perfect government

Perfect government? Sounds like an oxymoron. It's apparently a song by NoFX. Not to worry, it seemed an appropriate post title for covering these two stories from the 'left' and 'right' aligned newspapers in the UK, the Guardian and Times respectively.

In the Guardian, we learn that the venerable institution, the British Council, is undergoing all types of grief as its usual approach of funding all types of artistic representatives of the country is 'enhanced' (I bet that word crept in somewhere) to pursuit of 'strategic objectives' of the government.

I've got a bit of disclosure here - in various parts of my previous lives I've run across British Council people overseas and I've also had a hand in funding Australian artistic types to take our own messages overseas.

It's all typically fraught. Who do you fund? How do you choose them? What's the actual objective: raising awareness of the country; supplementing more mainstream tourism promotion activities; making people think you're great guys; slipping a few overseas trips to those struggling in garrets? Even more fundamentally, should it be done at all?

My own experience over about 18-24 months was instructive. There was no competition. There were no proper, documented processes. We relied on expert advice from the Australia Council and a couple of similar arts bodies. Some of the suggestions appeared to reflect the personal preferences of the experts we consulted, or what was 'hot' at the moment, and some appeared quite inappropriate (although I should say I had no particular knowledge of these art forms and reacted in what I took to be some sort of 'typical middle class' way). Also, this was all some time ago and I would hope that processes have improved a bit since then.

My experience over that period indicates that any effort to have a country's overseas cultural representatives serve some sort of 'strategic imperative' is doomed to fail and I wasn't surprised to read in the Guragian article that the artistic interpretations of climate change chosen were pretty naff. And would be counterproductive, I imagine.

In the Times, we learn that the overwhelming trend towards numerical targets and other anally-retentive but very seductive ways of measuring government performance are also having counterproductive consequences. Of course, what gets measured gets done (and this phrase also produces about 1,280,000 results on Google). But the issue is what to measure. Where it's a difficult environment, simplistic measures of activity can be subverted easily (I was going to reference the Larvatus Prodeo post on Centrelink, but their servers are down). That's human nature.

Of course numerical indicators are needed, if for no other reason that this is the way that Treasuries around the world operate and such measures of activity are good for lonking numbers of people to numbers of things done. What gets lost is the nuance of any situation and ideally any numerical targets should be supplemented by qualitative feedback, in other words has any difference been made. This needs to be 'rich', the recent description of preference, for example by providing case studies and similar. You need something that can be learnt from so that services can be improved and any unintended consequences rectified.

So from all of this , what the lessons? Even where some government intervention is warranted, setting suitable performance measures is far from simple. And second, governments should understand what is propaganda and what isn't, and steer clear of the former.

As if. Perfect government indeed. Am I biting the hand, etc? No, just looking to make things a little better. It's no fun to be doing one's best to deliver some sort of service while getting continually diverted, or subverted, because of inappropriate performance indicators.