that also keeps them on their toes)
8. Make sure that requests for information are fully justified, and make sure that it is not given to managers freely
9. Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of delegation and participation, responsibility for figuring out how to cut back, lay off, move around, or otherwise implement threatening decisions you have made. And get them to do it quickly.
10. And above all, never forget that you, the higher-ups, already know everything important about this business.

“Any of this strike you as similar?” I would cheekily ask my Uzbek and Azeri officials.
Robert Greene’s 24 ways to seduce; 33 ways to conduct war; and 48 Laws of power are, also, tongue in cheek. The first to hit the market was the 48 Laws of power and I enjoyed partly because it so thoroughly challenged in its spirit the gung-ho (and unrealistic) naivety of the preaching which characterised so many of the management books of the time – and partly for the way historical examples are woven into the text. I’ve selected a few to give the reader a sense of the spirit of the book
• Never put too much trust in friends; learn how to use enemies
• Conceal your intentions
• always say less than necessary
• Guard your reputation with your life
• Court attention at all costs
• Get others to do the work, but always take the credit
• Make other people come to you
• Win through your actions, never through argument
• Use selective honesty and generosity to disarm your victims

I found a Russian translation of the book in Baku and gave it as a leaving gift to the Azeri lawyer in the Presidential Office I had worked closely with for 2 years on the project to help implement the Civil Service Law. he obviouly made good use of it as 3 months later he was appointed as Head(Ministerial level)of the new Civil Service Agency my work had helped inspire!
Luther’s 95 theses on the wall of the Wittenberg church seem excessive – but, given the success of his mission, perhaps contain a lesson for the media advisers who tell us that the public can absorb a limited number of messages only!

The Bakewell book suggests that Montaigne’s life can usefully be encapsulated in 20 injunctions –
• Don’t worry about death
• Read a lot, forget most of it – and be slow-witted
• Survive love and loss
• Use little tricks
• Question everything
• Keep a private room behind the shop
• Be convivial; live with others
• Wake from the sleep of habit
• Do something no one has done before
• Do a good job – but not too good a job
• Reflect on everything; regret nothing
• Give up control

At the very least, when I see such lists, it suggests we're in for some fun!

making change stick

It will take some time to get through Governance Reforms under real world conditions – the World Bank E-book I mentioned yesterday. It apparently came out in 2008 – but presumably has only now been made available as an E-book. I spotted it on http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/
Up until now, the World has focussed on the WHAT of administrative change and rarely looked at the HOW. And, as we all know, the devil is in the detail. The reason? Its constitution forbids it from anything that smacks of politics and, as a result, its staff are predominantly US trained economists.
The “real world” phrase in the title is a real slap in the face to the economists who (patently) don’t live in the real world. Critical study of the World Bank has been a real cottage industry – I have about 10 books in my own library alone. Some years back there were several active campaigns to abolish it – initially because of the environmental damage and huge displacements of indigenous people its large-scale damming projects caused. “50 years is enough” was one of the slogans. Under Wolfensohn there was good intent but hubris. Wolfowitz’s brief tenure brought ridicule and his replacement, Zoellick, few hopes. But all has been quiet since then. This publication is, certainly, a good sign – of brains actually being applied with some decent results to an important issue.

The last 3 of the 6 questions it is written around are what we consultants deal with on a daily basis and are not normally what you expect to see the World Bank deal with -
- How do we build broad coalitions of influentials in favour of change? What do we do about powerful vested interests?
- How do we help reformers transform indifferent, or even hostile, public opinion into support for reform objectives?
- How do we instigate citizen demand for good governance and accountability to sustain governance reform?

I tried to address some of these questions in several of my own writings – and, a few years back, had got to the stage of suggesting what I called and “opportunistic” theory of change –
• “Windows of opportunity present themselves - from outside the organization, in crises, pressure from below
• But reformers have to be technically prepared, inspire confidence – and able to seize and direct the opportunity
• Others have to have a reason to follow
• the new ways of behaving have to be formalized in new structures

Laws, regulations and other policy tools will work if there are enough people who want them to succeed. And such people do exist. They can be found in Parliaments (even in tame and fixed parliaments, there are individual respected MPs impatient for reform); Ministries of Finance; have an interest in policy coherence; NGOs; Younger generation – particularly in academia, policy shops and the media
The question is how they can become a catalytic force for change – and what is the legitimate role in this of donors?”
The Paper is number 8 on website (just click publicadminreform in the list of links in the right hand column on this site

The paper by Matthew Andrews which starts part 2 of the book weaves a very good theory around 3 words – acceptance, authority and ability.

