Alternative medicine, healing - or scam?

I want to recount a sad experience I had on Sunday here in Bulgaria - near Veliko Trnovo. Since a hill walk in the Kyrgyz mountains in 2006 I have had weak (and occasionally painful) knees. The Magnetic Resonance machine (in Glasgow) couldn’t identify any physical deterioration – and left me to conclude that my condition was arthritic. I was therefore easy prey when a friend suggested I try some foot reflexology from a Bulgarian who had returned home after a successful practice in Italy. He took me in 2009 or so for my first (painful) hour’s treatment. It didn’t make any difference – but I was persuaded it needed a course of treatment. After all, when (some 25 years ago) no physical therapist could deal with a previous knee pain I had, it was (apparently) sorted out in a short session by a guy who just massaged it – all the while dangling a pendant like a metronome.
And last Thursday started – after a 3 hour journey from Sofia - what I thought would be such a course. An hour’s session cost me 50 levs – which I considered reasonable since a massage would have cost me about 60 (although leaving me more invigorated). I returned on Sunday for the second session – which was only 30 minutes (I had been made to wait an hour and needed to be back in Sofia by 16.00) – and was shocked to be asked for 50 euros – effectively 4 times the previous week’s rate (double the price for less than half the time). I was told two things – first that they had made a mistake the previous week, charging me the rate for Bulgarians (foreigners were 50 euros – Romanians too???). And, second, that what counted was not the length of the session (it’s not massage!) but the effectiveness. But I had no pain when I arrived – so lack of immediate pain (apart from the bones he had pressed) was no measure. I would be happy to pay by results – but that was never on offer! The “healer” (for that is the term I have discovered they use on the website which is still under construction) just decided to stop my treatment in order to give someone else treatment who was also in a hurry.
I confess I was a bit annoyed by the guy’s abruptness – and lack of interest in the information I tried to convey to him about a skin condition I have - and the small wooden roller he used was duly beginning to tear my skin
I had noticed some time ago that the Bulgarians have a great belief in spiritual energy - which does leave them vulnerable to people we northerners would regard as quacks. And last october the Bulgarian authorities were threatening to tighten up on "healers".

Coda
A Bulgarian reader who has received and seen Mitio's treatment has been in touch to argue Mitio's corner. He draws attention to the many people who have clearly benefited from the treatment. I am sure that his treatment has helped many people and admit that part of my concern is the language of "healing" since this, for me, is getting close to calling oneself a "miracle-worker" which my world-view has difficulty accepting. I readily accept that there are a lot of things man does not and probably never will explain with current methodologies. But would be more comfortable with the term "therapist" - and if he showed some humility about other (complementary) approaches. Clearly, for example, what one eats (and drinks) does affect one's body. Man ist was man isst! For example, a coupleof days later, I had a painful swelling in a big toe - and the blood test at the hosptital identified high uric acid. They immediately put me on a diet of no meat or wine (and lots of water) for 4 weeks - after which we will test again. And my body seem to appreciate the new diet!
And it is certainly a problem for me that (a) I don't know what technique he is using (is it reflexology?) and (b) that I don't get any feedback. I can share his view of the medical profession - but he equally needs to accept that people need information and feedback; and that his treatment may not necessarily be appropriate in all cases.
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What would Google Do?

In fact, What Would Google Do? proved to be an engrossing and thought-provoking read – although the early stuff about turning customer complaints on their head (as it were) and using them as an intelligence tool to help improve design and/or maintenance is the stuff of common sense which I used forty years ago when I was a young politician trying to reshape municipal services. Except that, now, Blogs, Twitter and Facebook clearly give “the crowd” (that’s us) much more power – and not only negative (complaint) but positive – “your customers are your ad agency”. Later in the book, indeed, he explores the likelihood that various “middlemen” organizations such as advertising agencies may indeed become redundant. One review put it well

The principles he unearths from close observation of Google’s practices range from the obvious, like the importance of enabling customers to collaborate with you, to the apparently mystical mantra “focus on the user and all else will follow”.
In the second part of the book Jarvis offers ideas and suggestions for how various industry sectors can become more “Googley”, and although many of the proposals are more imaginative and speculative than realisable, by the end you get a real sense of the transformative power of applying the principles he has outlined. The core assumptions of transparency, connectedness and openness really do make a difference, and business models in the media, the car industry, venture capital and even the benighted banking sector would be transformed if they were taken seriously.
Sitting at the core is the desire to do more with data, to take the details of our daily lives, aggregate them with the information that companies inevitably gather and then – and this is the Googley bit – give us access so we can make our own choices eg a restaurant that open sources its menu and lets customers rate the wines as well as the service, Jarvis’s goal is to help us all to think differently.
It doesn’t always work, and the attempt to contrast Al Gore’s approach to solving the problems of global warming through regulation and control with that of Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who want to invest in finding ways to reduce the cost of renewable energy, ends up as an unconvincing paean to the free-market worldview that now seems rather dated in the midst of a banking-induced recession. But the overall tone is of infectious optimism in the power of innovation that is remarkably convincing.

I wasn’t quite so convinced. At one stage I started to wonder about the profile of these energetic and restless complainers who rush to put their experiences online and use comparative data to make their purchase decisions. It sounds suspiciously much like an idealisation of the rational (wo)man which is the basis of the economics doctrine which has just been blown away and is being replaced by behavioural economics. However, his section on the future of the book is provocative –

books are frozen in time without the means to be updated or corrected, except via new editions. They aren’t searchable in print. They create a one-way relationship. They tend not to teach authors. They cannot link directly to related knowledge, debate and sources as the internet can. They are expensive to produce. They depend on shelf space. They kill trees. There are only a few winners (20%) and the rest are losers.

Except that browsing a remaindered book section is an exercise in discovery. As the first review puts it -

deep down this is not really a book about Google as much as an extended meditation on the benefits of innovation, openness and the imaginative use of new technologies of networking and information processing. Jarvis uses Google’s undoubted success and continued development as a fulcrum for his rhetorical lever, attempting to move corporations, governments, educational institutions and the medical establishment away from their settled practices and into a space where innovation can flourish and where creative destruction leads to progress.

A critical review is here. The author uses his website to compose his books and there is an interesting assessment of some of the reviews of his latest here.
Two years ago I blogged about the Zhukoff book Support Capitalism which has a more measured (if more inaccessible) assessment

An opportunity to catch up

I will probably be out of access to the internet for the next few days – so please take the opportunity to check back on recent posts – most of which have dealt with the role of training public officials in countries emerging from autocratic rule. Or check the posts from exactly a year ago – for example the one for 10 November 2010 had a section which suggested we allow the wrong sort of people to be honoured and celebrated -

the first twenty years of my life, I focussed on the political – the "what”.

The last 20 years the focus has been on the "how”- on reforming the machinery of government. I’m still interested in the latter but, as the masthead quotation from JR Saul indicates, I think the value of technocrats is overrated and the role of citizens and the maligned politicians has to be asserted. And one of the things wrong with a lot of the reform writing is that it is too abstract. Change is a question of individuals – and we need more of the naming and shaming approach which I used myself for the first time a year ago when I picked out a State Secretary and analysed his (outdated) declaration of interest form which appeared on the Ministry website.

We also need to celebrate more those who are trying to make a positive mark on life – and, as I noted on a recent friend obituary, while they are still alive. One of the reasons I enjoyed Paul Kingsnorth’s book One No; many Yeses on the protests against the iniquities inflicted on the world by multi-national corporations is that it focused on the individuals in different parts of the world who are risking their lives and livelihoods to protest against the destruction being wrought by people running these organisations.

