never-ending

Despite technical difficulties with the NISPAcee site, I seem to have managed – thanks to the ever-helpful Jan Andruch - to meet the deadline for the delivery of my paper on the way public admin academics seem to walk around the issue of how political and consultancy systems pervert administrative reform in countries in this neighbourhood and east. Typically, when I had a version which seemed at least coherent, I came across new papers which at least need referencing - if not nudging me to a new coherence!
First I come across an important SIGMA paper whose provocative title „Can Civil Service Reforms last? suggests it shares the critical spirit of my new draft.
I had managed to work into the paper at least a reference to a good overview of the huge amount of Technical Assistance which Romania has received to improve its policy-making process – and the utter lack of its impact. I had not, however, been able to find anything about one of the favourite EC mechanisms to help develop the capacity of state bodies here in central Europe – twinning. Now I have found two – first an excellent paper on the Romanian experience of Twinning in judicial reformand a 2002 paper by Papdimitriou.
My paper (as always) takes aim at the EC – which has been tying itself in knots in recent years with all the rethinking and reorgansiation of its external aid on which it spends so many thousands of millions of our euros. One of the few people who seems able not only to make sense of all this but to contribute in a clear and original way is Simon Maxwell whose blog I have just added to this site’s links. One of his most recent posts gives a fascinating perspective on the challenge of the EU’s new External Service. And if, like me, you need to know who the hell is doing what in the new structure – have a look here
The painting is by a contemporary Romanian Eugen Raportoru - to whom I have just been introduced on Romania TVR Cultura - as a result of which I have discovered a great Romanian art blogger (see links)

elephants in european administrative space

I’ve uploaded to the website the paper I want to present to the Varna Conference in May of NISPAcee - the body which has, for the past 20 years, done a valiant job of encouraging the development of studies and training in public administration in the countries of central and eastern Europe (CECE). The original title was The Elephant in the Room because I wanted to focus on consultants whose activities are ignored in the writing on reform in the area - but then realised that, as part of my criticism was the way their models abstracted from political realities, I needed to bring the politicians in as well. And, in order to mock the dreadful EU jargon, I substituted „administrative space” for „room”. But, since discovering changes which the EC has been making to the TA system, its now called Reforming the reformers an dhas a very different content. And a few days ago, I read with some interest but some frustration a post about a new culture of learning – and it reminded me of some distinctions I had made in a paper I wrote for the Bulgarian project in 2008. I excerpted the section – and it’s available here.

problems of democratic transition and consolidation

Most of the world (with the obvious exception of Chinese rulers) celebrates the achievement of Egyptian „people power” – but how little analysis about the prospects which lie ahead. One of the exceptions is a piece by an Egyptian activist which goes beyond the superficial reporting of the Western media; warns about the military; and gives a rare insight into what workers have been doing. Read the full article (and the good discussion thread) here.

Central and Eastern Europe countries seem to offer the most recent examples of (differential) experiences of the fall of dictatorships. I have referred several times to the Romanian experience which Tom Gallagher has described most clearly in his Theft of a nation – Romania since the fall of communism
Romania is patently the worst of the recent accession countries. It got rid of a dictator - but the same personnel and system persisted for almost a decade. It has a constitutional and electoral system which splits power between a Presidency and 2 parliamentary bodies and makes coherent action extraordinarily difficult for the coalition governments which have become the basic feature of its governments. And the culture of every man for himself makes it almost impossible to work consensually and in the public good. For a good example of the lawlessness which passes for government here in Romania see the post of 12 Feb on this site.