Is there acceptance of the need for change and reform?
• of the specific reform idea?
• of the monetary costs for reform?
• of the social costs for reformers?
• within the incentive fabric of the organization (not just with individuals)?

Is there authority:
• does legislation allow people to challenge the status quo and initiate reform?
• do formal organizational structures and rules allow reformers to do what is needed?
• do informal organizational norms allow reformers to do what needs to be done?

Is there ability: are there enough people, with appropriate skills,
• to conceptualize and implement the reform?
• is technology sufficient?
• are there appropriate information sources to help conceptualize, plan, implement, and institutionalize the reform?

A diagram shows that each of these plays a different role at the 4 stages of conceptualisation, initiation, transition and institutionalisation and that it is the space of overlapping circles that the opportunity for change occurs. “Reform space”, at the intersection of acceptance, authority, and ability, determines how much can be achieved. However the short para headed - Individual champions matter less than networks – was the one that hit nerves. The individual who connects nodes is the key to the network but is often not the one who has the technical idea or who is called the reform champion. His or her skill lies in the ability to bridge relational boundaries and to bring people together. Development is fostered in the presence of robust networks with skilled connectors acting at their heart.
My mind was taken back almost 30 years when, as the guy in charge of Strathclyde Region’s strategy to combat deprivation but using my academic role, I established what I called the urban change network and brought together once a month a diverse collection of officials and councillors of different councils in the West of Scotland, academics and NGO people to explore how we could extend our understanding of what we were dealing with – and how our policies might make more impact. It was, I think, the single most effective thing I ever did. I still have the tapes of some of the discussions – one, for example, led by Professor Lewis Gunn on issues of implementation!

Sad that the recent OECD paper which tried to look at the change process was so inadequate. I mentioned it on a previous blog -
In 1999 I devoted a chapter in my small book - In Transit; notes on good governance -to a summary of the various texts on managing change which was then such a fashionable subject. And one of the "key papers" on the website is a 63 page "Annotated bibliogaphy for change agents".

The 2 best things I have ever read on the subject are Robert Quinn's Deep Change; and Buchanan and Boddy's The Expertise of the Change Agent - public performance and backstage activity (Prentice Hall 1992)
Paul Bate's Strategies for cultural change (1994)is also a highly original and neglected book which presaged the recent fashion on that subject.
Useful summaries of the last 2 books can be found on pages 47-48 of the Annotated Bib I've just mentioned - I like in particular the 5x4 matrix I reproduced on styles of change he suggests.

the itinerants

A second post today - freezing fog (and light snow) has reduced visibility to 20 metres - and supplied the atmosphere to do a ot of reading, most of which I;ll summarise tomorrow.
One of the daily delights is selecting a picture to go with the blog – but it has an element of what the Germans call “Die Qual der Wahl” – the torture of choice! I am building up a stock of pictures I can draw on – and found that the Uzbek photo perfectly fitted the notion of philosophical discussions which comes later in today's earlier blog. But the first part of the blog is actually about a poem called Smuggler – so I surfed to find such a picture and was reminded of the great Russian school of painters who went by the name The Itinerants. I've supplied a link to the list on the right of the site.
I had to practice my first censorship just now - on an engraving by Albrecht Duerer no less! I wanted it to be the pic for today - but when I uploaded it and saw it, I knew that it just too risque! Instead, I've selected one of the Itinerants - Bogdanov-Belskiy - and his

Mental Arithmetic In the Public School of Rachinskiy

Quite superb! It's a much more powerful painting than the one I had to use in my recent posting of the report on the English primary school system.

I've uploaded two new papers to my website. One fits uneasily with all the jargon of the professional paper - it's 40 Tips for 2010 but fits nicely with the tenor of some of the recent postings. It's paper 9 and is more a New Year thing. But I thought of it since I determined yesterday to (a) read each day at least 2 of the hundreds of professional papers which I;ve downloaded but lie unread in folders and (b) skim at least one of the googlebooks which have been equally downloadedwith enthusiasm but then languished. There is no beating the sensuality of a book between your hands!
I also came across a little pamphlet I produced for a Conference the European Delegation in Kyrgyzstan asked me to attend in late 2006. I've included it because it's an example of the sort of policy analysis I like to write - which tries to find a pragmatic approach to issues in the local context. It was called Building LG in a hostile climate – it's paper 7

Zen Calvinism and Pyrronian scepticism

Still on yesterday’s poem, another pleasure is inspecting the latest books from Amazon – particularly here in Sirnea where their arrival is more of an event. The process starts with a shout from the post office to my neighbour who then phones me to announce the event. Yesterday was such a day – with 6 new books – one of which was a new collection of Norman MacCaig’s poems. His wry, humanistic observations on man and nature have always been a favourite. I thought I had already reproduced a very typical one - “Smuggler” – on this blog but can’t find it (in fact it was Oct 17but this will save the trouble of searching).