Business has been using the journal “portrait” for a long time to glorify their class – and most management books are little else than hero creation and worship. Only women like Rosabeth Kantor (with her marvellously mocking ten-rules-for-stifling-innovation and Shoshana Zuboff, it seems, are capable of resisting this inclination of business writers! But you don’t find such positive write-up of reformers – presumably because media ownership is so neo-liberal. And the publications of the reform movement tend to concentrate on ideas.
For example, I’ve wanted for some time to say something about one of the people I admire most – a Slovak friend of mine who, as Director of a training centre run on cooperative lines in a village, has utterly transformed an old palace, building up not only the facilities it offers (and the labour force) but commissioning local artists to create glorious murals to remind us of the place’s historical heritage and holding vernissages with painters from central europe, the Balkans, Central Asia etc. Walk into his huge office and he is almost lost amongst the books and paintings which are piled up around his desk. And his house is like a (living) museum – from all the artefacts he has brought back from his vacations throughout the world. He is such a lovely, modest man and I always feel a taste of heaven when I visit him at the Mojmirovce Kastiel.

I was stumped a few months back when I was asked who were the people I admired? Apart from a few inspirational friends such as my Slovak friend, the people I admire are those who have a combination of vision, social justice and communication for example Peter Drucker; Leopold Kohr; George Orwell; JK Galbraith; Ivan Illich; C Wright Mills; Ernst Schumacher. They’re all dead!

And the November 12 post poses four basic questions which are always worth posing and exploring.
So have a good rummage while I'm away......there is some good stuff there....

Leaders of change

New readers should note that this blog is a great resource for those concerned about the apparent collapse of key elements of our core systems – and what we should be doing about it. My blogs rarely comment on the trivia which passes for News these days (although I couldn’t resist the recent grilling of Rupert Murdoch by a UK House of Commons Committee) and try to strike a reasonable tone. They alternate between the professional and political aspects of improving governance (particularly in "transition countries" – a combination which gives these posts a distinctive slant. Most of my posts give direct links to papers which give hard evidence of my points. A bit like Google Scholar, I try to stand on the shoulders of giants. Indeed one of the reasons I keep blogging is that I find it is a great way of organising my reading. Anything which impresses me gets worked in; without the blog I would be wasting time trying to find a paper which I knew said something important. Now all I have to do is punch a keyword into the search engine on the site – and hey presto! The blogs are therefore (I hope) more like perennial flowers which can be enjoyed even if a couple of years old. And I am pleased to see that some of my readers do that without being urged.
Exactly a year ago I had a lament on impotence of democratic politicswhich shows you what I mean.

From October 28, I devoted a series of posts to the issue of the role of training in improving the performance of state bodies in ex-communist countries. I was pretty critical – particularly of the EC funding strategy.
The second post in the series summarised my critique and suggested three paths which those in charge of such training in these countries needed to take to make an impact -

1. to signal that the development of state capacity needs to be taken more seriously – by officials, politicians and academics – and to give practical examples of what this means
2. to try to shine some light on the role of training in individual learning and organisational development – to show both the potential of and limits on training and to have the courage to spell out the preconditions for training which actually helps improve the performance of state bodies
3. to encourage training institutes to cooperate more with change agents in the system - and with academia

Part V tried to put us in the shoes of a Director of the National Institute of training of public servants in these countries – facing incredible constraints - and to expand on these three points. Part VII switched the focus back to the funders and tried to reduce the critique to a few bullet points - "Wrong focus; wrong theory"; "context" and "leadership" and then went on to give an illustration of the sort of cooperation which might pay dividends for a Director of a Training Institute.
A final post backtracked a bit to ask what we actually know about the process of developing the administrative capacity which I had made the core of my argument.
It also noted that I should now explore why on earth anyone facing the sort of political and budgetary constraints which exist in the Balkan countries (widely defined) should ever wish to put her head over the parapet and "think big and reach out” as I had earlier suggested . So here goes……

I did make the point very strongly in the posts that each country has to make its own way – each context is very different and requires something which resonates with its key actors. Locals who bring foreign experience (like most think-tankers) are generally just trying to make a name for themselves as can be seen in this (otherwise interesting) book of case studies from the countries which were in the more direct influence of the Soviet Union.
But I am who I am am; my context (at least for the first 25 years of my working life) was the strong bureaucratic system of Scottish local government – which owned the vast proportion of the housing and transport system. I challenged this system – before Margaret Thatcher appeared on the scene – but from a new left and participative rather than privatising perspective.
And I had a lot of allies – first in men and women (more the latter) who worked in impossible circumstances of low income and insecurity – but who had the guts and energy to try to make a better lives for those around them. And, secondly, in a few officials who realised that if they did not use their position, skills and knowledge to try to make things better, then we would soon hit rock bottom. Mark Moore tried to legitimise the work of such committed officials in his 1995 Public Value book.

It is extraordinary people who make things change – sometimes, of course, for the worse. We have been brainwashed in the past 2 decades to believe that change was always for the better – the default option in the dreadful language. I linked yesterday to a Monbiot article which quoted from an important recent book identifying the psychotic element in so many corporate leaders – which has been a theme since Alaister Mant’s Leaders We Deserve. Malcolm Gladwell shows that even the recently deceased and highly regarded Steve Jobs had many elements of dysfunctionality in his pursuit of perfection.
And psychotic management seems to be in an even healthier state in ex-communist countries – although at least one book has tried to celebrate local heroes willing and able to make a difference.

In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell’s famous book The Tipping Point argued that the attainment of the "tipping point" (that transforms a phenomenon into an influential trend) usually requires the intervention of a number of influential types of people - not just a sinle "leader". On the path toward the tipping point, many trends are ushered into popularity by small groups of individuals that can be classified as Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.
Connectors are individuals who have ties in many different realms and act as conduits between them, helping to engender connections, relationships, and “cross-fertilization” that otherwise might not have ever occurred.
Mavens are people who have a strong compulsion to help other consumers by helping them make informed decisions.
Salesmen are people whose unusual charisma allows them to be extremely persuasive in inducing others to take decisions and change their behaviour.
Hopefully my next post will be able to make proper use of all of these references!!

Management as religion

As you may perhaps have noticed, I’ve been experimenting with the title of the blog – in the belated realisation that "Balkan and Carpathian musings" may not be a phrase that people often punch into their search engine! "Better government" has the sort of technocratic note which is perhaps needed and does reflect some of the content. But what about the phrase I used yesterday - "in the public interest"? Another possible title could be "A Common Reader – since I do try to give references and excerpts from my extensive reading. On the other hand, I have always liked the metaphor of striving and exploring – indeed the designation on my new business card is "explorer and aesthete"(I actually wanted to put "epicurean" but desisted since it has contradictory meanings). My first little book (way back in the mid 1970s) was called "The Search for Democracy". Two titles of recent papers of mine reflect some of what I write about – "Just Words" and "Thoughts for Posterity" – but again have no resonance for those hitting the search engines. I need someone to explain to me the relative importance of (a) the name of the blog; (b) the title of the particular post; and (c) labels and keywords.
What frustrates me is that I have no real idea who the 40-50 people are who hit my various posts each day – nor whether they actually read the posts. Apart from the (rising) numbers each day, all I know is the location of the readers (in the past week the top 6 countries are, in descending order, Germany, Russia and central Asia, USA, South Korea, Bulgaria, Romania and UK). I don’t know how many of them actually return (eg there was a spike of 80 German page viewings last night).

