The Beast of Bureaucracy - Institute of Development StudiesThe Beast of Bureaucracy and Other Tales...

The Beast ofBureaucracy

and Other Talesfrom Valhalla

Andrea Cornwall, Katja Jassey, Seema Arora-Jonsson and Patta Scott-Villiers

This little book tells the tale of an unusualorganisational learning process in Valhalla, aNordic development bureaucracy. Known forbeing a people-friendly development partner,Valhalla was one of the first bilateral donoragencies to promote people’s participation indevelopment. But for those who work there, howto put participation into practice in theireveryday work isn't as obvious as it may seem.For, as they discover, it means tangling with theBeast of Bureaucracy ...

‘You'll laugh. You'll grimace in recognition. You'll applaudthe plucky little band who tried to bring participation home.The Beast of Bureaucracy should be required reading foreveryone who works in a development bureaucracy,particularly those at the top.’ – Louise Fortmann, Universityof California at Berkeley

‘Brilliantly conceived and beautifully crafted, The Beast ofBureaucracy holds up a mirror for all who work in aidbureaucracies and celebrates the courage to be“dangerously different”. A gripping, entertaining andtherapeutic read ... a must-read for all who work inbureaucracies, not only in aid.’ – Robert Chambers, IDS

ISBN 978 1 85864 660 X

Notes on the Authors

Andrea Cornwall is a researcher at the Institute ofDevelopment Studies, Brighton. A social anthropologist bytraining, with interests in participation, democraticgovernance, sexuality and gender, she has worked as atrainer and researcher using participatory methodologieswith and in organisations.

Katja Jassey is a freelance development consultant,specialising in social development, communications andsexual and reproductive health. A former socio-cultural andgender adviser in the policy department at Sida, she has abackground in anthropology and participatorycommunications.

Seema Arora-Jonsson is a guest researcher at the Centre forGender Research at Uppsala University, and a researcher atthe Department of Urban and Rural Development of theSwedish University of Agricultural Sciences. Her interestsinclude theories and practices of development and feministparticipatory methodologies.

Patta Scott-Villiers is currently based in Ethiopia, where sheworks on the ways in which people and their organisationsnegotiate with governments and aid organisations. She hasworked on organisational learning and bureaucracy as wellas citizens’ voice in the political economy of aid.

The Beast ofBureaucracy

and Other Talesfrom Valhalla

Cerridwen Cornwall, Freja Jassey, Maya Arora-Jonsson and Brid Scott-Villiers

This little book tells the story of anunconventional project that happened in atime before Results-Based Management.Its tales are set in a place that only exists in

memories of times past, and filled with characterswho no longer do what they did in the days whenthese events took place. And yet the worlddescribed in this story lives on, in the new open-plan offices with the latest in interior design, in thedocuments and decisions that are the stuff ofeveryday life in a large development bureaucracy –and in the struggles with the Beast of Bureaucracythat continue to be waged by those who want to seetheir efforts bring about a better, fairer world for all.

The experiences we describe here are all realenough. They took place as part of anorganisational learning initiative that brought agroup of desk officers from different departmentstogether to enquire into what would help close thegap between fine-sounding words about poorpeople’s participation in development and actualpractice. Composed as a series of episodes in the lifeof this group, who met every couple of months overthe course of a year in those long-distant times, our

The Beast of Bureaucracy and Other Tales from ValhallaAndrea Cornwall, Katja Jassey, Seema Arora-Jonsson and Patta Scott-VilliersCover image drawn by bureaucrat during a participatory exercise

First published by the Institute of Development Studies in July 2007© Institute of Development Studies 2007ISBN 978 1 85864 660 X

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90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE, UK, or fromanother national licensing agency; or

• under the terms set out below.

This publication is copyright but may be reproduced by anymethod without fee for teaching or non-profit purposes, but not forresale. Formal permission is required for all such uses but normallywill be granted immediately. For copying in any othercircumstances, or for re-use in other publications, or for translationor adaptation, prior written permission must be obtained from thepublisher and a fee may be payable.