Smuggler
Watch him when he opens
His bulging words – justice
Fraternity, freedom, internationalism, peace,
peace, peace. Make it your custom
to pay no heed
to his frank look, his visa, his stamps
and signatures. Make it
your duty to spread out their contents
in a clear light

Nobody with such language
Has nothing to declare

There are many similarities with the poetry of Marin Sorescu who is my favourite Romanian poet. Both died about the same time in the early 1990s. MacCaig’s last Collection is in the (small) poetry section of my library here – this one (edited by his son) contains about 200 additional ones (some unpublished)
His voice was to be heard even in the Introduction – which recalls how he replied when asked about his religious beliefs – “Zen Calvinist!”
I had just been reading the chapter in the Montaigne book which explores the sort of philosophical scepticism which influenced him.

“Ordinary scepticism asserts the impossibility of knowledge; it is summed up in Socrates remark; “All I know is that I know nothing”. Pyrronian scepticism starts from this point but then adds, in effect, “and I’m not even sure of that”. Pyrronians deal with all the problems which life can throw at them by means of a single (Greek) word – epokhe – which means “I suspend judgement”.

MacCaig has some of the same spirit.

One of the World Bank publications I downloaded yesterday was an E-book of 500 pages - Governance Reforms under real world conditions – which looks very useful. It is organised around what it regards as six key challenges facing governance reform efforts:

1. How do we use political analysis to guide communication strategy in governance reform?2. How do we secure political will, which is demonstrated by broad leadership support for change? What are the best methods for reaching out to political leaders, policy makers, and legislators?3. How do we gain the support of public sector middle managers, who are often the strongest opponents of change, and then foster among them a stronger culture of public service?4. How do we build broad coalitions of influentials in favour of change? What do we do about powerful vested interests?5. How do we help reformers transform indifferent, or even hostile, public opinion into support for reform objectives?6. How do we instigate citizen demand for good governance and accountability to sustain governance reform?

I was amazed to find the following section in the introduction -

There is an iron triangle of stakeholders whose interests seem to converge mostly on business as usual - Economists in donor agencies, experts in consulting firms, and CEOs in large NGOs are well intentioned. But the natural inertia of modern large-scale organizations, together with residual affinities for the cult of expertise, threatens to halt progress toward people-centred development in its tracks.No doubt much of the threat, if one can call it that, lies in simply not knowing exactly what to do. Large-scale organizations need to change their best practices.

Academia has not been terribly attentive to this need, and those who control the spigot of funding are those whose thinking remains most determinedly technocratic.

Things are looking up at the World Bank! Read for yourself here

Easter lamb in Transylvania

It’s Easter Friday and, as I see the dawn come up over the hill, I can sense it’s going to be clear, bright day. I feel at the moment very much like the alter ego I have given this site (see Spitzweg’s painting at the right of the site - at the bottom of all the links etc).
For my part, I sit up in bed, fully clothed, a pile of books down on my left, a stove and candles in the room! Unlike "Der Arme Dichter", I a have scarf around the neck (not a hat), a carpet on the floor, paintings on the wall, a laptop on my lap and a secure ceiling!

Yesterday the old couple invited me to join them for an Easter meal – I heard the word “Miel” – and thought “interesting that honey should be part of the Easter celebrations”. Later I heard the word again when I went to another neighbour who makes and sells the most glorious Cascaval and Burdurf cheeses. OK, I thought, I’ll buy some honey. When I entered the basement room where they make and store the cheese, he proudly pointed to several carcases of lamb hanging from the ceiling!

