Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 16th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview Panel on Getting Public Administration Reform to Work Author(s) Iwona Sobis Goteborg University Göteborg Sweden de Vries Michiel, Iwona Sobis, University of Skovde, Sweden Michiel S de Vries, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands Title Searching for professionalism: The provision of technical assistance to CEE countries during their transition process File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Abstract In the last four years we presented five papers at Nispacee conferences and elsewhere on technical assistance to CEE-countries during the transition period. All those papers showed that something was very amiss in the process of technical assistance, be it on the side of the recipients, the foreign experts, the donor organizations or the governments that provide the money. The last paper in Kiev made many participants ask the question: “So, what needs to be done? What are your recommendations?” This paper intends to address these questions. Since the subject of our research was the search for professionalism, in this paper we will address the question what is indicative for such professionalism, how this differs from the practice of technical assistance and what can be done to reduce this gap. Hence it is not an empirical but a normative paper, based on the outcomes of previous empirical research. The paper will first point to the problems in all the phases of technical assistance as encountered previously. Then we will search in the enormous amount of literature, already starting with Daniel Bell (1973) who developed a theory on the post-industrial society, in which he argues that the western high-developed countries produce knowledge instead energy and that this knowledge can be put up for sale and provide producers with profit. This study as well as subsequent studies on the subject deals explicitly with professionalism that is based on high-specialised qualifications and knowledge (Abbott 1988; Burrage & Torstendahl, 1990; Freidson 1986; Evans 2007). The main question the paper tries to answer in this theoretical part is whether professionalism is an individual trait or also something that can be seen in institutions or organizations: that is institutional professionalism. This refers, among others, to studies that investigate whether there are rules imaginable or incentive structures which promote professionalism and reduce amateurism and whether such rules themselves can be seen as more or less professional. In such a framework the question becomes: how did the actors involved in the Western aid on various organisational levels (government, aid-organisations and experts) follow the well written and promising guiding principles for the western aid addressed to CEE and which problems can be encountered in those rules. A third line of thinking addresses the inter-organizational contradictions in the technical assistance to CEE countries that proved to be a serious hinder to provide effective aid and reach professionalism in aid providing. How professional is that ‘aid chain’ and what can be done to improve the professionalism thereof. We will argue that the provision of the elementary “know-how” by West to the CEE countries in transition was unprofessional in all three respects and pinpoint the crucial elements of failure, but that this is by no means an unavoidable or self-evident finding. The paper concludes by transforming the cynicism that is likely to arise from the empirical findings into positive recommendations about each phase in the process of providing technical assistance, which, if they are implemented can prevent disappointing outcomes of foreign aid and technical assistance in the future.