Curious that I should buy at the weekend and start to read a book which announces (for the 4th or so time in my lifetime) the end of the power structures as we know them and the power which ordinary people now have – when the global demonstrations against finance capitalism demonstrate the scale of political impotence people all over the world feel. The book is one I had been recommended - What would Google Do? and I have discovered that it can be read for free in its entirety here.
It was first published in 2009 and, as far as I can understand, tries to demonstrate that the google way of doing business is the way of the future – for the public as well as the private sector – giving us all new power (though networks etc). You will get a good sense of it from this review.
From what I have read so far, I do not expect to have my sense of corporate power shattered – although I do hope to learn a bit more about how Google and internet companies operate.

But the book seems to me another example of how we seem to have lost our social memory.
I remember reading, in the early 1970s, books by prominent management theorists (such as Warren Bennis) and others (such as Toffler – Future Shock) which promised the end of bureaucracy.

The early 1990s saw breathless books (by people such as Tom Peters) which promised the same. Forty years on, what do we have – stronger bureaucracy (now called contracting, procurement and regulatory bodies) than ever - and more autocratic and pyschotic leadership and management!
And I find it significant that – as far as Google Scholar goes – Warren Bennis hardly existed.

For me, it is very strange how difficult it is to get hold of serious books which critique the whole management religion. I know that a lot of sociologists have in fact conducted such critiques but two factors make it difficult for the interested citizen (another possible title for my blog??) to access this stream of work. First the language in which (and the narrow audience for which) they write - in expensive, specialist academic journals.
And, secondly, the control exerted by (large) publishing companies who have a very special interest in NOT demystifying management since they make so much money from management books – whether textbooks or airport lounge pickups.
 All credit therefore to Sage Publications for giving Chris Grey the opportunity to publish A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Organisations (2009 2nd edition) which, for me, contains more incendiary material than Marx, Lenin, Che Guevara and Al-Quada rolled together. It is written by an academic who can actually write clearly - and who sees it as his job to interpret for us the significant parts of academic work.

Public Interest - how innocent we were

One of the really difficult things for people of my generation is to come to terms with is how venal our legislative and legal systems have become (the bankers are simply part of a complex equation). The post-war generation to which I belong was brought up with the tenets of liberal democracy - some of which you will find set out at page 6 of this paper of mine. We believed that government was responsive to public concerns; that our civic input (in whatever form - letters; political membership; political involvement and argument - not least as local councillors) would ensure the system operated in the public interest. The evidence we have seen in the last decade has, however, has forced us to the reluctant conclusion that laws are created generally to protect the rich and powerful; and that the judiciary (despite or perhaps because of its claims of impartiality) is in fact not blindfold but highly susceptible to the interests of the rich and powerful. I leave open the question of whether this is a new phenomenon - or simply one which less deferential a more educated and connected society has become aware of.
The examples I quote are first from a bastion of social democratic values (Canada) and then the better-known practitioner of venality and hypocrisy which happens to be its southern neighbour.The first article identifies the huge inequities in how banks are treated – compared with the rest of us.

They are often protected (from foreign competition); subsidized (for example, in the way capital gains tax worked), and bailed out when needed. But what do banks actually do, in return for all that money? What is their actual economic function?
Let’s cut through the mystification of high finance, and ask that simple question: What do banks do? What do bankers actually produce?
The practical answer, in concrete terms, is simple: nothing. They produce nothing.
In that, the banks are different from the real economy, where hard-working people like you and I produce actual, concrete goods and services that are useful.
Banks, and the financial sector more generally, don’t produce goods and services that are useful in their own right. They produce paper. And then they buy and sell paper, for a profit.
Here’s a little economic lesson. You can’t live off paper. You need food, clothing, and shelter to survive – not paper. And since we are human beings, not animals, we need more: we need education, and culture, and recreation, and entertainment, and security, and meaning. Those are the fundamentals of economic life. Not paper.
What is paper actually good for? You can wallpaper your house with it. You can line your birdcage with it. In a pinch, you can wipe your butt with it.
But other than that, paper is just paper. It is not concretely useful in its own right.
How do banks create that paper? Let me put it bluntly again: They create it out of thin air.
It is not an economic exaggeration to state that the private banking system has the power to create money out of thin air.
Not cash. Not currency. Only the government can produce that.
But most money in our economy – over 95% of money in our economy – is not currency. Most money consists of entries in electronic accounts. Savings accounts. Chequing accounts. Lines of credit. Credit card balances. Investment accounts.
In that electronic system, new money is created, not by printing currency, but through creating credit. Every time a bank issues someone a new loan, they are creating new money.
It’s like a big magic machine, creating money out of thin air. And it’s called the private credit system.
One of my favourite economists, John Kenneth Galbraith, put it this way: “The process by which private banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled.”
How do they do it? They start out with some capital. Let’s say a billion dollars. Then they lend it out. Then they lend it out again. And again. And again and again, 10 or 20 or 50 times over.
Each new loan, is new money. The economy needs that money, let’s be clear. Without new money, we wouldn’t be able to pay for the stuff we make. So we’d stop making it, and we’d be in a depression.
So the creation of new money (or credit) is as essential function for the whole economy. It’s like a utility. But we’ve outsourced that crucial task to private banks. We’ve given them a legal license to print money – and the freedom and power to do it on their own terms.
Their goal is not providing the economy with a sensible, sustainable supply of the credit we need. Their goal is using their unique power to create money out of thin air, to maximize the profits of the banks, and the wealth of the shareholders.

The second article I owe to a site - Byliner - which offers simply good writing. Out of curiousity I hit this piece which tracks how the American judicial system treated someone outraged with the secretive and iniquitous way heritage land was being sold to commercial gangsters.

WHEN DECHRISTOPHER’S CASE finally went to court last March, 2,000 protesters showed up. So did the Salt Lake police department, federal marshals, and Homeland Security agents. The trial lasted three days, with Judge Benson making a few things clear up front. First, DeChristopher’s attorneys wouldn’t be allowed to use a necessity defense—the argument that he had to disrupt the auction because of his beliefs about climate change (he had successfully bid for about 12 lots of land with no intention of paying). Second, the defense couldn’t bring up the fact that DeChristopher had actually raised money to buy the land; the court’s view was that, by then, the fraud had been committed. Finally, the defense could not inform the jury that past bidders had not been able to pay for their parcels either. Shea and DeChristopher’s other attorney, Ronald Yengich, were left to argue that their client had acted on impulse and hadn’t intended to disrupt the auction. The prosecution didn’t have much trouble refuting this, given DeChristopher’s public statements, and it came as little surprise when, on March 4, DeChristopher was convicted

You can imagine the behind-the-scene discussions which went on to fix that!

Culture corner
And, after these photos of reality, let's have a fix of something more worthwhile in these latest paintings from Its about Time

Comic insights

"We are where we are" was a great phrase I heard for the first time a some 7 years ago – from a very understanding European Commission desk officer. I had expected some swearwords about the cock-up we were facing – instead of which I got this very wise response. You might think that the German “man ist was man isst” (to which I have referred before) is a variant – but, if you do, go back to square one! The German phrase suggests that our behaviour is determined by our diet. I disagree – they are determined to a huge extent by the words we use. "Words", as a left-wing political elder once severely but memorably told the cabinet of which I was a young member, "are important". I didn’t need the reminder – since George Orwell was then (and remains) one of my favourite writers.
All of this is by way of preface to a couple of very funny glossaries I came across yesterday. The first about civil service jargon on a site which contains some great articles tracing the development of the British civil service through its different stages and putting it all into historical context.
The second glossary is a good contribution to the sort of ridicule which we urgently need to start slinging at economists (and bankers). It’s from the website of one of the contrarian economists whose critique of economics has been at last proven so correct - Steve Keen. Curiously, his blog was down all Monday!!
This article from the very readable US Chronicle of Higher Education puts his work in a larger context.