Writing this has reminded me of an earlier blog in which I had recalled the impression an essay called “Dissertation upon roast pork” had made on me at school. Decades later I was sure (not without reason!) that its author was the inestimable Francis ....Bacon! When I tracked down the essay, it was to discover the author was Charles..... Lamb! Can create a good quiz or crossword question – “when is pork ...lamb?”!!
While on the subject of food, I drove to Brasov and Zarnesti yesterday on various errands – including general stocks; getting an anti-virus programme inserted on laptop; a haircut; and booking a test-drive of the new Dacia 4 wheel.
Amongst the purchases was my favourite bread – a huge Hungarian potato bread (cu kartoffel) brought in apparently from the Hungarian county. It lasts me at least 2 weeks (and costs just under 2 euros) As I groaned with its - and the 3 kilos round of cheese - weight up the hill and stored the cheese in the (ice-cold) spare room, 2 thoughts came into my head – first Brecht’s poem which celebrates the things wich gave him pleasure -

Pleasures
The first look out of the window in the morning
The old book found again
Enthusiastic faces
Snow, the change of seasons
The newspaper
The dog
Dialectics
Taking showers, swimming
Old music
Comfortable shoes
Taking things in
New music
Writing, planning
Travelling
Singing
Being friendly
Brecht (Last Poems 1953-1956) It's his pic above - not the usual one but if you look closely you will see he still has that large typical cigar!

OK – so it’s not really poetry – but it’s poetic! And it doesn’t refer to beer, bread or cheese. And what on earth does he mean by dialectics? The newspaper and planning and I would cut out – and include good bread and strong cheese; viewing favourite paintings; and walking in the hills with a breeze on the face (for one of the great Brecht poems see the Brecht and Candide blog entry of mid-October)

The second memory sparked was the old black and white French film “The 7 deadly sins”...The one which made the impact on me was the traveller in old France who was given shelter in a hovel by an old man and a younger wife. The place was so small the guest shared the marital bed – the camera focussed on the faces of the guest and the young woman – both lustful. Eventually the man could bear it no longer – he leapt over the woman; stretched up to the top of the cupboard and brought down .....a succulent round of cheese!

I’ve discovered and put on my links a Romanian photographer whose pictures do justice to the glorious landscape here – see Stunning Transylvanian landscapes on Links
http://www.panoramio.com/user/1063344/tags/judetul%20Brasov?photo_page=9

Finally, for this early Easter morning (the sky is cloudless as 07.00 pips on the radio), a good series of blogs and papers from a world bank site. Waisbord has a useful comment about how practitioners and academics rarely talk to one another and indeed talk a different language.
http://blogs.worldbank.org/publicsphere/talking-about-theory-and-practice
And I downloaded from the site some interesting papers on, for example, different models of Freedom of Information systems (including the Scottish). Another on social accountability mechanisms and their role in public sector reform.

The world's first blogger

Montaigne is a name which evokes France in the troubled 16th Century; a lone writer in a castle tower putting his thoughts about everyday life on paper , a count who had taken early retiral from life in public service. I had bought an Everyman’s edition of The Complete Works a year or so ago but only dipped into its 1,340 pages. I am now more encouraged since starting to read Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live – a life of Montaigne in one question and 20 attempts at an answer. It’s a superb edition by Chatto and Windus – with superb black and white engravings, paper, layout and typeface (sadly it doesn’t say which). It’s a long time since I’ve seen such a beautifully produced book. It’s also beautifully written – and all for 10 euros from Amazon.
I knew that he had retired young from a political life in Bordeaux in troubled times in France to look after his estate and muse about life in what became an exemplar for the memoir – and that he was inventing the template which people like Proust (and Pamuk in modern times) have made their own. But I hadn’t realised that he retired at age 37! So I feel better at this first attempt at musing in retirement at 67!
Now The Guardian has its obvious April Fool story – although the picture and first para did fool me! You must have a look at it!

This spell in the mountains helped me rediscover my energy so quickly that I had an interesting marketing idea – a retreat for shell-shocked mercenaries of technical assistance – not so much to help send them back into battle as to help redefine the enemy and nature of battle needed!
The experience has helped me reconnect with the critique I wrote 3-4 years ago – which was a mite too ambitious. It’s the paper on my website’s “key papers” – entitled critique of development assistance.