Available from: Communications Unit, Institute of DevelopmentStudies at the University of Sussex, Brighton BN1 9RE, UKTel +44 (0) 1273 678269 Fax +44 (0) 1273 621202Email [email protected] Web www.ids.ac.uk/ids/bookshop

Printed in England by the Cpi GroupIDS is a charitable company limited by guarantee and registered inEngland (No. 877338).

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We seek in these stories to show bureaucrats aspeople: as those whose daily struggles with theBeast of Bureaucracy leave them with little timeand energy to step back and reflect on the kindsof issues our learning group grappled with; asthose whose work is inspired less by a love for thearts of bureaucracy than with a passionate desireto make a difference in the lives of the millionswho suffer poverty and discrimination; and as aparticular group of people who dared to breakwith established conventions and thaw the ice,shake Valhalla out of its grooves and promptthose who work there to think and maybe even doa little bit differently.

Cerridwen, Freja, Maya and Brid

aim in this book is less to fictionalise the factualthan to evoke some of the feelings and frustrationsthat animate these struggles, and with this revealthe nature of this Beast.

The tales we tell here tell a different story tothat usually told about bureaucrats. These arestories that show the fiery advocate within theapparently icy bureaucrat whose creativity isfrozen in electronic planning systems, financialguidelines, in ideas about efficiency and theproper way to act. These are stories that revealdilemmas over what kind of actions to take in acontext where small, almost imperceptible, actsmay make more difference than grander, morevisible, gestures. And these are also stories of therules that enable, but can also come in the way of,achieving the institution’s own goals. They aretales told from our particular viewpoints, as theinstigators and co-conspirators in a process thatbecame by turns more and more unconventionalas we tangled with the Beast of Bureaucracy andsought new and different ways of taming it. Andjust as we’ve given our principal characters namesfrom the Nordic pantheon, so too we haveadopted names of legend and myth to writeourselves, and others, like Sol and Vor, whoworked with us, into this tale. As Cerridwen, Freja,Maya and Brid, we are also part of the story.

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The Beast of Bureaucracy

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Välkommen till Valhalla

Enter Valhalla headquarters in Nordstad asa foreign visitor and you will be struck byhow warm, bright and well co-ordinatedthe colours are that beam at you from the

curtains, the cloth-covered seats on the chairs orthe cloth-bound files on the shelves in each office.How attractive it looks with all the matchingblonde wooden shelves and desks. How nice thedesigner lamps are that hang over those lovely bigtables in the coffee rooms in each department. Youwill be surprised to realise that there was no needto put on a suit and tie. The person who comesdown to greet you after you’ve signed in at thereception is very likely to be dressed in casualtrousers, a blouse in bright colours and to wearheavy ethnic jewellery. This is, after all, Nordia;and she is most likely to be a woman.

As a Nordian, you will know that you are inValhalla because there are always larger-than-lifephotos on display in the public area of thisbuilding portraying African women radiatingwith confidence having participated in a Valhalla-sponsored activity which has given them access tomicro-finance, clean water or reproductive health.

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And finally Freja, with her shells from the shoresof the Indian Ocean and her little cone-headedZimbabwean stone sculpture reminding her oftimes long past.

But even if the warm colours, the ficusbenjamina trees in the big pots, the fish swimmingpeacefully in their tanks and the casually dressedbureaucrats on each floor all contribute to givingan illusion of this being an easy-going place wherea better future is being built for the world’s poor,there should be no mistaking the seriousness thatmarks the way people go about their daily work. Alook at the Valhalla intranet tells us the storybehind the smiling larger-than-life African womanin the photographs, the story of what these samebureaucrats are supposed to know and how theyare supposed to work. We will share with those ofyou who do not know a place like Valhalla, threeauthentic, but edited, clips selected from dozens tobe found on Valhalla’s intranet on one particularday – and what they tell us about what goes on inthe belly of the Beast of Bureaucracy.

These are the kind of announcements thatValhalla staff find as they switch on theircomputers each morning. For the Nordstad-baseddesk officer, her computer is her main instrumentin the fight against poverty and oppression. Shecan download useful documents setting out

But, as a Nordian, the colour scheme, designerlamps and pale wood will also tell you that you’veentered state agency territory. Had you chosen towalk down a nearby street – where the NationalPublic Board of Health is located – you wouldhave found yourself in a strikingly similar office.Only there wouldn’t have been African womenbeaming at you but posters about the dangers ofsmoking or the joys of safer sex.

