uncertainty and capacity - part VIII of a critique

It’s been a tough few days as I completely revamped my Varna paper in the light of the EC papers of 2007/2008. The focus has shifted from the neglected role of consultants and politicians to the capacity of the EC policy-making system; instead of a cri-de-coeur, it’s become a case-study and has therefore a new title “Reforming the reformers”.
I was initially happy – to discover (however belatedly) that the criticisms some of us had been making about the system had been recognised and acted upon. Ironically, however, it made me realise that my 2006 analysis had not gone far enough and, in particular, had not followed through on the issues embodied in my later 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 space and 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?”

The very language of Technical Assistance assumes certainty of knowledge (inputs-outputs) and relationships of power – of superiority (“experts”) and inferiority (“beneficiaries”). What happens when we start from the following assumptions?
• Technical Assistance built on projects (and the project management philosophy which enshrines that) may be OK for constructing buildings but is not appropriate for assisting in the development of public institutions (Such criticism has been made of Technical Assistance in the development field – but has not yet made the crossing to those who work in the (bureaucratically separate) world of institution-building in post-communist countries)
• Institutions grow – and noone really understands that process
• Administrative reform has little basis in scientific evidence – just look at the 99 contradictory proverbs underlying it which Hood and Jackson identified in their (out of print) 1999 book. The discipline of public administration from which it springs is promiscuous in its multi-disciplinary borrowing.
• Once one accepts the world of uncertainty in which we are working, it is not enough to talk about more flexibility in the first few months to adjust project details. This is just the old machine metaphor at work again – one last twist of the spanner and hey presto, it’s working!

Robert Chambers writings have been so very good at exploring alternatives – which is why I gave that excerpt of his a few posts back. And my 2006 critique used an excellent table of his at page 12 table 4 which indicated the direction in which Technical Assistance needed to go
I found it interesting that the Court latched on to capacity development (giving appropriate references) in its 2007 paper whereas the EC response was a bit sniffy about that perspective and made no attempt to pick that concept apart (as the Morgan paper I referenced does). I vividly remember my own discovery of the “capacity” concept in 2006. That should give a clue to the inadequacy of TA work – I am a well-read and conscientious consultant and yet I had to reinvent the wheel of capacity development. It was only after I had developed the diagrams you will find at the end of the 2006 paper that I discovered the literature and debate on capacity development – at the same time it seems as the EC.

catalysts to change

I’ve been remiss in making so little mention of the momentous events going on in the north of Afirca and in Yemen. Others more expert than I are covering the issues very well – I was particularly interested to see the discussion about the role played by outsiders in guiding the protestors. An 83 year old American citizen - Gene Sharp – has emerged from the shadows and seems to have played a role in various recent revolutions and his website has some useful guidance for citizen activists in autocratic regimes. Serbians also seem to have been active tutors
The Guardian’s development blog had a very useful post on the catalysing conditions -

Tertiary enrolment – school leavers going to higher education – in Egypt has risen from 14% to 28% since 1990, and in Tunisia from 8% to 34%. Egyptian high school graduates account for 42% of the workforce, but 80% of the unemployed. According to the global employment trends from the International Labour Organisation, Arab countries need to generate more than 50 million jobs in the next decade just to stabilise employment. These conditions have created a large body of disaffected youth, a boiling pot of frustration that is now spilling over at governments that have failed to provide employment opportunities. But the reasons for unrest aren't all economic. Increases in literacy and education, alongside urbanisation and the expansion of the media, have extended political consciousness and broadened demands for political participation. Despite national increases in living standards, the region's repressive, authoritarian regimes are often plagued by corruption and nepotism. Dani Rodrik, a development economist, points out that economic growth does not buy stability unless political institutions mature at the same time. This shows that widely used measures of development such as the MDGs and the HDI are, by themselves, insufficient to determine development priorities: much greater attention needs to be played to inequality, but not only inequality of income.
Middle Eastern countries have had, at least until recently, one of the most equal income distributions in the world. Egypt, for example, registered a Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) of 32 in 2005, far lower than the 47 achieved by the US in the same year. This suggests that access to gainful employment and acute inequalities in political power also need to be considered. These issues are not unique to the Middle East. But the histories of countries such as Egypt, Tunisia and Algeria demonstrate that as societies transform and urbanise, aspirations grow and people expect more of their governments.
However, economic inequalities within, rather than between, countries are becoming more important as the proportion of middle-income countries grow: research from the Institute of Development Studies shows there is a new "bottom billion" of 960 million poor people – 72% of the world's poor – who live not in low, but in middle-income countries. This is a dramatic change from just two decades ago, when 93% of poor people lived in low-income countries.