And let me direct you to another excellent piece in Scottish Review – one on how those who blow whistles are treated

modern work

Went exploring yesterday afternoon on the hills above the house – accompanied by 2 more dogs which have attached themselves to me. The view from the upper part of the extensive strip of ground we have there are quite stunning. The picture above doesn't do the view I have justice. I struck over to the left side of a wooded copse which runs at the top of the main hill which screens the main range of mountains and was intrigued to hear an engine. When I topped the ridge I saw 2 tractors in the small valley down below each dragging a large tree trunk toward the far end of Sirnea. Following their tracks I quickly found myself in a real Shangrilai – the real old Romania of scattered summer cowshacks. I headed left down a deep dell in the general direction of Dambivici and was very soon into a settlement which I guessed was Tohani (or Cohanini??)– a village whose northern part I know. An old guy spreading manure onto the field from his cart confirmed this. Then a lovely walk following the contours which took me back to above the house. Google these various names on Google Earth and you will find quite a few superb photos taken by various Romanians.
Now that my spirits are reinvigorated, I’ve been drafting a note trying to pin down why I became disabled so quickly in my last project. I had noted 14 points – which is more a manifesto than an explanation! Starting a project is never easy - with doubts about what one can really contribute (and I've already mentioned that reading too much in this confused field is not good for your health!!) Going into new terrain every 2 years or so – another unknown country, another new flat, new team , new contractor, new EC structure, new beneficiary, new procedures and ways of doing things, having to prove one’s credentials again and again. Mercenaries grow old – what was once a delight becomes unbearable.
Basically I have been spoiled by the flexibility I enjoyed in my projects until 2008 The conditions in which I worked in places such as Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan demanded this – and the EC desk-officers basically trusted me to deliver. Now the project management ideology has become so strong that it is assumed that you can and should plan detailed activities a full year ahead – and that your every (scheduled) visit to the toilet has to be recorded and monitored. This is full-blown Fordism which is now mocked in the private sector which is assumed to have all the answers and skills. Some years ago I found an article Lost in the matrix which attacked the logframe approach to projects – and have uploaded it to my website

Now a bit of light relief. Todays Guardian carries a story about a shopkeeper being fined 1,000 pounds (and put under a curfew for a week!!!) for selling a goldfish to a 14 year old. April Fool's Day is actually tomorrow - I'm assuming this is an early bash. See for yourself here.

Finally I have to record the discovery at last of the title and author of a book I've been searching for since it was stolen from my office in Kyrgyzstan. I used it extensively in mini-seminars with the staff in my Tashkent and Bishkek offices. It's Peter's Honey's Improve your people skills

Weber and NPM

Superb cloudless sky - and last night the full moon lit up the landscape beautifully. Had trouble with an Amazon delivery yesterday - they had sent it UPS and it landed up in the wrong village. But an hour there the package was - on my neighbour's table. And one of the items is mouth watering - How to live - a life of Montaigne by Sarah Bakewell.

On the Saturday post I promised to give some excerpts from Dreschler's Rise and Demise of NPM. I hope you'll find this syfficiently tantalising to go and read the full paper -w hich you will find on my website
NPM is based on the understanding that all human behavior is always motivated by self-interest and, specifically, profit maximization. It assumes that everything relevant can be quantified; qualitative judgments are not necessary. It is popularly denoted by concepts such as project management, flat hierarchies, customer orientation, abolition of career civil service, depolitization, total quality management, and contracting-out.
NPM is part of the neo-classical economic imperialism within the social sciences, i.e. the tendency to approach all questions with neo-classical economic methods.
In advanced PA scholarship itself, especially – but not only – in Europe, NPM is on the defensive by now, if taken as a world view (i.e. an ideology), rather than as one of several useful perspectives for PA reform (i.e. part of a pluralistic approach). The question here is more whether one favours post-NPM (anti-NPM) or post-post-NPM, Weberian-based PA, the latter being the most advanced, and the most sophisticated, and now called the Neo-Weberian State (NWS). What was an option ten years ago is not an option anymore today. I would say that in PA
• in 1995, it was still possible to believe in NPM, although there were the first strong and substantial critiques
• in 2000, NPM was on the defensive, as empirical findings spoke clearly against it as well
• in 2005, NPM is not a viable concept anymore

Yet, in many areas, both of scholarship and of the world, as well as in policy, NPM is very alive and very much kicking. It is, therefore, necessary to look both at the concept itself and at the reasons for its success.