But I don’t think the central European countries offer much useful experience to the Egyptians and Tunisians. For a start they did not have the decades of military rule which Egypt has experienced – indeed the military in most of these countries has been and remains a joke (despite their salaries and pensions). Turkey and the south American dictators of the end of the last century are the better parallel. And, despite being in the EU Neighbourhood programme of technical assistance, neither Egypt or Tunisia have any prospect of European accession – which was the basic incentive for (formal) institutional changes for the central European countries. Almost two decades ago, when I started this latest phase of my life, working in central Europe, I read thirstily the literature which was pouring out then on the mechanics of transition – how countries which had been under dictatorships could make the transition to democracies (see section 3 of this annotated bibliography on my website.
The best was one which drew on the Spanish and south American experience and was produced in 1996 by Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan - Problems of Democratic Transition and Consolidation – S Europe, S America and post-communist Europe. It’s a remarkable and definitive book – which initially establishes the basic classifications to conduct the assessments on the extent to which the transformations are consolidated and then analyses each country and region in considerable detail and profundity. They suggest a four-part classification for non-democratic regimes
• Authoritarian
• Totalitarian
• Post-totalitarian
• sultanistic

A "consolidated" democracy is one which combines behavioural (elite), attitudinal (public) and constitutional elements. Five conditions are suggested –
• Free and lively civil society
• Relatively autonomous and valued political society
• Rule of law to ensure legal guarantees for citizens' freedoms and independent associational life
• Usable state bureaucracy
• Institutionalised economic society

Each of these interacts with the others - and affects the outcome of transition. They also bring in five other important, but less major, variables - (a) the leadership basis of the prior regime, (b) who controls the transition, (c) international influences, (c) political economy of legitimacy and coercion (relationship between citizen perceptions of economic efficacy and of regime legitimacy) and (e) constitution-making environments. This study is the culmination of a lifetime's study of the transformation process; is written elegantly and with very detailed references for follow-up study. A summarising article they wrote at the same time can be found here.
A different type of book from Elster J, Offe C Preuss U was their Institutional Design in Post-Communist Societies - Rebuilding the Ship at Sea (1998) which focussed on Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary and Bulgaria.

Those activists want us to trust Mubarak’s generals with the transition to democracy–the same junta that has provided the backbone of his dictatorship over the past 30 years. And while I believe the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, who receive $1.3 billion annually from the US, will eventually engineer the transition to a “civilian” government, I have no doubt it will be a government that will guarantee the continuation of a system that will never touch the army’s privileges, keep the armed forces as the institution that will have the final say in politics (like for example Turkey), guarantee Egypt will continue to follow the US foreign policy whether it’s the undesired peace with Apartheid State of Israel, safe passage for the US navy in the Suez Canal, the continuation of the Gaza siege and exports of natural gas to Israel at subsidized rates. The “civilian” government is not about cabinet members who do not wear military uniforms. A civilian government means a government that fully represents the Egyptian people’s demands and desires without any intervention from the brass. And I see this hard to be accomplished or allowed by the junta.
The military has been the ruling institution in this country since 1952. Its leaders are part of the establishment. And while the young officers and soldiers are our allies, we cannot for one second lend our trust and confidence to the generals. Moreover, those army leaders need to be investigated. I want to know more about their involvement in the business sector.

who knows of reforms of kleptocratic regimes?

Three things account for my silence of the last three days – a particularly foul bout of the flu; a powerful novel 1,000 page book The Kindly Ones by Jonathan Littell which recounts, from old age, the activities of a senior 30 year old SS bureaucrat throughout the harrowing years of the war; and my attempt to draft a paper for the May Conference of the Network of Schools of Public Administration in centraland eastern europe (NISPAcee). I’ve got a fair amount of text and have reached the critical stage of drafting a first Executive Summary of the key points I seem to be arguing –

The Schools which form NISPAcee train officials from state administration in both EU member countries and in those which neighbour the EU - but their courses have little or no impact in shaping the perspectives and behaviour of public officials particularly at a senior level where the agenda is set by politics with both a large and small „p”.

More seriously, the content of their teaching is conducted at a high level of rationality – and takes little account of the political context of the work of the public service (particularly appointments and promotion) in CEEC nor of the questionable basis of many of the new models of pubic management they have adopted with such enthusiasm.

The same is true of the intervention tools used by the (large) consultancy industry funded by the EU which fail to account of the highly charged political environment of most CEEC countries – and which therefore make little impact.

The design and delivery of technical assistance of administrative reform is, in any case, fatally split between anonymous individual consultants and EU officials (on the one hand) who design the programmes and Terms of Reference according to unknown assumptions about drivers of change – and the actual consultants who have to manage the projects exactly as designed – regardless of their relevance to the situation they confront on the ground several years later.

