Chinese repression

A year ago, I was waiting impatiently to make my exit from Beijing. Everything I’ve read about events there since then confirms me in my judgement that this was a society in which I simply could not live – despite the enthusiasm which my young German colleagues seemed to have for it. Last week it was first this amazing Open Letter- then an outline of the scale of the Securitate control system which governs people's lives in China. And today it was the touching final blog of a frequent blogger before he disappeared into the Chinese prison system. For an interesting debate about the current Chinese situation see here.
I’ve shared my enthusiasm here for the detective stories from Qiu Xiaolong based on Shanghai in the 1990s which give a better sense of political realities (systemic corruption) than most social science writing about the country. Yesterday my visit to the Anthony Frost English bookshop unearthed the 1930s detective mysteries of the Dutch diplomat Robert van Gulik who celebrated the work of Judge Dee, magistrate of Han-yuan in 666AD – followed by today’s discovery of someone even closer to power and corruption (in Beijing) who has turned his experiences into detective stories.

another EC rethink

The criticism I have been making foe some years of EC Technical Assistance has related to hhe relevance of project management philosophy in the context of what I have called "non-accession" countries eg those who have been the focus of its Neighbourhood Policy. This was launched in 2003 and aimed to create a “ring of friends” by extending aid and benefits, such as access to the single market, in return for economic and political reforms. Yet the EU has little to show for the billions of euros it has spent. Belarus remains Europe’s last dictatorship, Ukraine is moving backwards, the Arab-Israeli conflict is unresolved and punctuated by violence, and north Africa has languished, until this year, under the rule of autocrats. In the south the EU has focused mainly on economic development; this area gets the lion’s share of neighbourhood-policy funds.
A report this week tells us that The Economist tells us that

Europe has a wealth of experience in helping to reform former totalitarian states. The democratisation of eastern Europe, though incomplete, is a striking success for the “soft power” of the EU, a body without much of the hard sort. But if enlargement has been the EU’s most successful foreign-policy tool, the attempt to promote reform in borderland countries with little hope of joining has largely been a failure. Nicolas Sarkozy’s vanity project, the “Union for the Mediterranean”, a political club that has been paralysed since its inception in 2008, has if anything boosted Arab monarchs and presidents-for-life.
Stability has been paramount for many reasons: preserving Arab-Israeli peace treaties; fighting jihadist terrorism; curbing weapons of mass destruction; protecting oil and gas supplies; and preventing mass migration to Europe. These are not trivial concerns. Europe must deal with the neighbours it has, not the ones it would like. Its mistake was to lose belief in their ability to change for the better. But now that the Arab world is being remade from within, European policy must change too.
The EU’s foreign-policy chief, Cathy Ashton, is being showered with ideas: Germany says EU support (including lifting barriers to agricultural trade) should be linked to democratic reforms. Italy wants more “carrots” to encourage orderly but rapid change, including an upgrade of relations with Egypt and Tunisia and a new system to manage migration. France, Spain and four others plead for more spending in the south and boosting the Union for the Mediterranean, with few or no conditions.
Remember 1989
The end of communism in the east was a great blessing for Europe. The fall of dictators in the south could be too, though the transition is bound to be more uncertain. In 1989 western Europe’s communist foes collapsed; the people rose up against the resented Soviet occupier and were attracted by the West. In the Arab world it is the West’s awkward allies that are falling, and the people there have long resented Western overlordship.
So far the revolts of 2011 have been strikingly free of Islamist, anti-imperial and even anti-Israeli ideology. Such sentiments could yet be stirred if Europe appears to be colluding with hated rulers. The uprisings have removed Europe’s dilemma over pursing stability or democracy—its interests against its values. Stability is gone; interests and values are the same. The only answer is to embrace, help and protect those who want democracy.

I have a feeling that this word "democracy"is misleading us again. Another blog puts a more realistic gloss on things.
We really do need to unpick this term "democracy"! One of the thoughts I am trying to develop at the moment is the artificiality of the distinction the EC has bmade in its TA work between democracy assistance and administrative reform. I don't think you can't separate the two.
graphic is Tudor Banus againwith critics saying that recent events in north Africa have highlighted its ineffectual nature. Stricter "conditionality" attached to EU funds and greater "differentiation" between how much target states receive are two ideas due to come up in a forthcoming review of the policy, a commission spokeswoman said on Thursday (24 February). In a letter to EU high representative Catherine Ashton this month, France, Spain and four smaller EU members said the Union should give less money to its post-Soviet neighbours in the east and more to southern neighbours on the Mediterranean rim. An analysis paper attached to the letter noted that out of the €12 billion set aside for the European Neighbourhood Policy from 2007 to 2013, just €1.80 is being spent per capita in Egypt and €7 in Tunisia compared to €25 in Moldova. But two-thirds of overall ENP money already goes to the south - since the countries in question are more populous.
„We do recognise that lessons need to be learnt," Natasha Butler said of the recent turmoil in north Africa. "There has been a sea change in the region and we are ready for a sea change in terms of our approach," she added. "That means we are ready to strengthen differentiation, we are ready to move more on conditionalities."
Devised in 2004 as a means of building better relations with the Union's closest neighbours, the ENP has recently taken flak from a wide range of people. British Prime Minister David Cameron this week said it needed "radical reform" after EU financial assistance worth around €1.7 billion for countries such as Tunisia, Egypt and Libya in recent years failed to bring about the political and market reforms they were supposed to.