The use of business techniques within the public sphere thus confuses the most basic requirements of any state, particularly of a Democracy, with a liability: regularity, transparency, and due process are simply much more important than low costs and speed.
If you go for savings and neglect context and even the actual goals, you will not be efficient but rather the ultimate wastrel. This misunderstanding of the concept of efficiency and the depolitization that comes with it are typical symptoms of technocracy and bureaucracy, which NPM professes to oppose but which, as Eugenie Samier has demonstrated, it rather fosters. (2001)
The catchword promises have empirically not been delivered – flat hierarchies are a matter of appropriateness and depend in their suitability entirely on context; taking the citizen merely as customer takes away her participatory rights and duties and thus hollows out the state; the abolition of career civil service will usually let administrative capacity erode; depolitization – and thus de-democratization – leads to the return of the imperial bureaucrat (in its worst sense, disguised as the entrepreneurial bureaucrat – same power, less responsibility); and contracting-out has proven to be excessively expensive and often infringing on core competences of the state as well as on the most basic standards of equity. Total Quality Management is actually not necessarily an NPM concept; it can be just as well used elsewhere and was actually always understood to be part of a well-working PA; project management may frequently work, but as a principle and in the long run, it is more expensive and less responsible than the traditional approach.

The counter-model to NPM, indeed its bête noire, is what is called “Weberian PA”. This label is highly problematic, as NPM presents a caricature of it and thus builds up a paper tiger. Its namesake himself, the great German sociologist and economist Max Weber, did not even particularly like the model of PA so described; he only saw it, rightly, as the most rational and efficient one for his time, and the one towards which PA would tend. That this is by and large still the case 80 years later if one looks at the model rather than at its caricature is something that would have probably surprised him quite a bit. (He also described, almost clairvoyantly, the NPM system, which for him was the most dehumanizing of organizational forms; see Samier 2001.)
Apart from the caricature, for Weber, the most efficient PA was a set of offices in which ap¬pointed civil servants operated under the principles of merit selection (impersonality), hier¬archy, the division of labor, exclusive employment, career advancement, the written form, and legality. This increase of rationality – his key term – would increase speed, scope, predict-ability, and cost-effectiveness, as needed for an advanced mass-industrial society. (Weber 1922: esp. 124-130) And although we are well beyond such a world – and in what we may or may not call the “network society” –, these, or almost all of these, are not obsolete criteria, but in fact, they are exceedingly close to most of the recent large-scale principles of PA reform agendas worldwide, including the European Admin¬istrative Space’s main standards of reliability and predictability, openness and transparency, accountability, and efficiency and effectiveness (SIGMA 1998: 8-14). Most certainly, they are closer to responsible PA reform than the catchwords of NPM.

The Neo-Weberian State
And yet, of course there are legitimate problems with many a bureaucracy, there are still very self-centered administrations that hinder economic development rather than fostering it, there is the frequent legalistic domination of PA – and of lawyers within the civil service – that is preventing a problem-solving approach, and there are organizational changes and other shifts in public life that distance us from the Twenties. But the Weberian system has actually (been) adapted to them very successfully, as Continental PA always has. Both to characterize these and to denote a post-post-NPM, synergetic system of PA, perhaps a specifically European one that is not a NPM “laggard” but the opposite, Pollitt and Bouckaert, in what is now the standard book on Public Management Reform, have coined in the second edition (September 2004) the term “Neo-Weberian State” or NWS. I think it is wise to accept that label for the sake of clarity and uniformity, even if I do not agree completely with all details (for my earlier thought on the matter, see Drechsler 2003, 2005a, upon which much of the current article is based), and even though the Weber label might not be “cool” enough for the consultancy circuit. The respective outline of the NWS will be quoted here in full, rather than paraphrased:

‘Weberian’ Elements
• Reaffirmation of the role of the state as the main facilitator of solutions to the new problems of globalization, technological change, shifting demographics, and environmental threat
• Reaffirmation of the role of representative democracy (central, regional, and local) as the legitimating element within the state apparatus
• Reaffirmation of administrative law – suitably modernized – in preserving the basic principles pertaining to the citizen-state relationship, including equality before the law, legal security, and the availability of specialized legal scrutiny of state actions
• Preservation of the idea of a public service with a distinct status, culture, and terms and conditions

‘Neo’ Elements
• Shift from an internal orientation towards bureaucratic rules towards an external orientation towards meeting citizens’ needs and wishes. The primary route to achieving this is not the employment of market mechanisms (although they may occasionally come in handy) but the creation of a professional culture of quality and service
• Supplementation (not replacement) of the role of representative democracy by a range of devices for consultation with, and direct representation of, citizens’ views (…)
• In the management of resources within government, a modernization of the relevant laws to encourage a greater orientation on the achievements of results rather than merely the correct following of procedure. This is expressed partly in a shift from ex ante to ex post controls, but not a complete abandonment of the former
• A professionalization of the public service, so that the ‘bureaucrat’ becomes not simply an expert in the law relevant to his or her sphere of activity, but also a professional manager, oriented to meeting the needs of his or her citizen/users (99-100)