At the start of the year I tried to pull together my various thoughts (and references) about the words which modern technocrats have used in the past 4-5 decades to protect their power and disarm any possible threat from the unwashed masses. It's in what I consider one of the best papers I have ever written - Just Words - a sceptic's glossary?
I realise as I write this that I have always targeted the technocrats (the courtiers) rather than the all-powerful commercial and other elites. Is this simple because I knew them better? Or is it because they supplied the ammunition to allow the real perverts to exploit us all?

As a party piece, this is a good expose of the phrases we Brits use; how our European partners generally understand them; and what the Brits really mean by them. For example - when we say "very interesting", foreigners think we are impressed. What we are actually thinking is that it's a lot of nonsense! Similarly, when we say "with the greatest respect", we are actually thinking "the man's an idiot" whereas the non-English speaker assumes that he is being listened to."Incidentally, by the way" actually means "this is the primary purpose of the discussion" - whereas the foreigner that the issue is of no significance. For those who deal with Brits, the table is useful prepartion and, who knows, sharing it with them might open up new friendships!
Poets are supposed to be the great explorers of verbal nuance – but I’m beginning to suspect it is actually comedians who deserve this accolade. I’ve referred recently to Tommy Cooper and Chic Murray. One of Germany's greatest - Loriot - died recently and occasioned this tribute. One of the most delightful films for me is - A Fish called Wanda – and I was pleased to find a couple of clips - first when Jamie Lee Curtis is overwhelmed by the Russian phrases of John Cleese (co-producer)
and then a clip which contrasts English styles of bedding with (those of!) the Italian.

To round off this treatment of words and phrases, who better to turn to than one of Britain's best writers - Chris Hitchens - who gives here a great treatment of the Ten Commandments

Fiddling in Cannes (and Sofia) while Europe is burning

OK - I agree that fiddling while Athens is burning is not a good way to go down in history (the musical references in my last post). But perhaps, as Europe burns, the only resort is to celebrate what it has at least given in culture. Indeed I realised only yesterday that perhaps why I have, over the past decade, discovered and celebrated (beautiful) paintings is that they represent individual striving for excellence when that is so difficuly to achieve in the field I chose for myself all of 50 years ago when I made the fatal decision, in the middle of my university studies, to forsake the study of French and German and to choose instead the upcoming fields of Economics and Politics. When the shit hits the fan, another coping mechanism is humour and I was happy to come across these wry puns from a great British comic which actually remind me a bit of the vastly underrated Chic Murray from my own hometown.

However two leftists are redeeming my chosen field – today’s post from Cannes (where G20 countries are meeting) by Paul Mason blows my mind away as the most incisive comment on that is currently happening. And another old leftist - Stuart Holland whom I met in the mountain eyre of Erice (Sicily) in the mid 1970s at an (anarchist) Free University seminar – has an excellent paper which coherently spells out the path which European leaders should be taking – if they had any leadership skills.

I haven’t had time to read this article from Nouriel Roubini – but is seems worthwhile amongst all the dross from the usual business and economic commentators who are now exposed ar the brown-nosed charlatans they were.
The painting is a recent purchase of mine here - by Vladimir Dmitrov - which seems appropriately apocalytpic.

Part VIII - All you need to know about capacity development and administrative reform in 5 easy stages

My initial feeling after yesterday’s attempt to summarise the previous week’s thoughts about training in this part of the world was one of quiet satisfaction. I felt I had made a coherent and reasonable summary – all the better for having started, I felt, with the short (and memorable?) statement about “wrong focus and theory"; "context"; and "leadership”. I had made the link not only with the capacity development literature but also with the (very different and more academic) literature which has been following administrative reform in ex-communist countries. I had given a practical example which had come to me as I was wrestling with the question of how one was supposed to make any progress in regimes I had designated, in my paper at this year’s NISPAcee Conference, “impervious regimes” (impervious, that is, to public opinion). And I ended with a word of advice to those who head the various Training Institutes for public servants in the Region – effectively “courage, mon vieux, think big and reach out” – but had also recognised how difficult such cooperation is in the Region. My next step, I felt, was to look at examples of how individuals have achieved in the face of such difficulties and write an inspiring piece around that – drawing on the burgeoning literature of social innovation.

But I hadn’t quite finished with capacity development – after all this was the basic framework which, I had argued, all interventions to improve public services in the Region should have. True, Bulgaria and Romania are exceptional in having Administrative capacity as one of the strands for their Structural Funds – but most new member states would readily agree they have a long way to go before their state bodies are operating as well as they might wish. What, I wondered, does the capacity development literature say about the process of building administrative capacity? Is it different from what the literature of public management (with which I am more familiar) has been saying?

It is at this point that alarm bells started to ring in my head. One of the important points in my NISPAcee paper was that we have a lot of different disciplines looking at the same issues from different perspectives (which is fine), with different names (eg state-building; fragile states; administrative reform; anti-corruption; capacity development; democracy assistance) and each apparently oblivious to and/or careless about the other disciplines(which is not fine). Was this perhaps simply an example of different people coming to the same conclusion using different words? Was it all verbal gymnastics? I began to think so when I stumbled across a free download Deconstructing Development Discourse – buzzwords and fuzzwords which was published in 2010 by Oxfam and which makes a nice complement to my Just Words – a sceptic’s glossary
But, as I puzzled over the two approaches, I began to see some interesting differences. Bear with me as I try to explore some of them.

Those who have been writing about capacity development for the past 2 decades (but particularly in the last 5 years since OECD got into the act) seem to be in the development field and working in NGOs, International bodies or development think tanks. They draw from (and try to contribute to) field experiences. I discovered a good history about capacity development only this morning – written as far back as 1997. Its concerns and focus seem to have been social - rather than institutional - development. Peter Morgan is the most coherent writer on the subject and has an excellent paper here on it. There is an excellent learning network for capacity development which published in January a very useful paper which spells out in details what the approach means in practice . I get the sense that it is change management for social development people. That is to say, they emphasise context and process - the HOW and say llittle about the WHAT.

Those who write about administrative reform focus, on the other hand and by definition, on state bodies rather than social groups (although the anti-corruption literature considers social groups critical); are usually from academia; draw on the classic literature of public administration, management and (to a lesser extent) public choice theory. They are (with the exception of the latter school) more voyeurs than actors. One of the top names is Chris Pollitt whose recent paper Thirty Years of Public Management reform – has there been a pattern? gives an excellent flavour of the topic.
An obvious question then is - If the key writers are voyeurs, who has been behind the explosion of adminisitrative reform of the past 30 years which Pollitt is writing about? The answer would seem to be practitioners, government units and consultancy companies – some of whom have subsequently written up good experiences as models of good practice. The key books are generally American eg the one which started it all off in 1992 - Reinventing Government (see also here for update on its influence in UK) - but also Mark Moore’s Public value. However the main proselytiser of change over the past 20 years has been the OECD Secretariat based in Paris – as Professor Leslie Pal has well described in this paper; a sequel he presented to this year’s NISPAcee Conference; and chapter three of this book. The significance of this is that there is, perhaps, underneath the technical words, an ideological agenda – shrinking the state. Certainly one writer suggests today there is.
At a practical level, the European Institute of Public Administration published an interesting overview of reform efforts recently - Taking the pulse of European Public Administration

So far, so good…..Give me time to look at these various references in more detail and come back to you on the question of the relationship between the two bodies of work. Clearly the latter body of work focuses more on the WHAT than the HOW - and is indeed as guilty as management generally of fads and fashions. At the moment the capacity development stream seems to be the more thoughtful…..