Rethinking Technical Assistance - part VII

The more I looked at the EC's reform of TA - the 2008 Backbone strategy - the more I realised that it is simply saying that everyone just needed to try a bit harder. The document sets out 8 „principles” and 5 „axes” – a sophistication which should raise alarm bells! The principles embody all the right words - flexibility, demand-led, result-orientation, harmonised, country-owned, quality control of companies etc – but the 5 axes are simply the 5 stages of the project management cycle (which remains sacrosanct). And the more I thought about the paper, the more I realised the superficiality of my own 2006 analysis which had focussed on procedural aspects - rather than the issues embodied in my later 5 questions.
Let’s face it - the Court of Auditors consists of accountants. The EC officials who drafted the response are managers. Neither accountants nor public managers are specialists in administrative reform or social science methodology and able to deal properly with the ends-means issue involved in such social interventions as administrative reform. The language of the logframe has them imprisoned in a system which believes in short causal links between activities and outcomes; if the outcomes don’t happen, then it’s the project designers, managers or implementers to blame! It’s that simple! The possibility of a more complex – if not chaotic – world does not occur to them. I’m now trying to explore what the consequences of such a (more plausible) world view might be for Technical Assistance in my field. Of course several websites are already devoted to this alternative view in the general field of development - but not PAR see Aid on the edge of chaos

The context in which we work

One of the problems about institution building in non-accession countries which I haven’t touched on is the weakness of the our understanding of the way power in many post-communist countries. Because countries quickly introduced elections and have open, competition between parties, the word „democracy” is used – and the imagery associated with this word therefore governs our choice of intervention mechanisms for administrative reform. Azerbaijan was a seminal experience for me – when I realised that it had the inverse of the „normal” political-civil service relationship. I was used to a system where Ministers temporararily occupy positions of power – and civil servants were the more permanent system whose perceptions and behaviour needed to be challenged. In countries like Azerbaijan it was (and is) the other way around – the Ministers were the permanent feature (except for the Minister of Economic development in 2006 who was thrown into prison for being too ambitious!) and the civil servants who were there at their whim. There was therefore no challenge. Too many western experts are taken in by the terms and language they and others use – and assume they are dealing with systems similar to those at home.
I referred recently to the typology of the 1996 book by Linz and Stepan which suggested the term „Sultanistic” for one type of post-totalitarian regime. The word did not, sadly, catch on. A new article on the Russian situation suggests the term „neo-feudalism” for the system there.