Good Governance: The Back Door
This being realized, it is now important to beware of the “thief that cometh in the night.” NPM may be in demise – but what about the currently ever-so-popular concept of Good Governance? Arising, once again, in the 1980s in the International Finance Institutions (IFI’s), this was a positive extrapolation from the negative experiences that these organizations had had in the “developing” countries by observing that financial aid seemed to have had no effects. From this, they deduced an absence of institutions, principles, and structures, the entirety of which was called “Governance” – and “Good Governance” when they worked well. A good idea as such – but the provenience, the same as with NPM, may make us halt, and rightly.
By and large, the term “Governance” has by now become a more or less neutral concept that focuses on steering mechanisms in a certain political unit, emphasizing the interaction of state (First), business (Second), and society (Third Sector) players. “Good Governance”, on the other hand, is not at all neutral; rather, it is a normative concept that again embodies a strong value judgment in favor of the retrenchment of the state, which is supposed to yield to Business standards, principles, and – not least – interests. In that sense, “Good Governance” privileges the Second over the First Sector, even in First Sector areas.
Within the state sector itself, many of the principles of “Good Governance” are therefore identical with NPM. And while a unitary definition of the concept never existed, not even within the respective individual IFI’s, “good” principles usually encompassed such concepts as transparency, efficiency, participation, responsibility, and market economy, state of law, democracy, and justice. Many of them are indubitably “good” as such, but all of them – except the last one, which is the most abstract – are heavily context-dependent, hinging not only on definition and interpretation, but also on time and place. Critics from the “developing” countries thus often saw and see the demand for “Good Governance” as a form of Neo-Colonialist Imperialism and as part of negative Globalization, since it demands the creation of institutions and structures before economic development, while all wealthy countries of the “West” established them only afterwards.

PA as a humanistic discipline

After heavy snow yesterday and strong wind overnight, the electricity in the village went down about 08.30 and stayed off until 14.15 - repairs apparently. The snow has quickly melted.
As promised, I have updated the "key papers" on the public admincreform website (see links)mainly by adding the paper I referred to in my last entry - "Toward PA as a humanistic discipline - a humanistic manifesto". This is the sort of critique (and overview) I've been waiting for.
Blogs, I'm afraid, are part of the restless and senseless search for novelty. Only when I printed out the 100 plus pages of this blog and bind them in book form, did I see some of the entries from a few months' back. Bloggers tend not to look at archived material - no wonder, given the name "archives" for heaven's sake. Who visits such places? One of (several) reasons why I don't think E-books will replace real ones!

management blogs

Erasmus (by Holbein the Younger)

The “links” which are listed on the right hand side are those blogs (generally) which have impressed me over the past year or so. Initially it was quite difficult to find blogs which catered for my various interests in - food, literature, paintings, governance – let alone more arcane subjects such as carpets, haystacks and Egyptian music (actually Anouk Brahim ). But, once, you start surfing you get into a roll. One good link leads to another.
So, recently, I was led from authentic organisations to three useful managerial blogs -
graeme martin; bob sutton; and management craft

Management ideology (for such it is) is important to the theme I raised in the last post of the identity and future of PA since public administration has always been a pot-pourri – initially of the disciples of law, political science, economics, sociology and psychology but then of other parasitic subjects such as management and its dreadfully-named sub-subject "human resource management".

Toward PA as a Humanistic discipline – a humanistic manifesto

by Eugenie Samier offers an excellent overview of the subject's development (as well as a polemic) at I have been looking for a paper like this for a long time.

the search for post-autistic public administration

another Tudor Banus graphic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Greece and capacities to govern

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

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

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

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

policy amnesia

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

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

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

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

project management and modern work places

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

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

Transylvania

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

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

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

performance management

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

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

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

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

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

novels I go back to

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

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

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

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

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

THE NOVELS

Alaa Al Aswany (Egypt)
The Yacoubian Building

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

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

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

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

Crumey Andrew (Scotand)
Sputnik Caledonia

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

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

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

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

Houllebecq Michel (France)
Atomised
Platform

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mason Daniel (USA)
The Piano Tuner (2002)

Massie Alan (Scotland)
A Question of Loyalties

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

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

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

Nabakov Vladimir (Russia)
The Stories of Vladimir Nabakov

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

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

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

Remy Pierre-Jean (France)
Une Ville Immortelle

Roy Claude (France)
Le Malheur d’aimer

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

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

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

Yehoshuova (Israel)
A Woman in Jerusalem
The Liberated Bride


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

cookbooks and desert islands

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

recycling

It's been very therapeutic experiencing the season's change - the drip of melting snow; the thump as it lands on the terrace at the back; the gradual exposure of the grass; the dogs luxuriating in the earth and sun.
Earlier blogs complained about the backbreaking work involved in having wood as the main heating - but my flabby and fattening body was grateful for the physical toil involved in having a rural retreat.
Over the weekend I have printed out the 100 pages or so of my 2 blogs - and have to make sure that the more interesting entries are not lost to posterity! So - be prepared for some recycling of old material!