The office of a Valhalla desk officer is usuallybig enough only for her own desk and a visitor’schair. The walls are covered with shelves on whichyou will find long rows of identical files for eachproject or activity for which she is responsible.Most desk officers try to personalise their officespace and the participants in this story have alladded their own individual touches. Vidar hasbeautiful photos of historical buildings, Heimdallhas gadgets for fishing in the Far East hanging onhis wall, Hildr has a distinctly Central Americanfeel to her space with her own personal coffee cupbearing the message ‘men are only good for onething – and how important is parallel parkinganyway?’ Hermod’s desk is barely visibleunderneath heaps of paper and shows no sign ofany personal interests, while on Lofn’s deskeverything is neatly filed away so that yourattention is drawn to the photos of her children.

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will increasingly be disbursed to and monitored in therecipient’s own financial management.

A condition for this is that the recipient’s financialmanagement system(s) works with sufficient quality andcoverage. One of Valhalla’s roles is to assess whetherthat is the case, and to contribute to the improvement ofsuch systems. The Director General recently decided that‘public financial management’ should be a priority and afocus area for Valhalla within the framework of thegrowing co-operation around programme support. TheDirector General also decided that all Valhalla staffworking directly with development co-operationprogrammes – based in Nordstad and field offices –should receive training in public financial managementduring the coming two–three year period

Template related to evaluationsUseful definitionsEvaluation: ‘— an evaluation is a careful and systematicretrospective assessment of the design,implementation, and results of development activities’(Valhalla’s Evaluation Policy)

An evaluation can involve one or more aspects ofprojects, programmes and policies that are in progressor completed. It can also be an assessment of one ormore aspects of how Valhalla, or organisations that aresupported by Valhalla, plan, design and/or evaluateprojects, programmes or policies.

Water commission formed for southern Africa (NewsItem)Eight countries in southern Africa, that share thedrainage basin of the Zambezi river, have signed anagreement for a joint water commission. This institutionis to co-ordinate water usage in an area about threetimes as large as Nordia and thus becomes one of thelargest permanent co-operative river basin projects inthe world.

Almost one half of the African population lacksaccess to water and sanitation. Drought and floodingalso make food production unreliable. To overcome thewater crisis, institutions are needed to ensure that waterresources are put to the best possible use. The newinstitution, to be known as the Zambezi River BasinCommission, is a real breakthrough in that it should leadto long-term improvements in the lives of the tens ofmillions of people who live in the area. Eight differentcountries have come together in organising the project,while Valhalla and other donors have provided financialbacking to the tune of 35 million kronur. Of this, Nordiahas provided 14 million kronur, the support beingdirectly linked to a three-year contract. The river basincommission is officially brought into being at aceremony to be held on the 13th July, in Botswana.

Invitation to Public Financial Management Workshopfor Valhalla staffThe policy of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and Valhallais that the use of broad programme support (budgetsupport and sector programme support) to contribute tothe implementation of poverty reduction strategies ofpartner countries should increase. This means that funds

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For Freja, the socio-cultural adviser of Valhalla,charged with the difficult task of securing somepurchase within this organisation for greaterpopular participation in development, such acourse was more than just another mainstreamingactivity. It was the beginning of somethingcompletely different.

guidelines for the approval and transfer of funds,and she is required to enter notice of suchtransactions into the electronic financial planningsystem. She can call up templates that allow her toencode the funding decisions that enable thegiving of development co-operation money in theappropriate bureaucratic form. And computersgive access to the external world, through articleson the intranet, internet searches for informationto assist the making of funding decisions, throughemails from prospective ‘partners’ seeking fundingor from members of the Nordian public seekinginformation.

Over the years, Valhalla has financed researchand development to promote institutionallearning on participation within Nordia and ininstitutions abroad, such as at the Globe Credit.For those working at Valhalla’s Nordstadheadquarters, the lives of poor people can seemvery distant from the paperwork and meetingsabout paperwork that make up much of theireveryday working lives. So when one day an advertappeared on the intranet inviting them to a courseon participation at the Institute for DruidicSophistry in Albion, it seemed like an attractiveproposition. It was a place that many had readabout in its authoritative publications but neverhad the chance to actually visit.