The Russian system is fundamentally far more solid and durable than most Western comment allows. Its strength emanates from a basic principle: It is much easier for subjects to solve their problems individually than to challenge national institutions collectively. This is because what Westerners would call corruption is not a scourge of the system but the basic principle of its normal functioning. Corruption in Russia is a form of transactional grease in the absence of any generally accepted and legally codified alternative. Built under Vladimir Putin, Russia’s “power vertical” provides a mechanism for the relatively simple conversion of power into money, and vice versa. At every level of the hierarchy a certain degree of bribery and clientalist parochialism is not only tolerated but presupposed in exchange for unconditional loyalty and a part of the take for one’s superiors. The system is based on the economic freedom of its citizens, but cautious political restrictions on these freedoms generate the wealth of the biggest beneficiaries. There is a cascade of floors and ceilings to the restrictions on freedom, so it is a feudalism with more levels than the old kind. But it works fundamentally the same way: The weak pay tribute “up”, and the strong provide protection “down.”
The Putin phenomenon reflects the fact that Russian leaders of the 1990s preferred a mediocre officer with no noteworthy achievements to become the new President instead of, for example, experienced if imperfect men like Yevgeny Primakov and Yuri Luzhkov, both of whom were quite popular at that time. The rise of Putin, who barely progressed to the rank of lieutenant colonel in Soviet times and who later became famous only for his corrupt businesses in the St. Petersburg city hall, became typical of personnel choices in the 2000s. Inefficient bureaucrats by the hundreds recruited even less able people to occupy crucial positions in their ministries and committees, content in the knowledge that such mediocrities could not compete with or displace them. As a result, Russian governance suffers today less from a “power oligarchy” than from a dictatorship of incompetence.
On the one hand, Russia has built a system in which the execution of state powers has become a monopolistic business. It is controlled mainly by friends and colleagues of the system’s creator, Vladimir Putin, and faithfully operated by the most dutiful and least talented newcomers. All big national business is associated with the federal authorities or controlled by them; local entrepreneurs still try to bargain with regional bureaucracy. All of the new fortunes made in the 2000s belong to Putin’s friends and people who helped him build this “negative vertical.” Therefore, in the coming years, competition inside the elite will diminish, the quality of governance will deteriorate further, and what is left of effective management will collapse. Yet to change these trends would nevertheless be a totally illogical step for the political class.
At the same time, a huge social group wants to join this system, not oppose it (in contrast to the final years of the Soviet Union). In a way, this is like wanting to join a Ponzi scheme at the bottom in hopes that one may not stay at the bottom, and that in any event one will be better off than those left outside the scheme altogether. As the de-professionalization of government advances (along with the “commercialization” of state services) competition among non-professionals will grow, since these have never been in short supply. Therefore, in the future a less internally competitive ruling elite will be able to co-opt any number of adherents.
The Russian elite has essentially “piratized” and privatized one of the world’s richest countries. It is so grateful for this privilege that it may insist on Mr. Putin’s return to the Kremlin in 2012 for 12 more dismal years. By then the young liberal cohorts on whom so many Western analysts pinned their hopes for change will have grown up. The mediocre among them will be part of the system. Most of the best of them, no doubt, will no longer reside in Russia.

improving the system - part VI

What conclusions do I draw from my belated discovery of the critical 2007 EC Court of Auditors Report on Technical Cooperation – and the rediscovery of the curiously entitled EC response A Backbone strategy of July 2008?

• how isolated individual consultants like myself are?
• How poor my internet surfing is?
• how responsive the EU systems is?

I would concede the first and third – but in fact my surfing is pretty good and I discovered this paper only by accessing the new EC site on development cooperation which has taken the place of my old EuropAid site. The paper doesn’t appear on a google search.
And the 2008 EC response is a good topic for both textual analysis and monitoring. Certainly I need to recast my paper for Varna – which becomes less an individual cri de coeur and more a case study in EC policy-making and implementation. My questions now become –
• How did the Court of Auditors pick up on these criticisms?
• What role did the monitoring reports of the period play?
• How coherent is the EC 2008 strategy response? At first sight it seems to be „all over the place” and not actually working from a clear problem identification
• How have the 81 European Delegations in charge of programmes understood the issue?
• How have they framed their responses? Formalistically (though action plans)? Or realistically – through a limited number of actions?
- do they in fact the capacity to do what is expected of them - with only 2-3 staff for such things?
• How are the results being monitored?
• What use is actually being made of experienced people like me?

I certainly haven’t noticed any changes – the European Delegation in China actually compunded felonies by imposing in December 2009 a unilateral requirement of an action plan from me within one month of my arrival instead of the several months given in the ToR for the Inception report – and stuck to this despite the lack of a counterpart appointment. It was one of the factors which led to my resignation.
The EC seems to suffer from an inherent schizophrenia about consultants in its work. On the one hand it chose 2 decades ago to go for procuring private consultancies rather than building its own internal system. But, whenever the choice presents itself (eg on Twinning; and BackBone strategy) it indulges in the populist attack on consultants. It would be better if it did at least make a distinction between the consultancy companies (who make the profit) and the individuals who work for them on a casual basis. The 2008 document has an interesting section which says

This entails on the one hand promoting the involvement of organisations other than commercial firms (such as public institutions, universities, non-profit organisations, think tanks, etc.), and on the other hand making more use of local and regional expertise (and more generally facilitating South-South cooperation). Particular attention will be given to facilitating the dissemination of know-how, the extension of learning systems, training, etc.through appropriate guidance, training and dissemination of good practices, raise awareness of the existing mechanisms available for mobilising expertise in public bodies. This includes:
- a) greater use of the negotiated procedure (already allowed by the PRAG in case of publicsector bodies or to non-profit institutions or associations);
- b) use of grant contracts (possibly and where relevant by direct agreement) to provide TC through non-traditional sources.

