Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 14th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview General Session Author(s) Michiel de Vries Radboud University Nijmegen Nijmegen Netherlands Sobis Iwona, Title The role of donor organisations during the transition process File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract During the transition phase much money went to advisory work in CEE countries. However, with the benefit of hindsight we can say that not all those investments were profitable. Previous papers by Sobis and De Vries pointed out that the experts that were sent to transition countries were less successful than expected. What went wrong? When listening to recipients in CEE countries, the advisory work itself was unsatisfactory (Sobis & De Vries, 2004). When asked to the experts, they claim that they had to work under poor conditions, which was due to the conditions imposed by donor organisations (Sobis &De Vries, 2005). The paper we would like to present at the 14th Nispacee conference addresses the position and opinions of those donor organisations. It addresses the following research questions. 1. What were the goals of the donor organisations for which they invested in projects on behalf of the transition process? 2. Were the projects evaluated and did these projects achieve their goals? 3. What were the main factors responsible for success or failure according to these organisations? 4. To what extent are the explanations of the experts and donor organisations congruent? 5. What does this imply for the explanation of the sometimes disappointing outcomes of advice? The plan is to structure this paper is as follows: First we describe the characteristics of donor organisations and address their goals. Subsequently go into the procedures these organisations worked with, their own standards and their methods to ensure that advisory work was effective. Third, we will present the outcomes of a content analysis of the evaluations done especially searching for those factors mentioned that explain the success or failure of these projects, and last we will present the outcomes of interviews with officials working for donor organisations, especially regarding the question how they explain the outcomes of advisory work. In this way we expect to get a reasonably good picture of what they aimed for, what they achieved in reality and how they explain the differences. References: Sobis, I.& Vries, M.S. de (2004). Outside experts in local government in transition countries. Nispacee conference: Vilnius Lithuania (14-05-2004 - 17-05-2004). This paper was published in: Alexei Barbashev Jenei György & Frits van der Berg (Eds.), Institutional Requirements and Problem Solving in the Public Administrations of the Enlarged European Union and Its Neighbours (pp. 119-141). Bratislava: Nispacee. Sobis, I.& Vries, M.S. de (2005). Western advice in CEE countries: The Swedish experts' view. Nispacee conference: Moscow (19-05-2005 - 21-05-2005). This paper will be published in Bill Dunn, Katarina Staronova, Sergei Pushkarev, Implementation in Central and Eastern Europe: Why failures occur, Bratislava, Nispacee.