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The Beast of Bureaucracy The Beast of Bureaucracy

Becoming Lagom

None who answered Freja’s advertexpected to become Lagom – theNordian name the group came to knowthemselves by, meaning ‘just enough,

not too little and not too much’. What they didexpect was to be trained by Experts from Albion.The aim of our project was to make better senseof, and perhaps begin to close the gap between,what Valhalla’s policies said about ‘participation’and what actually happened in practice. Our ideasabout what we would actually do were stillprovisional. Although Hermod had voicedsuspicions at the very start that the group were tobe ‘guinea-pigs’, no-one could really haveanticipated what we were to do together.

Freja was the spider in the web, the one whocalled the group together. The people she invitedran the gamut of those you might expect to find inValhalla. Picture Vidar: his foot wedged high on hisknee, leaning back into his tilted chair as hedescribed a row of toilets in a village square inAfrica, built by virtue, or perhaps in spite of, aridiculously long participatory process and Hildr,leaning forward, her eyes flashing with cynical

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about the incongruence of Valhalla’s policies.Then, finally, there was Cerridwen and Brid,considered to be Experts from the renownedInstitute of Druidic Sophistry in Albion, flying inat regular intervals for intense doses of Lagom,and puzzling all the time about the Beast ofBureaucracy that they were getting to know.

There are several possible beginnings but themost decisive one was before the group had beennamed Lagom, when eight bureaucrats whowanted to know what it meant to deliver this idealof ‘participation’ huddled together with theExperts from Albion in the insalubrious lobby ofone of those placeless chain hotels in Brighton,bemoaning the stale biscuits in the room and thepervasive smell of damp. (This was, after all,Albion, far from the civilised comforts of Nordia).

We began to talk, in turn, about what being ina learning group on participation might be about.Round and round the group we went, listeningand talking and listening. Our discussion soonbecame woven with a rich array of watermetaphors: from swimming to drowning, fromdeep waters to having to do the requisite numberof lengths to win the race. The group began tovoice their differences.

The more we talked, the more difficult itseemed to pin down what participation might

humour, telling of her dilemma with a bridge atthe bend in a Central American river, built milesfrom its more logical spot, for the sake of a smallvillage. Picture Heimdall, describing withfrustration his meeting with a fisherman on theMekong Delta whose capricious and now poisonedwaters were controlled by a distant multinationalauthority which claimed to be doing all the right‘participatory’ things and Hermod, leaping up tothe whiteboard, making a joke and then drawingdiagrams of Valhalla’s strategy-making structure,pointing out how impervious it was toparticipation of anyone but the elite. Or Lofn, whowould quietly protest with a wisdom that could soeasily be cast into the shadows as flashes of lightand heat crackled in the group’s deliberations.

Then there were the others who facilitated,cajoled and conspired with the group in some ofits wilder ideas, who came from outside Valhalla.There was Maya, the non-Nordian ‘Nordianresearcher’ whose role was always in doubt, andwhose beams of acute insight would occasionallybring the group to an astonished halt. There wasSol, who brought wisdom from years of workingas a university-based consultant for Valhalla andwhose calm, wise presence helped us all to think.There was Vor, who worked with the group for ashort time at the beginning, and helped us think

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The Beast of Bureaucracy The Beast of Bureaucracy

treading water and of drowning in the depths. Itbecame clear that it was going to be impossible toplease everybody. Hermod put his finger on it,wryly observing that all the doers will think theyhave no time, and the thinkers will make it morecomplicated... And so it was.

mean and what implications any given form ofparticipation might actually have in practice. Themore we circled around the concept ofparticipation, the more our conversations turnedto everyday life in Valhalla and how disconnectedValhalla’s policies on participation were from theactual decisions and documents that desk officershad to deal with each day. In the weeks andmonths to come, this gap was to become clearer,while ways of bridging it continued to elude us all.