Part V - Court of Auditors' 2007 Report

I have a discovered a great Report from the EU Court of Auditors on Technical Cooperation (2007) here and recommendations which very much fit the drift of my arguments.
eg
Recommendation 3; Design of capacity development projects should be improved, by facilitating effective ownership and leadership of the national part of the process, by better defining specific capacity development objectives and related technical assistance requirements, by avoiding overly complex implementation structures, by being more realistic in terms of objectives to be achieved and by planning longer implementation periods.

Recommendation 4; The procedures governing the project preparation and start-up phase, including the procurement of technical assistance, should be reviewed, in order to create more time for implementation, and more flexibility should be allowed during the inception phase to adjust the project design and/or the Terms of Reference for the technical assistance to changes in circumstances.

Recommendation 5; The evaluation criteria in technical assistance tenders should be reviewed, in order to better reflect the quality and previous experience of the experts and the consultancy company.

Recommendation 6; More options should be considered regarding procurement possibilities to allow the best possible choice of technical expertise, including expertise from public institutions and expertise available in the beneficiary country or the region.

Recommendation 7; The Commission should increase its use of technical assistance through coordinated programmes and apply, where possible, implementation arrangements which encourage local ownership.

Recommendation 8; Technical assistance performance by companies and experts should be assessed systematically and a management information system for recording, reporting and consulting this performance should be developed.

And I now remember the EC's Backbone strategy of July 2008 which followed that report

Part IV - strengthening the backbone

If I’m so unhappy with the EC’s approach to institution building in kleptocratic countries, how would I improve it?"
The first steps in any such change are, of course, to assess the situation – describe how the systems works and assess how well it works – and then find out what the various stakeholders think.

The 2007 European Court of Auditors' assessment of the EC Technical Cooperation programme was a good start. It spurred the Commission to produce its "Backbone strategy" which my present draft to the NISPAcee Conference in Varna currently assesses here .

Given the bureaucratic constraints on policy change (particularly given the upheavals involved in creating the External Service), it is hardly surprising that the Backbone strategy says that the strategy is OK and that it is the staff of the 81 EC Delegations which manage it who need to wise up.

These staff are well trained in procurement issues - but not so knowledgable about the substance of the sectoral work they manage; nor particularly skilled in contractual management. The EC has been publishing Manuals and Guidelines for its Delegation staff in recent years to help them understand the conceptual issues involved in institution building - see this one on capacity development in 2009.

Basically the Delegations are enjoined to -
- get better ToR
- select consultants more carefully
- allow them more flexibility

Easier said than done? And still they hardly mention the people who actually do the work - the independent consultants like myself. Strange!

The European Centre for Policy Development Management in Brussels published in 2007 one of the very few papers I know which focuses on the people actually carrying out TA – and asks how their work can be supported and improved

For more on the Court of Auditors' Report - and the EC response, see tomorrow's post


My recent visit to Sofia set off a paean of praise to that city which should be extended to the whole country – at least as far as its landscapes and townscapes are concerned. And, compared to Romania, it is possible to travel around the country and taste this varied scenery in superb ethnic houses remarkably cheaply. In 2007 I discovered by accident a small book on these places produced by the Bulgarian Association for Alternative Tourism – and was very pleased to come across the 2010 version on my last trip.

The Guardian has a good story about some fundamental changes the Conservatives want to make to public services in Britain which were never mentioned in the manifesto. Democracy is in shambles in that country. The previous government commissioned a paper on this issue to a fairly right-wing body which failed to produce convincing evidence of the benefits of further contracting out of public services. See also here an article about the likely effect on the health service.

The painting is Stanley Spencer's wartime "Welders"

Guest post from Robert Chambers

I've just come across a post by Robert Chambers which is highly relevant to my attack on the logframe.

In my 1997 book Whose Reality Counts I presented two alternative paradigms - as I then understood them – which contrasted things with people, as shown in the table below

.
Things People

mode; blueprint - process
Goals; pre-set, closed - open, evolving
assumptions; reductionist - holistic
technology; table d'hote - a la carte
interaction
with locals; instructing - enabling
locals seen
as; beneficiaries - partners
force-flow; supply-push - demand-pull

The ‘things–people’ distinction is useful for identifying and understanding relationships between many phenomena and for diagnosing problems. It points up the contrasts between disciplinary and professional orientations: the things paradigm is more associated with engineering and economics, the people paradigm more with anthropology and sociology. And the contrasts in the two columns indicate differences which are evident in much practice. At the same time, there are many cross-overs and cross-applications.
One key difference is that the things paradigm works in contexts (including human contexts) in which inputs and receiving environments are relatively uniform and controlled, and there is clear causality leading to desired outcomes.