As long as accession was the name of the game, this perhaps didn’t matter too much since the „beneficiaries” of Technical Assistance in accession countries had little choice than to comply with external advice.

It is a completely different matter with, for example, Neighbourhood countries – where the language of „local ownership” has to be taken more seriously.

The rhetoric about and programmes for anti-corruption cloak the reality that a systemically corrupt New Class has arisen in many CEEC countries – which makes a mockery of administrative reform and improved public services. The global financial crisis was just the last nail in the coffin.

It is insufficiently recognised that the language of „beneficiaries” and „experts” contradicts utterly the dynamics of a normal client-consultant relationship.

Despite the many evaluations of EU programmes of Technical Assistance which have been carried out, I am not aware of any real (as distinct from formalistic) assessments of the impact of (and lessons from) the large amounts of money spent on the various blocks of work in such fields as functional review, rule of law, civil service reform etc

I know of no examples of the successful transformation of kleptocratic regimes into operational democracies – nor of the possible drivers of such a transformation.

Another heroic example from China – a blind activist released from prison but surrounded in his house day and night by more than 20 state louts is able to smuggle out an eloquent video of his experience which you can see here. He and his wife are beaten senseless for this gesture.
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purple heather

The last post mentioned the book on „wabi sabi” which I’m reading. One of its elements is the appreciation as art objects of ordinary, natural things and of artefacts constructed from nature such as wood, stone and terra cotta. Those brought up on the seaboard of the Atlantic Ocean (as I was) generally come to love the smooth polished pebbles and dramatically carved rocks you find everywhere on the West Coast of Scotland – pounded into shape by the powerful Ocean. I even put one of the photographs I had taken of a rock as an illustration for the front cover of my last book – In Transit – notes on good governance. And one of my most precious collections is a set of Uzbek terra cotta figurines showing various basic occuptations such as a barbour, ceramic maker, beggar etc
I was very pleasantly surprised to find, on my last day in Sofia, pots of purple (unfortunately more red than violet) heather – a well-known Scottish plant which gives our mountains their lovely, special hue in late summer - a plant which is apparently quite rife also in Bulgaria!

com-panion-ship - sharing bread

I can’t leave Sofia without my thanks to my great hosts and friends. But it’s invidious to mention them now since I wouldn’t know who to put first - the Bulgarian alphabetical listings use the first „given” name - not the family name. Just as they shake their head to indicate agreement. Very contrary! Suffice to say that, apart from the company, paintings and laughs, I had (and gave) great food – I haven’t mentioned Jovo’s great artist spread on Sunday afternoon in his studio – salads and pickled vegetables with pastrami and home-made Raki (from muscat grape) then slow-cooked beef with home-made brown bread and the special Brestovitza red wine prepared privately and sold only to friends by one of the vinoculture experts there. Jovo and Yassen are my first artist friends (apart from Bogdan in Ploiesti) and I have learned so much about Bulgarian painting from them. I was reminded, during the meal, of the spirit in which I was given a meal in a converted church in Jersey City by a Monsignor I had met at a Ditchley Park weekend devoted to urban renewal in the mid 1980s. He was the leader of a community cooperative which now owned much of the real estate of this poor neighbourhood - and the meal he and his Board members offered me (before I caught the plane back to the UK after my 6 week's Fellowship in the USA) celebrated the features of "companionship"- literally "breaking bread with (pane -con)".....It seems to share the qualities of "wabi sabi" – the japanese art of impermanence - which I am reading about at the moment in a delightful book by Andrew Juniper. It explains about the tea-drinking ceremony - whcih I have always appreciated since my days in Uzbekistan
Jovo’s studio is in a special apartment on the outskirts (a huge town in its own rights which had sprouted in the last decade) within sight of his flat – and he has a very distinctive style with elongated nudes with heads bowed which have a touch of Matisse. As we were about to leave, a friend and well-known cartoonist (Ilian Savkov) dropped in – and gave me some more names for my list. He draws daily cartoons for the Daily Standard.
I knew I would not have an easy departure on Tuesday morning - since the car wouldn't start on Sunday - despite a bit of exercise I had given it on Satruday. Once again Ivo came to the rescue - helping to push start it and taking me to a friend who had a cable sorted out in a jiff and for only 10 euros. Thanks Ivo!