Amid promises to avoid floskler – fluffyplatitudes and empty rhetorical phrases – to besmart and sharp and just-enough-but-not-too-much, the group became Lagom. It was, inretrospect, significant that this, the affectionatemoniker adopted by the group, was bestowed byVidar in the pub after the first meeting and neverreally formally decided upon by the group as awhole. Lagom offered a tantalising space – one inwhich each person could find something different,do something different, even perhaps besomething different from that which they were inthe space of the everyday.

The group was woven together with a disparatecollection of wants and worries: of spending toomuch time talking, of spending too little timethinking, of having a structure, of not having anystructure, of being forced to swim, of simply

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The Event

During our first meeting back inNordstad, when everybody was stillflushed with excitement at beinginvolved in something innovative and

different, Lagom decided that they had to find away of communicating all their anticipatedlearning to other staff at Valhalla. It was usualpractice in Valhalla to hold seminars to present‘findings’, and there was a vague, unformed,expectation that this is what Lagom would also do.It was October and the Nordian nights weredrawing in and whatever form the presentationwas to take, it needed to happen fairly soon.

Months later, in April the following year, theelevator vestibules of Valhalla were covered byposters with photos of well-known Valhallacharacters from the 1970s entitled ‘in the head ofa Valhalla-ite’. These unconventional invitationswere to entice as many staff as possible to come tothe basement late on a Thursday afternoon. Theposters made a promise of drinks but the rest wasleft up to the imagination of the reader.

And people came. One after another, theyfound their way down to the big Valhalla exercise

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Valhalla and Nordia are characterised byutredningar (‘inquiries’) and seriousness when itcomes to presenting results and problems. Yetthose supposedly serious bureaucrats participatedwhole-heartedly in the creation of poetry and acommon history with a glass of wine in one hand(paid for by the foreigners in the group as theNordian State does not allow such expenses) anda pink Post-it in the other. Many were astonishedwith the messages that could be found in the time-line, how money spent on development haddramatically gone up at the exact same point thatthe number of staff in the field had started anequally dramatic decline. Or how different theideas inspiring the agency’s work had been duringthose early years compared with the present day.And they smiled at all those crazy 1970s hair-dos.

Framed by the twinkling Christmas lights thatlit up the room, we could see that from 1965 to1975 recollections brought up phrases like‘solidarity’, ‘okay for women to wear trousers’, ‘allwomen were called Mrs’, ‘enthusiasm’, ‘aid will dothe trick’, ‘liberation’, ‘sandals’, ‘belief that thewritten word can change the world’, ‘Nordian low-income utredning’.

The next decade was marked by ‘more coffee-breaks’, ‘we don’t make the priorities, they do!’,‘Valhalla cheers for Mugabe’, ‘individualism’,

room way below the streets of busy centralNordstad. Within a very short time, over ahundred people – managers, support staff anddesk officers from all age groups – had gathered tofind out what on earth these posters were all about.

What they found was a sparsely lit room. Thehuge mirror covering one of the walls had beendecorated with Christmas lights. On it were chartsof how much Valhalla had spent on developmentsince its inception in the 1960s, how many peopleValhalla had employed in the field throughout thistime and what had been said about participation.People were asked to write their own memories ofsignificant events at any point in time on Post-itsand put them up on the wall, creating a time-line.

In another corner, a video was running withimages of people at Valhalla stating the words thatthey associated with participation – ‘grassroots’,‘something good’, ‘democracy’, ‘an impossiblemission’. On a washing line, photos of a Valhallaofficer taken every day at the same time were hungnext to the billboards from that day of the biggestNordian daily newspaper. The officer was usuallyfound next to his computer whilst the billboardsshouted out the angst of the world. The fridge wascovered with ‘fridge poetry’, using the vocabularyof bureaucratic life: everyone was encouraged tocreate ‘Valhalla poetry’.

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how they had reacted, sharing stories of how asenior official had arrived – furious at suchapparent flippancy, only to become totallyengaged in telling her own story of change inValhalla – and as we exchanged snatches ofconversation we’d overheard, we felt a strangemixture of thrill at our own brilliance and daringand fear that we really had gone too far, been tooobscure, and lost those we’d tried to reach in theprocess. We had held an Event, a Happening, withthe kind of lighting and lingering questions youmight find in the Modern Museum of Art but wasit the right thing for Lagom to do and was it theright thing to do at Valhalla?