Culture cornerFor those who think I have been neglecting my cultural activities, let me assure that I have not been. On Tuesday I paid an interesting visit to the imposing edifice which houses the National Bank of Bulgaria – to see whether I could access their painting collection. I knew they had one because the Classica Gallery I had visited last week had a beautiful catalogue from the bank which had celebrated its 130 years with 130 superb reproductions from its collection of Bulgarian painters. You ascend a formidable flight of stairs, passing a guard and entering what I could only designate as an alternative cathedral – a design on a scale calculated to put you in awe of those who manage money! Ironically, there seemed to be an exhibition about the euro! I was met with some bemusement by the staff – but, after a wait, I was rewarded with a complementary copy of the catalogue but told that the paintings regretfully were not on public display.

The It’s About Time blog continues to delight - with its rediscoveries of (to us) unknown European (women) painters from the early part of the last century generally – for example a Finn/Belge Helene Schjerbeck and Lotte Laserstein.
And BBC’s Through the Night continues to excel – for example the Romania Radio Concert Orchestra playing Sarasate, Pablo de [1844-1908] Zigeunerweisen for violin and orchestra (Op.20) (you have to move the timing to 4 hours 20 minutes to get the piece – and only for another 5 days!)
For those intrigued by the title (changed from this morning's rather negative one), I am experimenting since I see that I have not so many hits today - and yet it is, for my money, one of the most useful posts for some time (with all these references). I still don't understand what we need to do to get more hits - people tell me I should twitter - but I don't have a good voice. So I'm now trying a more positive title - with some key words.
And the painting is heavily symbolic - Moutafov's "Rescue at Sea" from the National Bank's collection - and chosen with cunning reference to British political philospher Michael Oakeshott's famous metaphor of politics/government as a sea journey. The rescuers are, of course, the consultants. You certainly get your money's worth on this station!

Leadership central europe - part VII

Reflecting further on the 5 posts, my concerns about the effectiveness of training programmes in transition countries can perhaps best be summarised in 4 words – "wrong focus" and "wrong theory"! And the way ahead can be summarised in two words – "context" and "leadership".

Wrong Focus
• The EC has funded (in Technical Assistance) and continues to fund (under Structural Funds) too many training projects in transition countries with insufficient focus on building a training capacity. Indeed it undermines national training institutes by the resources its projects gives to private trainers and companies under its procurement rules.
• these programmes have, in addition, concentrated on the supply side (training individual trainers; drafting course material; and funding course) to the almost total exclusion of the demand side (helping organisational managers define their real needs and building stronger inderstanding of and pressure for quality training)
• they focus on lower rather than higher levels of organisations. (It’s the easy option – senior management will rarely admit its deficiencies and need to learn).
• And the programmes assume knowledge rather than skill needs. (It’s easier to provide – through traditional rote learning).

Wrong theory
Most of the training programmes I’ve seen implicitly assume that the performance of state bodies (insofar as it measured in transition countries) can be improved by better knowledge of junior staff. This may be true of the sort of training project I’m currently involved with – aimed at those municipal staff who handle bids for EC funds and manage such projects – but is not true of the general management course which National Training Institutes run. And the mission of such Institutes is surely to help improve the performance of state bodies.
Poor organisational performance is generally due to a mix of poor management systems, lack of strategic leadership and political interference. And Improving them is more a matter of skills and attitude than knowledge!

I am not alone in questioning the effectiveness of the programmes to train public officials.. I was very encouraged a few months back by the publication of a paper - Training and Beyond; seeking better practices for capacity development by Jenny Pearson - which, in a much more referenced (but sometimes turgid) way, expresses the same concerns and indicates the number of people who now seem to share them in what, in the last decade has become the up-and-coming field of capacity development.

Context, context, context
All interventions should therefore start from proper contextual analysis of existing administrative capacity – and constraints. The focus then should be on organisational change – not training - to ensure that proper consideration is given to the full range of possible interventions, of which training is only a small part (see pages 33-37 of the Pearson paper for a good overview). Of course this is not easy – but, if this is not the starting point, then people will fail to pose the correct questions; to learn the required skills; and therefore to waste a lot of money.
Official documents have begun to recognise this in recent years. The EC’s Backbone Strategy admits that its projects need to be better grounded in the context; in its "drivers of change" work, the UK's ODI has pioneered ways of identifying power constraints; and the World Bank’s recent Governance Reforms under real world conditions is written around the sorts of questions which have given my work as a consultant its real edge-

1. How do we build broad coalitions of influentials in favour of change? What do we do about powerful vested interests?
2. How do we help reformers transform indifferent, or even hostile, public opinion into support for reform objectives?
3. How do we instigate citizen demand for good governance and accountability to sustain governance reform?

The paper I wrote earlier in the year for the Varna Conference (Time for the long game - not the logframe) drew attention to the crumbling of key building blocks of administrative reform in many of the EC’s new member states in the last few years. Francis Cardona’s Can Civil Service Reforms Last? The European Union’s 5th Enlargement and Future Policy Orientation – published in early 2010 - is just the latest evidence. It shows how appointments are becoming politicised again. In 2007 Tony Verheijen had published a paper for the World Bank entitled Administrative capacity in the new member states – the limits of innovation which painted a fairly bleak picture. So in 2009, did Meyer-Sahling’s paper for SIGMA - Sustainability of civil service reforms in central and eastern Europe five years after accession. Sorin Ionitsa and Tom Gallagher have painted a vivid picture of the fate of administrative reform in one of these countries – Romania – and offered different levels of explanation for it.

If that is the context, how does one get around it? Clearly politicians in these countries need to grow up and stop behaving like petulant and thieving magpies. But how does that happen?
Manning and Ionitsa emphasise the need for transparency and external pressures (civil society) to try to get politicians to act more seriously.
Verheijen and Cardona talk more idealistically of the need to establish structures which bringing politicians, officials, academics etc together to develop a consensus. It happened, certainly, in the Baltic states – but there are always dangers in holding up one country as an example. When things go wrong, as they generally do, the corrupt and incompetent use this to damn reform. And one of the difficulties so many transition countries have is the inability of its elites to work cooperatively.

I have to wonder whether there is not a place now for the sort of initiative which impressed me when I visited Pittsburgh more than 20 years ago. As an old industrial city, it was experiencing social and economic dislocation – and someone started a quiet movement which brought the potential leaders of tomorrow in its various sectors (commerce, political, administrative, trade union, religious etc) into a regular academic setting to confront the city’s problems. Leadership Pittsburgh has been replicated across other cities and has had 2 profound effects – it forged crucial personal links of respect and understanding; and it made most of those who attended think about their wider responsibilities and the needs of the city.

Going back to the Director of the Training Institute - my advice to him would therefore be - Think Big! Reach out! Have passion!

Benefits of nomadism

Glorious autumn weather here in Sofia – although the ground floor garden flat is getting ever more icy cold every night and morning. Time to move somewhere warmer!
I started the morning with a long article which touches on one of the most fundamental issues for us all (apart from food and accommodation) – companionship. It’s about the trend (which I’ve noticed here in Europe) for women to choose to remain single. Men are simply not worth the bother! The article in The Atlantic journal starts perhaps in a rather self-centred way but soon proved to a worthy read about contemporary values – backed up with perspectives from forays to other lands, cultures and times. I recommend it.