There must have been a vicarious strand in me since amongst the books I have collected in the past couple of years are quite a few which celebrate nature and isolation. I started with Robert McFarlane's amazing "Mountains of the Mind", then found Roger Deakin's "Wildwood - a journey through trees" and then Richard Mabey's "Beechcombings - the narratives of trees". The latest were McFarlane's "The Wild Places"; and "Song of the Rolling Earth: A Highland Odyssey" by John Lister-Kay.

We all enjoy books about the joys and frustrations of rural living. Peter Mayle made it all fashionable - but there are so many accounts - Harry Clifton's poetic "On the Spine of Italy - a year in the Abruzzi" (1999); Peter Graham's superb "Mourjou - the life and food of an auvergne village" (1998); Michael Viney's "A Year's Turning" (1996) about life in a remote Irish location to which they moved in the late 1970s. And I've just found Tahir Shah - whose "Caliph's House" and "In Arabian Nights" take us further afield to Morocco.

The combination of economic crises, urban pressures and crazy management systems have made "simple living" a more attractive option. Ghazi and Jones's "Downshifting - the guide to happier, simpler living" appeared 12 years ago (1997) - and it was in 1998 that the sociologist Richard Sennett published "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism" in which he saw soul-destroying consequences in our new work habits,endless hours spent at flexible jobs, performing abstract tasks on computer screens. Last year, in "The Craftsman" Sennett suggested that skilled labour could be a way to resist corporate mediocrity. The environmentalist writer Bill McKibben proposed something similar in "Deep Economy" which condemned the ruinous effects of endless economic expansion and urged readers to live smaller, simpler, more local lives. This artisanal revival has been particularly pronounced among foodies, thanks in part to the writer Michael Pollan, who helped popularize an American variant of the Italian culinary-agrarian movement known as Slow Food. In "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defence of Food" Pollan surveys and explains the excesses of the industrial food chain and praises small farms and local produce.

These ideas have crept farther toward the mainstream in the wake of the economic collapse, which inspired calls for a return to "real work", a return, in other words, to activities more tangible (and, it was hoped, less perilous) than complex swaps of abstract financial products.
Of course, it's easy for me to talk - I'm comfortable financially (as long as the banks don't go bust) - and can always jump into my car and do the odd bit of consultancy in Bulgaria or Macedonia; or take in a concert at Brasov or Bucharest. And, if I had only the village gossip for social contact (rather than the internet) I might be driven up the wall! But for the moment, let me indulge my fancy and be one more small voice arguing for a return to more natural living.

back again

The last few months have been difficult - hope this is not an outbreak of the winter problems I epxerienced 3 year's running more than 20 years ago in Scotland! The last assignment seems to have been the catalyst - but return to the sun and snow of the Carpathian mountains is as healthy a recipe as one can find. I was miserable in Beijing (today - I see from the news - covered in a yellow sandstorm!) - and really don't have to be so at my age. I reckon I've earned enough - and it's about time I got myself sorted out - for starters finding a decent house in an interesting and sensible area. We've lived long enough in a tiny flat in central Bucharest. The 20 paintings on the wall rather overwhelm!
And by sensible I mean in a country whose language I speak; with some basic facilities; and close to the sea. France is the obvious country - although prices are now a bit ridiculous. Brittany and midi-Pyrenees are the most attractive - with their proximity to the sea. Bulgaria and Turkey also attract. I'm making arrangements to visit Brittany to check things out there - so the blog will be intermittent.
By the way, the painting is by Dobre Dobrev - another marvellous Bulgarian painter from the inter-war years.


Apart from sawing logs today, I took some time to review the blogs on both of my websites. Although the pictures and layout of this blog are inviting, the content of the old website was actually more interesting a year ago as I tracked the progress on the house between April and October. Those interested in life in the mountains should have a look.

Last week's find was the recipes of Nigel Slater - http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/nigelslaterrecipes