‘goodbye to the goodness’, ‘from project to sector’,‘no talking to the press’.

Something that seemed to have started in theearly 1980s continued into the following decadewith messages of ‘development pessimism’, ‘on therecipient’s terms (but we don’t believe in it anylonger)’, ‘neo-liberalism’, ‘cut-backs’, ‘structuraladjustment’, ‘debt relief ’, ‘partnership’, ‘got acomputer – hello stress’, ‘no smoking at Valhalla’, ‘aminister of development who supportsdevelopment but not Valhalla’ – references to whatolder staff regarded as the ‘Dark Age of Valhalla’ ofthe 1980s and 1990s.

Then the present picture came into view: ‘morestress’, ‘development fatigue’, ‘masculinity’,‘fungibility performance…’, ‘economic, social andcultural rights’, ‘more emails’, ‘the return of theUN’, ‘beautiful words’, ‘we have to learn to makepriorities’, ‘the right to participation’, ‘panic how tospend as much money as possible with as littleeffort as possible’, ‘training in rhetoric’, ‘I’ve quit!’

Still high on the exhilaration of having pulledoff the Event, Lagom gathered together thefollowing day in the bright artificial light of thebasement room. The Post-its had fallen on thefloor and the display now looked rather tatty. Weasked each other: “Well then? Where now?”

As we sat analysing what people had said and

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Att Våga Flyga? Daring to Fly?

The road leading to the Event was bumpy.There had been little evidence of theconsensus form of decision-making forwhich Nordia was famed. The mood at

planning meetings had swung from excitement todepression and uncertainty.

In the month before the Event, preparationseemed to be going full speed – video films werebeing made, graphs were being charted, meaningsof participation collected. Cerridwen arrived inNordstad to find out how things were progressing.

Before the meeting, Cerridwen and Maya hadwritten down all the things we had actuallyachieved so far on the whiteboard. There were theinterviews with heads of department, interviewswith group members, the small acts, the planneddivision meetings, interviews by Lofn andHeimdall at their departments, Freja accostingunsuspecting people in the corridors to ask themwhat they thought about participation. When themeeting started, Maya asked us to write down oncoloured cards what we thought the purpose ofthe Event was and what our message to Valhallashould be.

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Panic began to mount, in ripples and then waves:“Why are we going through all of this?”, “What arepeople going to think of us?”

These doubts and uncertainties allowed thegroup to discuss and to clarify for the very firsttime what exactly Lagom was for and what wereally wanted. We realised that we were not agroup of experts that gave answers but people whoposed questions and wanted to reach out to therest of Valhalla. Although we realised that therewas no need to take on the whole of Valhalla inorder to get the organisation to take participationseriously, whatever the group did would have to bedone with the rest of Valhalla. We saw that thismeant understanding the history and theorganisation itself, sharing and linking up withothers at Valhalla, inviting them to learn together.This was how participation worked! With thissharper definition, the Event took place.

Valhalla is a place known for its problem-solving, not for its fun or questioning. It isinhabited by people on a passionate quest for ajust world. To take part in the accepted andformalised channels for communication –intranet, meetings, seminars, informal and formalworking groups and short courses – and to readreports and attend seminars could easily take upall of one’s time. A jargon has evolved, and being

Everyone began to scribble except for Vidar,who sat looking aloof and dissatisfied with life, asonly Vidar can.

“I don’t think we should have the Event at all,”he said.

“Why are we having it? We have nothing topresent as yet. This is a group reflecting together;it’s not really something we can share.”

Others nodded.Lofn, who had already brought this matter up

on other occasions, agreed.“Even if we do want to present ourselves to the

rest of Valhalla, is the Event the best way? Thealternative may be to work through ‘small acts’, bitby bit. The Event is a huge undertaking; it mightcreate more confusion among people about us. Itmakes me nervous; it might make it more difficultfor us.”

Vidar continued: “This is an event aimed atstirring the pot, creating curiosity, reflections andquestions – not really to present ourselves. It isone thing stirring the small pot that is us – but thebig pot, Valhalla, is another thing. We could findourselves flooded by questions and thoughts thatwe are unable to deal with.”