A trip to the nearest Knigomania bookshop a few minutes round the corner in Vassil Levski St gave a good haul –
• Modernism – the lure of heresy by Peter Gay (2007) – a wonderful-looking 600 page treatment of all art forms of this genre by an historian who escaped with his family from Berlin in 1933 when he was a young boy; one review is here and a more critical and historical one here
• the classic Zen and Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance – an inquiry into values (1977) – which I have from internet but whose electronic format does not invite me in. I need to touch!
• a novel by the highly rated John Cheever from 1957 - The Wapshot Chronicle
• Langenscheidt’s Grosswoerterbuch Deutsch als Fremdensprache – to help me with my reading of the Spiegel magazine which I have taken to buying here. Langenscheidt I remember with some veneration from my father’s study (when he had the voluminous but silky weekly edition of Die Zeit paper dispatched from Germany in the late 1950s and 1960s during his post-war pastoral "reconciliation" twinning with a church in Heligenkirchen near Detmold). With its 1312 German pages at 16 euros, it offered 10 times the value of almost similarly-priced and much smaller dictionaries (half of whose contents are taken with English-German for which I have no use)

This is the great thing about the bookshops here. You are not press-ganged by marketing into buying latest releases. You never know what gem from the past you will find – even if the editions are fairly recent.
Talking of Der Spiegel, it had an incredible story yesterday about the Germans finding a 55 billion mistake in their national accounts because one bank added up wrongly – giving the system now a windfall to that extent!!
When I started this nomadic life of mine all of 21 years ago, I noticed one immediate advantage. I was no longer exposed to British newspapers and the relentless noise of television reporting. This not only released time for other pursuits; it also created greater serenity. I could hear myself thinking – and was more able to choose my own agenda. Television has not been allowed into my Carpathian house – and I have no temptation to open the television set here since it offers only Bulgarian programmes. Of course, I am hit with news headlines when I go onto the yahoo site for my mail – and I do then always check the Guardian website after that – but rarely find myself spending longer than 10 minutes on its articles. The BBC has become my great consolation – particularly the Through the Night programme – which are constantly introducing me to new pleasures eg in the past week Telemann’s Suite for strings and continuo (TWV.55:Es3) in E flat major; Taneyev, Sergey Ivanovich (1856-1915) Symphony No.4 in C minor (Op.12); and Respighi, Ottorino (1879-1936) Rossiniana. I even find myself listening to opera – eg the haunting tones at the moment of the final section of Mahler’s 3rd Symphony which can be heard for the next 5 days.
The BBC’s economic bloggers are always worthwhile – particularly Paul Mason and Stephanie Flanders and I was impressed with the radio series she has started recently which figures key figures (such as George Soros).

I mentioned JK Galbraith recently. His son, James Galbraith, is also a renowned economist who has been highly critical of mainstream economics and has a useful piece on those economists who were warning years ago of the bursting of the bubble and how they were marginalised within the profession. For me this is not a left-right issue – it is about hubris and the need constantly to challenge (in the phrase coined by Galbraith Senior) the “conventional wisdom” .
Finally a good article about the "We are the 99%" protestors

Update - the British School of Government axed! (part VI)

The UK’s National School of Government – which I indicated (in my recent table about such national Institutes) had been reprieved from closure last year – will now be closed next March. According to a Ministerial statement in Parliament in June, it delivered 809 events to a domestic audience for the 12 month period from 1 June 2010 to 31 May 2011. These events were attended by 33,254 UK government officials. But last week its closure was announced (again) with a bland statement that "The new "Civil Service Learning" will focus on work-based approaches, including e-learning, and will directly involve managers in the training process" says the official statement. Previously called the Civil Service College, the facility runs training, development and consultancy courses for Whitehall mandarins. It employs 232 staff and is based at Sunningdale Park in Berkshire, with an annual budget of £31 million.
Quoted on the school's website earlier in the year, the Head of the Civil Service said: "It is clear that the public sector will be confronted with some serious challenges in the future. The National School of Government is a vital tool to help us meet them. The learning and development it provides must be part of our solution." But the Minister (Mr Maude) has claimed a shake-up of training will "improve the quality and impact of training". In his recent Parliamentary statement, he added: "It will also create greater flexibility by sourcing much of the training from external providers, including small and medium-sized enterprises."

I would have to say that the School was always vulnerable to such treatment. For example, it never produced anything that was available publicly. My source of inspiration when I was a young reforming politician in local government was the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV) at Birmingam University which was built entirely around the passion of one man John Stewart; which produced a bi-monthly journal; Discussion papers; and books. And to whose seminars one could easily access as a local government person. The revenue came from its local government pmarket - which is politically diverse.
Warwick University has also been home to another such Institute - the Local Government Centre built around one man John Bennington.
The School of Government was more elitist - and political. And therefore vulnerable. So one lesson is not to be too dependent on one market. The recent trend for amalgamating training of local and central government has a lot to be said for it - not least that people from these 2 sectors get to rub shoulders with one another.
There are lessons there - that a sustainable centre needs independence!

The future of public service training - Part V

Imagine yourself the Director of one of the Institutes I have been talking about…. There were periods last year when you didn’t have the cash to pay your staff. You’re not sure how long you’ll have in your position since both it and that of the Institute can be (and has been) affected by political vicissitudes. The only source of money is the European Union – but the bureaucracy is onerous and time-consuming; and the benefits not as obvious as might seem at first sight. None of the cash actually reaches the Institute – most of it goes to private companies and their contracted experts. What do you do in such a situation to try to ensure that the Institute’s activities actually help improve public services and are sustainable?
Most EC consultants would advise the Director to develop a strategic plan. That is to set up a process of identifying and consulting “stakeholders” to develop over several months a new “vision” and “action plan” which would carry with it a new “commitment” from those stakeholders to “make it happen”. I don’t mean to be cynical by the insertion of inverted commas – but I do have some questions about the belief that several months of such an exercise will magically produce an answer that no-one previously thought of or produce a new spirit of cooperation. The first thing I would actually recommend is some strong brainstorming for the Director with some experienced and trustworthy people – to try to identify some realistic options whose feasibility (s)he could then explore in a variety of ways – including a strategic exercise.
And if I were one of those with whom (s)he brainstormed, I would want to explore a central question -

What is the point of having a budget-supported national training centre for public officials?

Running courses is a means - not an end. The end is surely the improvement of state bodies. But this is not achieved by a series of ad-hoc workshops run by trainers who do not communicate with one another and who have no subsequent link with the participants. Of course, despite the claims of management consultants and management gurus, noone really understands the process of improving the performance of state bodies. To some it’s a question of leadership; to others teamwork; to others again, It’s competitive and/or citizen pressures; and to many politicians it’s a matter of targets, transparency and a mix of sticks and stones.

Several things, however, are clear for me –
• each country has its own cultures and needs to find its own way in its own language
• this requires a few experienced people to blaze a trail, providing ways of thinking about issues, presenting and interpreting relevant experience
• sometimes this can be an academic – but they generally have other agendas and an inaccessible language
• A training centre is ideally placed to bring senior managers together to share their experiences, encourage one another and formulate an agenda for strategic change
• A few suitable academics could be encouraged to participate in such sessions (good for their research) and co-produce Discussion papers

Of course this doesn’t immediately bring cash – and does demand time. But it’s time well spent – in building a reputation. It’s not easy to talk about cooperation between education and training institutes (not least because the terminological distinction is not as often made in central Europe as in the UK). The academics worry about a lowering of standards – and the trainers worry about opaque verbosity. But particularly in the field of public management, the distinction is a crazy one. I am not a fan of undergraduate courses in public management – they are shallow pot-pourris; they demonstrate little of value to subsequent employees (save perhaps that those who opted for the course have little ambition); and few who graduate actually go into public service. I think those who find themselves in academic positions teaching and (hopefully) researching public management would be better located in national training institutes – particularly if those institutes had a focus on senior management. I warned in part II that some academic cows would need to be sacrificed!

