what you get here

This is not a blog which opines on current events. It rather uses incidents, books (old and new), links and papers to muse about our social endeavours.
So old posts are as good as new! And lots of useful links!

The Bucegi mountains - the range I see from the front balcony of my mountain house - are almost 120 kms from Bucharest and cannot normally be seen from the capital but some extraordinary weather conditions allowed this pic to be taken from the top of the Intercontinental Hotel in late Feb 2020
Showing posts with label governance reforms. Show all posts
Showing posts with label governance reforms. Show all posts

Saturday, June 30, 2018

Managing Change…why have we lost interest?

Let me try to summarise the argument of the recent posts about public services reform……

Our view of the State (and what we could expect of it) changed dramatically in 1989 – and not just in Eastern Europe. Boring “public administration” gave way to New Public Management (NPM) – with its emphasis on the “consumer” (rather than citizen) and on “choice”…

A series of blogposts last autumn used 15 questions to explore its state almost 20 years on….
Anglo-saxon voices were loudest in what was essentially a technocratic debate, focussing on concepts such as “good Governance” and “public value”.  
Last week I wrote that it was nothing short of scandalous that, in comparison with the thousands of books written on the subject by academics in the past 25 years, there seem to be only two written for the general public by journalists….Even if I add in those written by consultants (such as Barber, Seddon and Straw) the total comes to under a dozen….

A question which is surprisingly rarely explored in the vast literature on reform is one relating to the sources of change. We all too readily assume that effective change comes from politicians and their advisers…..The sad reality is that this is generally the kiss of death.
Of course this seems to fly in the face of the narrative about democratic authority and political legitimacy…. 
But that just shows how two-dimensional is the concept of democracy which prevails in anglo-saxon countries.
Effective change doesn’t come from the “ya-boo; yo-yo” system of adversarial power blocs of the UK and USA – it comes from sustained dialogue and coalitions of change.
And, often, it starts with an experiment – rather than a grand programme…Take, for example, what is now being called the Dutch model for neighbourhood care – started by Buurtzorg a few years back which is now inspiring people everywhere. That is a worker cooperative model… which, quite rightly, figures in Frederic Laloux’s Reinventing Organisations
And when “mutualisation” was being explored by the UK Coalition government in 2010/11 (see reading list at end of this post) it was a bipartisan idea which had strong support from the social enterprise sector….

There was a time when people were interested in the process of organisational change…..it even spawned a literature on “managing change”, some of which still graces my library shelves (from the early 1990s). …The titles figure in this Annotated Bibliography for change agents which I did almost 20 years ago….
Most of the literature was paternalistic but a few writers understood that change could not be imposed (however subtly) and had to grow from a process of incremental adjustment….that was Peter Senge at his best….But the most inspiring book on the subject remains for me Robert Quinn’s Change the World (2000) – this article gives a sense of his argument. At a more technical level, Governance Reform under real world Conditions (2008) also offers an overview with a rarely catholic perspective.....

I don’t understand why we have lost interest in the process of change – and why leaders seem doomed to reinvent the broken wheel…..

Postscript; for the record, this post probably encapsulates some of the most important messages from this series about reform I have been writing in the past year

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Avoiding Best Practice

The last few posts (on cultural values) have led me back to the draft of a little book I abandoned two years ago – Crafting Effective Public Management - a collection of personal reflections about the craft I have followed now for almost 50 years.
As it stands, the document represents the musings I penned as I tried to understand the lessons from the very distinctive work which has occupied me for most of the last half of this period – namely reforming institutions of local and central state administration in ex-communist countries in these regions....
The opening section of the book (Part 1) was written in the late 1990s as I was trying to explain to a Central European audience the nature and significance of the changes in organising the business of government which started in britain in the 1970s and soon became global in scope. Separated geographically by then for almost a decade from that world, I could perhaps aspire to a measure of distance if not objectivity….

“Managing Change” may have been at the height of fashion then back home but the projects funded in the “newly-liberated countries” by Europe (and America) were not in the business of “catalysing” change but rather “imposing” it….”This is the way it's going to be”!! I vividly remembering the ticking off I got from the German company which employed me when, as Director of an Energy Centre in Prague, I offered some ideas for how the centre’s work might better fit the Czecho-Slovak context (it was 1992). Their response was classic - “We do not pay you to think – we pay you to obey”……I kid you not!! German friends tell me that there are traces in that formulation of the old Prussian influence!
It became obvious to me that these centres (funded by the European Commission) which purported to be helping countries of the ex-soviet bloc adjust to new ways of energy conservation were in fact little more than fronts for the selling of western technology…

“Best practice” was the phrase which the British private sector consultants were bringing with them to projects and was one to which I was starting to object. It was in Tashkent in 2000 that I first drafted material to make a point about the relative novelty of the government procedures in Europe which passed for “best practice” (whether in matters of hiring or procurement) and the number of exceptions one could find not just in southern European countries but even in the heart of Europe…..
As writers such as Ha-Joon Chang have documented in the development field, a lot of kidology was clearly going on!