The horrible realisation dawned that Lagomreally did have too little to say in the ways thatthings usually get said (and ignored) at Valhalla.

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The Log Frame

After the Event, the question “Where now?”hung in the minds of everyone in Lagom.The time seemed to be ripe to have somemore structure and a clearer plan for

what we were doing. So we arrived in Ragnarok, themeeting room on the seventh floor, where we weresurrounded by the orderly offices of the LongphortDepartment. Curtained off, we organised ourselvesto produce a list of things that we were now goingto do. Hermod, who had clamoured for structure atthe outset, was in his element. He rubbed his handswith glee. Vidar might have poured somescepticism on the scene had he been there – but hewasn’t.

The Event had been scarily chaotic. What thegroup needed, we all felt, was order. We needed aPlan. What better way to make a plan than to usethe very instrument to which Valhalla had becomeso devoted in recent years: the Logical Framework,otherwise known as the ‘Log Frame’?

Mention the words Log Frame to developmentworkers and watch their faces. It is one of thosefew development instruments about which thereis little ambiguity of feeling – you either love it, or

in the know means being on top of which keywords to use and when. The use of experts to signoff on any new ideas is a sine qua non, as aredocuments and seminars that look academic.

Whether the individual Lagom membersthought the Event was something positive or risky,they all agreed on one thing – that breaking withestablished ‘form’ was much more radical thanactually saying something unexpected. But, asthey would discover, departing from conventionwould be difficult to sustain.

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legendary origin of the Log Frame and home ofthe Department for Intentional Deliberateness,hallowed by the Nordians for its no-nonsense, all-knowing approach to the problems of the poor.What the group needed, it seemed, was aperformance of putting things in neat columnsand lists and the sense of achievement as each wasticked off. This would produce the reassurancethat tax payers’ money was being usedproductively, that everyone knew where we weregoing and that we had the kind of Outcomes andOutputs prized by development agencies in thedays before Results came into the picture at thefront of our minds.

Cerridwen and Brid had little experience indrawing up the kind of Log Frames for which thegovernment of Albion had become so famed.Their group at the Institute of Druidic Sophistryusually got some help from their friends in theDepartment for Intentional Deliberateness whenthey needed to prepare their money-raisingformulas. But they bravely took up the challenge,taking up their ritual instruments – marker pens –and swathing themselves in the mantle of Albion’sinnate superiority over matters technical such asthese. A matrix was drawn on the whiteboard. Thegroup became animated as, one by one, memberscalled out items to add to each of the boxes. The

hate it. A Log Frame encourages people toseparate their aims and objectives into orderly andnumbered lists of goals, purposes, activities andoutputs and to lay them out logically, providingfor each a set of ‘objectively verifiable indicators’(OVIs).

Lagom was under no obligation to use astructured planning process. Funds andpermission to spend time meeting had beenprovided freely; none of the desk officers’managers seemed perturbed by the need foroutputs; and the organisation’s statedcommitment to learning was, some might argue,admirably observed and indeed modelled byLagom. Still, unease remained about the lack of atangible set of visible, demonstrable Outputs. Thissense of discomfort came in waves. Sometimes, ittook the shape of small squalls, generating briefbubbling foam and quickly dissipating, while atother times it gave rise to a generalisedchoppiness, a sense of something vital that wasmissing, a broad but indefinable feeling of unrest.

Lagom turned to the Experts from Albionamongst them, as an unarticulated need began tosurface for a return to the early days when thegroup had been assigned activities by Cerridwenand Brid, and didn’t have to cope with so muchpersonal involvement. Albion was, after all, the

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models that are so admired at the time but end upbeing put in the cupboard and forgotten about. Itwas never mentioned again.

matrix was quickly filled with a comprehensivemenu and a veritable feast of activities. The veryfamiliarity of the process of filling in the matrixwas comforting; the terms that came to mind werefamiliar, part of the bureaucrat’s everyday life, theincantations used to evoke that stirring sense ofrightness that development agencies need to keepstoking to keep people from wondering what onearth they are doing. Within a short period oftime, we had a glistening, all-boxes-checked, LogFrame-looking Plan.