Can training make a difference? Part IV

Having suggested that few new Member States in central and eastern Europe seem to have managed yet to establish a proper training system for its public officials – and that the European Commission’s type of Technical Assistance has to take part of the blame for this – the following questions seem to be in order –
• Are there any examples of a relevant and sustainable training system in the new member states?
• If so, how did they manage to achieve this position?
• What is the status of such training systems in the older member states?
• Through what process have they gone to achieve their various present positions?
• What lessons would all this suggest for those countries which are still stuck at the drip-feed stage of development?

These are actually very difficult questions to answer – since so little is available - and I have spent the morning wrestling with them. In 1997 SIGMA published a couple of relevant papers – one setting out the various choices and issues involved in setting up a modern training structure; the second giving vignettes of each of the training centres for civil servants in OECD countries. Since then, nothing.
With all the support given over the decades by the European Commission to networks of practitioners, you would have thought that someone by now (eg Christopher Demmke of EIPA) would have recognised the value of a paper on the subject. And NISPAcee is, after all, the Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in central and Eastern Europe but has not undertaken such a comparative (and sensitive) analysis – although its journal does contain the odd profile. There is also the rather elusive Directors of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration (DISPA) whose latest gathering this month in Warsaw was captured on the site of the Hungarian Institute but which, equally, has never risen to the challenge of commissioning a comparative analysis. So I have to venture into this field with all my imperfect knowledge.
The situation of the central PA training institutions in the EU Member States in terms of their role, tasks, funding and other characteristics varies from one country to another. And there have been considerable changes in the legal structure of central bodies for civil service training -
• A Civil Service College in Britain (for senior civil servants) was first part of the Cabinet Office; then became the Centre for Management and Policy Studies; then the National School of Government which was a free-standing Department; was then slated for abolition in March 2011 but was instead transferred back to the Cabinet office.
• The Dutch, Finnish and Swedish Institutes have all been privatized over the past decade.
• Romania’s Institute for National Administration was moved to the Civil Service Agency a couple of years ago after a period of some tension with that body.
• The Bulgarian IPA now finds itself back with the Council of Ministers – having over the past 5 years been part of the (now abolished Ministry for Administrative Reform) and then of the Ministry of Education.
• The Hungarian structure has been subject to major changes recently - with first a university unit being merged with a national training centre and now the integration of national and local government training systems
• The Czech structure was also changed the last year. There were two institutes before: one under the Office of the Government of the Czech Republic, Department of the Institute of the State Administration and an independent Institute for Local Administration in Prague. They merged the last year and now there is only one institute under the Ministry of the Interior – Institute for Public Administration Prague.
• The Estonian IPA seems to have been absorbed into the Prime Minister’s Office

Given that most managerial theorists are a bit cynical about organizational changes, it is perhaps ironic that the training centres which are supposed to be helping state bodies become more effective have themselves been subject to so much structural change.
My recent personal experience of central european training systems is limited to 3-4 countries – otherwise I rely on anecdotal impressions from colleagues. I therefore hesitate to identify success stories. I hear good things about the Lithuanian and Slovenian systems but can say nothing about their trajectories – or the lessons they might have for others. In the next post, I will try, however, to present a "provocation" for those countries stuck at the drip-feed stage of development.
In the meantime I really would welcome comment from those readers who have experience and views in this field. I know you're there! I'm pleased to say that my readership has doubled in the past few weeks - but the blog does need (and appreciates) feedback

Evidence, dear boy? Training - Part III

I have made a lot of assertions in my two recent posts on EC-funded training – based solely on my (limited) experience in 10 countries over the past 2 decades . Before posting the final part of my commentary on EC training programmes for public officials in ex-communist countries, I wanted to check what was available on the internet about the recent experience with, and evaluation of, the EC-funded programmes for developing the effectivness (capacity) of state bodies which Structural Funds have been encouraging in these countries for the past few years. The EC, after all, treasures transparency and it is currently spending hundreds of millions (under its Structural Funds) in projects to develop the capacity of state bodies and their human resource management. In Bulgaria alone, 180 million euros was set aside for the 6 year period for the Admin Capacity theme (significantly this theme doesn't interest the Romanians who have set aside only 1% of their Structural Fund allocation for it). But there are few documents online which give any sense of what is happening. Those few demonstrate the scale of the mountain we have to scale to ensure effective spend of EC Funds. In most cases, of course, the documents are written in a foreign language (English) – for bureaucratic or academic approval – three factors which tend to knock any sense from the text! Key bureaucratic phrases such as cohesion, transparency and inclusion litter the sentences in meaningless ways. There is no experience or critical analysis behind the words – just obedient regurgitation of the required phrases. This academic paper from a Bulgarian in 2007 tries to extract the lessons of pre-accession instruments for future accession states is written clearly but simply presents global figures, organisational carts and some gossip. A 2009 German (GTZ) consultancy report on one of the instruments is more typical of the obtuse reporting style
A document prepared for a small network trying to share their experiences of using EC money for the development of admin capacity gives a useful insight into their world and issues. Finally a more critical 2011 paper from a young Bulgarian academic

Everyone – on all sides(beneficiaries, donors, consultants, academics, evaluators) – plays the same game – everything has to be fitted to the Procustean bed of EC funding. The European Policy Research Centre at the University of Strathclyde, for example, has received hundreds of millions of euros from the EC to explain, evaluate and proselytise the EC’s regional policies since they were a gleam in Bruce Millan’s eye from 1988 when, as EC Commissioner for Regional Policy, he started (under the Delors regime) the incredible expansion of the programmes whose munificence created the real attraction of EC membership for ex-communist elites. Of course it is the last organisation which would dare to blow the whistle on the dubious nature of the ventures. Take, for example, this Greek academic paper it published recently.

One longs for a young boy to shout out that the Emperor has no clothes – and dare to tell it as it is.

making training effective - Part II

Part I suggested that the billions spent by the EC on training public officials over the past decade or so in ex-communist countries have not created sustainable training systems there - ie centres for training public officials whose full-time staff contain both trainers and specialists in the field of public management – and who actually play a role in helping state bodies operate effectively. Most of the new member and Accession states have a central training Institute – but its staff are small and (in all but a few cases) administrators who bring in public officials and academics for a few hours to deliver lectures. Little "needs assessment" can be carried out (an annual schedule is negotiated between the Institute and the Council of Ministers); Ministries have a training budget and pay for the attendance of those officials it allows to attend selected courses (whether at the Institute or other centres). It is virtually impossible for such a system to carry out serious evaluation of course content and of trainers – its staff lack the specialist knowledge (and status) to question, challenge and encourage. Such a system also focuses on individual needs – and is unable to input to discussions about the development of state capacity or help state bodies tackle their organisational problems.
In the older member States, such Institutes have played an important role in setting a vision for the improvement of public services; in monitoring developments and assisting the exchange of experience. At the time, however, such bodies were being established in the ex-communist countries, the new fashion amongst western consultants was for slimline, competitive training; the academic community in the east simply had no relevant experience to offer; and governments were offloading rather than building functions. The result was underfunded training centres.
With budget cuts of the past few years, the EC Structural Funds are being increasingly used to substitute for mainline funding. Given the competitive basis of the procurement, what this means is that private companies (rather than the Institute) are being paid to act as the administrators – undermining the possibility of the national Institute developing its capacity. One other result is an endless repetition of training the trainers programmes and Manual drafting. Whatever happened to the previous trained trainers and drafted manuals?
Of course, the picture is slightly more nuanced. Some countries have Institutes on the French model – which combine undergraduate teaching with short courses and have therefore a core of academic staff. Poland is the prime example (that academic bias can, of course, bring its own problems!) And Ministries of Finance and Justice tend to have their own training centres, staffed by experts in the relevant field. But the general picture stands.