The European Commission has promised a "sea change" to the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP),

Fiddling while Bucharest....builds

In her recent blogs, Sarah has been giving great coverage to the destructionivists who occupy all positions of power and (apparently influence) here in Romania – and the Ceaucescu tendencies in particular of Mayor Oprescu (a surgeon no less) in relation to old Bucharest buildings.
The inclusion of buildings on a list of protected patrimony means nothing to him – nor laws which forbid eviction of people during winter months.

Today, we are witnessing a second 'systematisation' of Bucharest, which has accelerated since 2005. Its new face sees towers rising up to twenty floors in architectural zones replacing buildings of historical and architectural value. They are spilling into neighbouring areas - look no further than the recent Roman Catholic Cathedral, St Joseph's.
The segment affected by the demolitions included a mass of buildings of traditional architectural heritage representative of the capital. Now they are gone. Hotel Marna, the Nicolae Dobre House, the Constantin Radulescu House, The Dacia cinema, the house where the national poet Mihai Eminescu lived with Veronica Micle to name just a few...all gone. Gone forever. Irreplaceable jewels impossible to rebuild, impossible to replicate. Hala Matache comes next if it hasn't gone already. Twenty storey eye-sores will replace them. Bucharest is being deleted. An inestimable cultural value belonging to the Roumanian people has disappeared in the hands of the Mayor of Bucharest, Sorin Oprescu. The man has no Roumanian culture and no respect for it. This is how City Hall 'manages' historic Bucharest.
Dinu C. Giurescu is named after his grandfather, Constantin, who lived,as previously mentioned, at str. Berzei, 47, destroyed by Ceausescu. He carries the 'C' in his name proudly in memory, and spent his childhood in this house. He said, "We know the roads are congested but that does not justify returning to Ceausescu's demolition process of the few remaining historic streets left in Bucharest. There are monuments on str Berzei - noble, nostalgic and beautiful. The street is a sample of Old Bucharest which, by some miracle, survived [zic Nicolae Ceausescu's urban planning]." Indeed they did survive Ceausescu - but they have not survived Oprescu.
Does Oprescu realise what he is doing? Does he have any idea how loathed he is? Does he not give any thought to what he has done to Roumanian culture, history, architecture and patrimony? To the Roumanian people? Does this man have any conscience?.I think not. He is blinded by money and his own self-importance. Indeed, Roumania's latest urban dictator in a Mayor's position. How could this cardiologist break so many hearts?

The reaction of my Romanian partner is interesting – despite her admiration for European conservation she’s none too sympathetic to the few local protestors who turned up when the bulldozers crushed the old shell which has been standing for years on the corner across from the Mandache market (and the hotel next to it). “What have they been doing in the last 20 years when the old buildings have been empty and crumbling?” she asks. Clearly people like Valentin Mandache have been trying to develop an appreciation of the charm of the Romanian architectural tradition - his website gives us every day a delightful feature from the older buildings here. But he has said nothing about the demolitions which have, rightly, aroused Sarah’s ire. Protestors such as are a forlorn minority. And I came across a publication yesterday which may explain this passivity. Produced by the Romanian Architectural association Arhitect, it was a nicely bound 2 volume collection (in Romanian and English) of articles from their professional journal over the past 20 years – entitled After Twenty Years. I was initially excited to have a chance to follow the thoughts of the profession but was surprised to note an absence of diagrams, sketches, drawings or pictures. And, when I settled down to read the text, I was quite horrified with its abstract gibberish – all drawn, it seemed, from Western semiotics and having little or nothing to do with the tactile business of buildings. Of course, in a country where everyone builds their own houses, Romanian architects are in a curious position!
As I was writing this, I remembered an article Simon Jenkins had written last year on how close Britain came to the same destruction of its history-