Old draft material is like a good cheese or wine – it needs time to mature. And, rereading my material on ”crafting effective PM” made me realise that, despite my own determination since the beginning of my work here always to start from the local context and to find ”local champions”, I felt it needed more detail on how exactly to avoid the trap of "the best practice" formulae which are embedded in most EC guidelines...  
I have never been a fan of the World Bank but its Governance Reforms under real world conditions (2006) is one of the best reads - one paper in particular (by Matthew Andrews which starts part 2 of that book) weaves a very good approach around 3 words – “acceptance”, “authority” and “ability”. 
I enthused about the paper in a 2010 post and notice that he (and a couple of colleagues) have another book out - Building State Capability  - on the same theme of the need for a practical, ”learning approach” The book can be downloaded in its entirety from the publisher here.....
It’s got too much jargon for my taste; rather overdoes the analyses of individual (African and Asian) countries; and disfigures every line of every page with this annoying academic habit which groups names in brackets to prove that the author has read everything - but its basic argument is very important and can be read in this earlier paper by Andrews and Moorcock about something called ”Capability Traps”. 

capability traps can be avoided and overcome by fostering different types of interventions…..which - 
(i) aim to solve particular problems in local contexts,
(ii) through the creation of an ‘authorizing environment’ for decisionmaking that allows ‘positive deviation’ and experimentation,
(iii) involving active, ongoing and experiential learning and the iterative feedback of lessons into new solutions, doing so by
(iv) engaging broad sets of agents to ensure that reforms are viable, legitimate and relevant—i.e., politically supportable and practically implementable.

We propose this kind of intervention as an alternative approach to enhancing state capability, one we call Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation (PDIA). We emphasize that PDIA is not so much ‘new’ thinking as an attempt at a pragmatic and operational synthesis of related

The authors are part of an increasing number of people who want, like me, to “do development differently” – a few years back it was called…. political analysis……. From Political Economy to Political Analysis (2014) is an excellent overview of the thinking process

The basic ideas can be expressed a bit more simply -
- Fixing on an issue widely seen as problematic
- Getting people to admit that it can’t be solved by the usual top-down approach
- Getting wide ”buy-in” to this
- Bringing people together from all sectors which are touched by the issue
- Starting from an analysis of where we find ourselves  (reminds me of a philosophical colleague known for his phrase “We are where we are”!)
- Avoiding polarisation
- Working patiently to seek a feasible and acceptable solution

Fairly simple steps - which, however, conflict with prevailing political cultures – and not just in Central Europe!!

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Where the buck stops

In the 1970s and 80s, those of us struggling to reform the state (both national and local) talked about “generating understanding and commitment” and of the three basic tests for new proposals – Feasibility, legitimacy and support. “Does it work?” “Does it fall within our powers? And “will it be accepted?” The World Bank’s Governance Reforms under real world conditions (to which I have referred several times on the blog) is written around the sorts of questions we consultants in transitions country deal with on a daily basis -
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 by Matthew Andrews which starts part 2 of the book weaves an interesting theory around 3 words – „acceptance”, „authority” and „ability”. What Andrews means by these 3 terms is sketched out as follows -

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

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

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

Obviously, the world of Technical Assistance tends to assume that it is the latter which is the problem – since the people there who act as experts are strong on training. In the paper I referred to on Monday, Sorin Ionita applies this framework to Romania and suggests that
constraints on improving of policy management are to be found firstly in terms of low acceptance (of the legitimacy of new, objective criteria and transparency); secondly, in terms of low authority (meaning that nobody knows who exactly is in charge of prioritization across sectors, for example) and only thirdly in terms of low technical ability in institutions
The final version of my NISPAcee paper tries to identify all the papers which have assessed the impact of all the efforts to put government processes in transition countries on a more open and effective basis. In particular I was interested to find those which actually looked critically at the various tools used by Technical Assistance eg rule of law; civil service reform; training; impact assessment etc. One of my arguments is that that it is only recently that such a critical assessment has started – eg of civil service reform.
The one common thread in those assessments which have faced honestly the crumbling of reform in the region (Cardona; Ionitsa; Manning;Verheijen) is the need to force the politicians to grow up and stop behaving like petulant schoolboys and girls. Manning and Ionitsa both emphasise the need for transparency and external pressures. Cardona and Verheijen talk of the establishment of structures bringing politicians, officials, academics etc together to develop a consensus. As Ionita puts it succinctly –
If a strong requirement is present – and the first openings must be made at the political level – the supply can be generated fairly rapidly, especially in ex-communist countries, with their well-educated manpower. But if the demand is lacking, then the supply will be irrelevant.
On Sunday, when rain washed away the tennis at Queen's, I enjoyed watching this great spontaneous performance on a similar occasion some years back.