Back to the serious stuff

I’ve been indulging myself during the past 2 weeks – both in my activities here in Sofia and the blogposts which have followed them. Time to get serious! I reproduced yesterday an example of a great blogpost – from one of the BBC correspondents. It was an extended brainstorm and produced high-level responses – unlike newspaper threads. I have another good example today – from the archdruid report – which raises the issue of systems thinking.
I’ve been trying to get my head around the implications of systems thinking for some time – I flagged the issue up here … and here. I can understand very well the implications for government policy-making – namely that it should have more respect for the natural order (Lovelock’s Gaia thesis is the logical extreme of that); and more reliance on community-level decision-making. Reliance on market mechanisms too - provided, however, that the basic preconditions of a market are present, namely free entry, free flow of information, multiple suppliers and proper costing of external costs. The word „market” is, in our times, has almost religious value – and is attached (by big business) to processes and operations which are utterly oligopolistic and which have nothing to do with the market. It is not so much socialism as big business which is the enemy of the market. I digress….but, methinks, it’s an important digression.
The implications for organisations of the systems approach is something which I have more difficulty with – even although there is a 500 page book which will spell out this for you which you can access at the bottom of the September 3 post.

I have in the next week to tryo to draft a paper which I have been putting off – for the next NISPAcee Conference (for institutes of public admin in east and central europe) which is being held this year in Varna, just down the road from here. I sent them this outline some months back -

I have spent 40 years of my life on various endeavours concerned to make public service systems more responsive to citizens.
The first 20 years was in Scotland – as an academic and political leader in municipal and regional government to which I helped introduce community development principles and practice. But, at the same time, I supported the various efforts at establishing a corporate management capacity – to ensure that the political leaders had some analysis at hand to allow them to deal with the power of the various specialised professions which dominated service delivery in those days. One of the important principles to me then was that of the pincer movement – achieving change from a combination of challenges from above and below.
These were the years when it was possible to believe that politics was an honourable profession and that (local) government could deliver results for its citizens.

My last 20 years has been spent living and working in central europe and central asia as a consultant to national state bodies in their various decentralisation and civil service reform efforts.
This period has coincided with a global enthusiasm for (and, much more recently, a certain reaction against) all things concerned with the private sector. The political system in most countries got too close to that sector – and is now, perhaps fatally, burned.
And the reform effort - which was initially driven by committed individuals - has become sanitised and castrated by technocrats and the project management from which earlier reform efforts might have benefited.
All of which has made it difficult for those working in transition countries to offer the expected models of good practice. Throughout the 40 years, I have tried to follow the relevant literature on improving government – and to share what lessons my own experience seemed to suggest with those interested. For example, at the 2006 NISPAcee Conference, I offered one of the critical papers on Technical Assistance which led to the establishment the following year of the working group on PA Reform. Its most important section was - Those of us who have got involved in these programmes of advising governments in these countries confront a real moral challenge. We are daring to advise these countries construct effective organisations; we are employed by organisations supposed to have the expertise in how to put systems together to ensure that appropriate intervention strategies emerge to deal with the organisational and social problems of these countries; we are supposed to have the knowledge and skills to help develop appropriate knowledge and skills in others! But how many of us can give positive answers to the following 5 questions? -
• Do the organisations which pay us practice what they and we preach on the ground about good organisational principles?
• Does the knowledge and experience we have as individual consultants actually help us identify and implement interventions which fit the context in which we are working?
• Do we have the skills to make that happen?
• What are the bodies which employ consultants doing to explore such questions – and to deal with the deficiencies which I dare to suggest would be revealed?
• Do any of us have a clue about how to turn kleptocratic regimes into systems that recognise the meaning of public service?
At Varna, I would like to take the gloves off – and suggest some unpalatable lessons from the last few decades – for both training institutes and the EC. But, above all, for us as individuals!

The graphic is another Tudor Banus - "sens de la vie"