We have forgotten, who ever knew, how close familiar Britain came in the 60s to going the way of eastern Europe. Those who regarded themselves as in the van of taste wanted British cities demolished. The architecture and town planning professions, led by the Royal Institute of British Architects, were almost universally destructive. Victorian Britain was derided as ugly, largely because it stood in the way of fees. Scorn was heaped on Gilbert Scott's Foreign Office and his St Pancras hotel. The only Victorian buildings mostly left sacrosanct were places of worship. Nobody could afford to rebuild them. To celebrate its 50th birthday, the Victorian Society has published Victorians Revalued, a book recalling its battle honours. It is a noble record. Back in the 60s the society was the SAS of the conservation movement. It was founded after the demolition of the Euston Arch in 1961, a vandalism personally approved by the philistine Harold Macmillan, desperate to appear modern. Two environment ministers, Geoffrey Rippon and Peter Walker, planned to demolish the "government precinct", including the Foreign Office, and the entire eastern side of Bishopsgate in the City. The architects Leslie Martin and Colin Buchanan proposed to flatten the south end of Whitehall from Downing Street to the river, and the houses of parliament.
Five years of relentless campaigning by the Victorian Society defeated most of these plans. At the same time, with Nikolaus Pevsner and John Betjeman in lead, the society saved St Pancras. Next came a signal triumph over the Greater London Council at Covent Garden. In Liverpool, battle was joined against Graeme Shankland's plan to demolish the entire city centre, at the same time as T Dan Smith's Newcastle started to vanish under the wrecker's ball.
The story of these campaigns reads like a history of the Great War. Lost were the battles of Eaton and Trentham halls, the Coal Exchange and Barings bank in the City, the Imperial Institute in Kensington, Birmingham's Central library and Leeds's Park Row. Won were the battles of Carlton House Terrace, Covent Garden, King's Cross and Liverpool's Albert Dock. A climax came in 1974 with the V&A's sensationally successful 1974 exhibition, The Destruction of the English Country House. Before then a house was being destroyed almost every week; afterwards destruction virtually ceased. Never was art more potent.
It is hard in retrospect to appreciate how cliff-edge were these David and Goliath contests, and how desperately alone were the Davids. Against them were big money, big government and big architecture. The RIBA represented not a profession, let alone an art, but a financial lobby. At public inquiries, developers and architects called witnesses to argue for demolition – often corrupt art historians – whose payments were never revealed. Those whose sole concern was public aesthetics had to use their own time and money. Time and again they won. The survival of Victorian Britain was their reward. The story was not just public against private interest. It needed a revolution in taste.
Many factors brought about a change. The charm of Betjeman's poetic propaganda depicted the 19th century not as grimly Dickensian but as quaint and loveable (helped by ITV's Upstairs Downstairs). Clean air and restoration revealed the decorative subtlety of the Victorians' gothic and classical themes.

Norman Lewis - the quiet explorer

I’m discovering that truth is stranger than fiction – or rather that (some) biographies can make for more gripping reading than novels. A few months ago, the book which stunned me was The Orientalist – in search of a man caught between east and west. This is the incredible tale of one Lev Nussimbaum - born into Baku and a world subsequently destroyed by Communism and Fascism and the ideologies of class and race. The book vividly describes the 'wild west', oil-rich city of Baku in the 1920s, the cabaret of Weimar Germany and a whole host of strange and eccentric characters: Viereck, the writer and Nazi sympathizer, Ernst 'Putzi' , Hitler's Harvard-educated press secretary, Baron Omar-Rolf, Erika Lowendahl, a Jazz-age poetess whom Lev marries, Varian Fry whose mission it is to save two hundred of Europe's top intellectuals and artists from the grip of the Nazis and Italo Balbo, founder of the Italian Air Force who sets up a futurist experiment in the deserts of Libya. Through one largely unknown man we learn so much about that lost world.

And these last few days I’ve been reading Semi-invisible Man – the life of Norman Lewis by Julian Evans. I have read enough of Norman Lewis to recognise that he was up there as one of the inspirations for the new breed of travel writers but had not properly appreciated his other writing – nor the sort of life he had, right until his 90s. Norman Lewis spent his life foraging around some of the world's most dangerous places, from civil-war Spain to remote corners of Asia and drug-ravaged Latin America. From all of them Lewis returned vividly-written accounts which found their way into more than 30 books and many pieces of inspired journalism. Some see Lewis as the equal of Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell. He was a superb reporter of the civilisations being crushed by modernity. After an arduous jaunt around Spain just before the civil war he produced Spanish Adventure . It was followed three years later by Sand And Sea In Arabia. The outbreak of war found Lewis in Cuba, where he left his wife and son (for their safety, he said) and returned to England to enlist. He found a slot in the Intelligence Corps which dispatched him to French North Africa and then to Italy, where he found the inspiration for Naples '44 (published in 1978), the book that many regard as his masterwork. It tells the story of people scraping a living in a half-ruined ancient city that had been overrun by conquering foreign armies.
After the war Lewis seems to have found his voice. For 30 years he travelled incessantly and published book after book. Among the better known: The Volcanoes Above Us (1957); A Small War Made To Order (1966); The Sicilian Specialist (1974); An Empire In The East (1993); In Sicily (2000). All this was interspersed with journalism for titles such as the New Yorker, the Sunday Times, the New Statesman and Granta. In most of his writing, he gave voice to the outrage which people like John Pilger have subsequently made a vocation.

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