Because of this narrow applicability, many of the errors and failures of development policy and practice have stemmed from the dominance of the things paradigm. This dominance goes back at least to the Marshall Plan, to the creation of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, to development projects in the 1950s and 1960s devoted to infrastructure such as harbours, railways, roads, communications, dams and irrigation projects, and to the idea that Third World countries had to catch up with capital investment in ‘infant industries’. These all gave primacy to things over people.
Engineers and economists were in charge. It was they who set norms and procedures. For the infrastructure projects of the time, these largely made sense. But the things paradigm was then embedded in the values, culture, hierarchies and staffing of the World Bank and of bilateral and other organisations.

Non-economist social scientists were few, of low status, and regarded at best as useful to call in to deal with any ‘people problem’ in implementation once the planning had been done. So top-down, standardised approaches and methods came to be imposed on diverse, uncontrollable and unpredictable people and conditions, often with bad results.
There followed a long and continuing struggle for a better balance that put people first, with their participation from the start and throughout in projects and programmes. There were calls for a new professionalism to shift the balance, effectively from things more towards people. There was progress. For many reasons the balance did indeed shift.
Some attempts to introduce top down routinized procedures were abandoned. Participation and empowerment became part of the rhetoric even if less often of the reality of development. Local people were much less regarded as a residual. People living in poverty, women, children, those who were vulnerable, marginalised and socially subordinate, were given more priority. Though there remained far to go, their knowledge, aspirations, capabilities and priorities were better recognised and brought more into development processes. Especially in the 1990s, the centre of gravity of the balance between things and people began to shift towards people.

But the 2000s brought reversals. ‘Things’-related procedures were increasingly imposed on processes and people. In much development practice, problems were aggravated by the way linear logic, assumptions of predictability, objectively verifiable indicators, impact assessments, logframes and results-based management were more and more required by donors and lenders. More and more the assumption took hold that ‘we know what to do’ and all development required was more money. Good practice and performance, so often dependent on intangible personal and inter-personal unmeasurables like commitment, honesty, energy and trust, were undermined and sapped by the spreading culture in much development of targets, indicators and measurement, and the implicit and even explicit orientation of ‘If it can’t be measured, it won’t happen’.
‘Rigorous’ impact assessment was increasingly demanded. The so-called gold standard for this became randomised control trials (RCTs). These can make sense for medical research where there are many highly standardised units (people and their bodies) and inputs (immunisations, medicines, treatments) but misfit the realities of the complexity of social and much other change, with their uncontrolled conditions, multiple treatments, multiple and indeterminate causation, and unpredictable emergence .
In such contexts, RCTs are liable to postpone and limit learning, and to be costly, slow and inconclusive. Another contested manifestation of this control orientation has been the logframe. Thought by many in the late 1990s to fit realities and programme and project needs so badly and to have so many defects that it would die a natural death, the logframe has to the contrary flourished and spread to become a methodological monoculture in donor requirements.

So in the name of rigour and accountability what fits and works better in the controllable, predictable, standardised and measurable conditions of the things and procedures paradigm has been increasingly applied to the uncontrollable, unpredictable, diverse and less measurable paradigm of people and processes.
The misfit is little perceived by those furthest from field realities and with most power. But then all power deceives. Aid recipients do not tell donors what they experience. They think about future funding. Because funds and power are involved, these tightening and constraining shifts pass largely unremarked and unchallenged.

And what can be called ‘things procedures’ like the logframe are convenient for understaffed donors: they transfer transaction costs and any blame to those whom they fund. Recipients of aid funds are like frogs in the proverbial slowly heating pot and they adapt; but more than the frogs, they increasingly feel the pain. They do less and do it less well. They would like to jump out but fear for their survival if they did.
In my next post, subtitled Expanding Paradigms, I examine the limitations of this simple binary opposition of things and people. Shifts in technology and advances in the complexity sciences are starting to transform these paradigms, helping bring nuance to and even transcend these longstanding divides.

For the second part of his post see here