Is there a different model – in these times of crisis? Only on three conditions -
1. if the development of state capacity is taken seriously – by officials, politicians and academics
2. if there is greater clarity about the role of training in individual learning and organisational development
3. if some academic sacred cows are sacrificed

I assume all new member states have the sort of EC-funded Operational Programmes which Bulgaria and Romania have – with themes such as Administrative Capacity and Human resource management (to mention two). Hundreds of millions of euros are allocated to private consultancies to carry out projects of training and capacity building with state bodies as the clients.
In highly politicised countries such as Romania, however, building capacity is not taken seriously. As Tom Gallagher’s most recent and powerful book on the country vividly shows, there are more private agendas at work eg loyalty to the figure who put you in your position. And those academic social scientists who have resisted the temptation to go into consultancy are, understandably, more interested in achieving status with their western colleagues than in making forays into the real world of public administration. Again I speak generally – and from my knowledge more of southern than northern new member states.
As far as training is concerned, it is remarkable (given how much money is spent on it) how little discussion there is of its role and practices in new member states. Training can be effective only under certain circumstances. The very language trainers use – "training needs assessment" – begs the question of whether training is in fact the appropriate intervention. It is the easy option – it assumes that it is the lower levels who are deficient whereas the real issue may be organisational systems or the performance of higher management. I was recently in charge of a project designed to give such an institute the capacity to assist public officials at regional and local levels in the effective implementation of the complex EC Acquis (eg the various legal requirements of safety, consumer rights, equal opportunities, environment). The project was designed as a training project when, for me, the issue was totally different. I tried to develop my argument in several discussion papers but could not, for various reasons, reach the right people for a discussion. Amongst the points I was trying to make were -

• Organisations (state bodies) perform only when they are given clear (and limited) goals – and the commensurate resources and management support. This requires the systems and skills of strategic management.
• This can be developed only through senior management being properly encouraged to prioritise and draft realistic action plans – based on project management principles.
• The core mission of Institutes of Public Administration should be to encourage and help senior management acquire these skills
• But they cannot do this as long as they are trapped in an administrative role – and traditional teaching philosphies

What I remember is the anger I aroused at our final conference from a Professor of Law when I dared to say that state bodies should recognise they cannot implement the acquis in its totality (even with the few opt-outs negotiated) and should prioritise.
I will continue the argument in a future post.

Culture cornerI’m glad to say that art galleries continue to open here in Sofia. I had been disappointed earlier in the year to encounter a nearby gallery which seemed to have closed down but yesterday discovered that it had, some months ago, re-opened under new ownershop and is a charming visit. It is Gallery-Museum" CLASSICA" at 32 Venelin Str., Sofia near the football stadium at Eagle Bridge. Its old website can still be seen here with some of the paintings still on offer. Young Leta and her mother are delightful guides and hosts.

Our Gaddarene swine

This blog generally tries to steer away from crises since there are so many others in the blogosphere who have more insights than me on these – be they economic, financial or political. I try to be a distinctive voice on the things I know best – organisational change in transition countries - and otherwise try to pass on what seem to be sensible comments on ongoing events. The financial crisis, however, which has been rumbling on since late 2007 has, I feel, few real experts – in the sense of both contextual understanding and insights into what interventions would actually help put Humpty Dumpty together again. There are a lot of people, of course, who have the skills, understanding and contacts to exploit this situation for their own benefit but few (like George Soros and Nicolas Talib) able and willing to offer solutions in the interests of ordinary citizens.
Today, however, Paul de Grauwe has a useful comment on Social Europe/ which I would like to share in its entirety -

Imagine an army going to war. It has overwhelming firepower. The generals, however, announce that they actually hate the whole thing and that they will limit the shooting as much as possible. Some of the generals are so upset by the prospect of going to war that they resign from the army. The remaining generals then tell the enemy that the shooting will only be temporary, and that the army will go home as soon as possible. What is the likely outcome of this war? You guessed it. Utter defeat by the enemy.
The European Central Bank (ECB) has been behaving like the generals. When it announced its programme of government bond buying it made it known to the financial markets (the enemy) that it thoroughly dislikes it and that it will discontinue it as soon as possible. Some members of the Governing Council of the ECB resigned in disgust at the prospect of having to buy bad bonds. Like the army, the ECB has overwhelming (in fact unlimited) firepower but it made it clear that it is not prepared to use the full strength of its money-creating capacity. What is the likely outcome of such a programme? You guessed it. Defeat by the financial markets.
Financial markets knew that the ECB was not fully committed and that it would stop the programme. As a result, they knew that the stabilisation of the price of government bonds would only be temporary and that after the programme is discontinued prices would probably go down again. Few investors wanted to keep these bonds in their portfolios. As a result, government bonds continued to be sold, and the ECB was forced to buy a lot of them.
There is no sillier way to implement a bond purchase programme than the ECB way. By making it clear from the beginning that it does not trust its own programme, the ECB guaranteed its failure. By signalling that it distrusted the bonds it was buying, it also signalled to investors that they should distrust these too.
Surely once the ECB decided to buy government bonds, there was a better way to run the programme. The ECB should have announced that it was fully committed to using all its firepower to buy government bonds and that it would not allow the bond prices to drop below a given level. In doing so, it would create confidence. Investors know that the ECB has superior firepower, and when they get convinced that the ECB will not hesitate to use it, they will be holding on to their bonds. The beauty of this result is that the ECB won’t have to buy many bonds.
Why has the ECB not been willing to use this obvious and cheaper strategy?
Part of the answer has to do with the objections that have been raised against the idea that the central bank should be a lender of last resort in the government bond markets of a monetary union. Some are serious (moral hazard); others are phony (inflation risk). I discussed these in De Grauwe (2011) (see also Wyplosz 2011). My impression, however, is that these objections hide another more fundamental reason. The people sitting around the table in Frankfurt continue to believe that financial stability is not part of their core business, and, to use the words of Trichet, that there is only one needle on the Frankfurt compass and that is inflation. As long as this view prevails the ECB will be reluctant to do the obvious.
The result of this failure of the ECB to be a lender of last resort has been that a surrogate institution, the EFSF/ESM, had to be created that everybody knows will be ineffective. It has insufficient firepower and has an unworkable governance structure where each country keeps its veto power. In times of crisis it will be paralysed. As markets know this, its credibility will be weak.
To hide these shortcomings European leaders are now creating the fiction that by some clever leveraging trick the resources of the EFSF/ESM can be multiplied, allowing the ECB to retire to its Panglossian garden of inflation targeting. European leaders should know, however, that leverage creates risk, very large risks. These appear with full force when liquidity crises erupt. Thus when the leverage trick will be most needed, it will fail as it will show how risky the positions are of those who have guaranteed the leverage construction. Governments which now enjoy AAA creditworthiness will take the full blow of a 100% loss on their equity tranches and will lose their creditworthiness in one blow. The whole risky construction will collapse like other clever financial constructions of the recent past.
Academics have the reputation of living in an ivory tower far away from the realities of the world. My impression is that instead of the academics, it is the European leaders who have been living in an ivory tower. Disconnected from the economic and financial realities, they have created an institution that does not work and will never do so properly. Now they are creating a financial gimmick that, in their fantasies, they expect to solve the funding problems of major Eurozone countries. It is time for the European leaders to step back into the real world.

Craig Murray also has a brief and very succinct comment on the issue as does Der Spiegel in its article Politics stupid And I recommend the daily press summaries from Open Europe as the best there are at the moment on this issue.