The Log Frame that Lagom produced was,inevitably, a very Lagom kind of Log Frame. Itheld many ideas of what might be possible,although in their hearts many of the group knewthat few of them would actually happen. But theLog Frame served its purpose admirably. Itended our worries about purpose that haddisplaced the original anxiety about makingfools of ourselves and biting off more than wecould chew with the Event. We all felt anenormous sense of relief now that Lagom wasmoving forward with clarity and intent.

There was one thing that we had not realisedfully: the appearance of order can never reallydisplace the messiness of everyday bureaucraticlife. And so our neatly constructed Log Framebecame just another one of those nicely built

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Participation by Design

The elegant architecture of the Log Framehad, as the group well knew, very little todo with what really happens ‘out there’ inthe field. For the Valhalla staff based in

Nordstad, ‘out there’ is the reason for their dailywork. So rather than just talk about participation,the idea of working together on an actual, ‘outthere’, ‘real’ project arose early on in the group.This could give the group practical experience ofworking participatively. It would show the worldhow rewarding and effective working in that waycould be. Although the idea was mentioned at thevery beginning, a number of meetings passedwithout anything tangible emerging as an actual,real opportunity to put these vague intentionsinto practice.

In true Lagom style, the idea for what came togrow – or, as was the case, shrink – into the group’s‘practical project’ took shape in the pub after anotherwise uneventful meeting. Vidar had beengetting impatient. What we needed, he argued,was something we could get our hands on,something we could actually do. Why not takeover an ailing project, one that had been more or

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possibility that they could exercise some controland seek to improve poor people’s lives throughwriting a Terms of Reference for consultants.

There was no time to be lost. Vidar was due toleave for Jorvik within the next few days. Frejaemailed the group, calling a meeting. There wasexcitement in the air. Finally Lagom was going tochange the world… or change the Terms ofReference anyway.

The point of departure for Lagom’sintervention was the old Terms of Reference. Maya,a newcomer to the aid business, asked innocentlyand with a trace of frustration, “Why not let thepeople in the town decide what they want to workwith right from the beginning instead of thesuggestion coming from the previous study?”

Five steely pairs of eyes bore down on her,some uncomprehending, others pitying hernaivety, “What do you mean?”

Usually Maya’s questions were just ignored butthis one was just too dumb to be ignored.

“I think what Maya is trying to say is that theagenda is already set in the Terms of Reference”,Sol tried to help in more articulate Nordian.

Finally, Vidar as the chair of the meeting andrightful owner of the project, felt pressured to reply.

“Firstly, it would cost more but moreimportantly, going to the people right in the

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less forgotten about, given up on, and infuse itwith new life, using participative methods?Wouldn’t that be more of a challenge than sittingaround talking?

The idea of ‘hijacking a project’, finding aninitiative in which the group could apply theirdeveloping understanding of participation, wascaptivating. As they sat with their heads togetherover plates of Nordian meatballs and pickledherrings, Vidar, Freja, Hildr, Heimdall, Cerridwenand Brid plotted how they would take over one ofthe grand Valhalla projects – perhaps theWoodstown project that was the Director General’sfavourite? Or maybe the Cowdery’s Down DistrictDevelopment Programme? Everyone who wasanyone in Valhalla had been involved in Cowdery’sDown at some point or another so even touchingsomething in the programme there would be a sureway to start fires burning. Besides, all of these ideasheld a frisson of doing something subversive.

By the time of the next meeting, the grandplans that had been hatched in the pub had beenscaled down. Vidar suggested that he dust off anold planning project in Jorvik and commission anew study for the group to do in a participatoryway. As Nordstad desk officers, they knew theirchances of interaction with real live primarystakeholders were slim but there was still the

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two researchers from a sister project in aneighbouring country could go to Jorvik. Emailsflew back and forth about what the tworesearchers should do, what methodology theyshould use when plans came to an abrupt end: theembassy said that they did not want any moreoutsiders running around and taking up thevaluable time of poor people who had moreimportant things to do than talk to researchers.

The 90-page document that resulted was notmuch different from any other Valhalla report,except that this one had used the word‘participation’ more often. There was no section onmethodology to show how the study had beenconducted, nor had the consultants gone back for afinal presentation and discussion with the localpeople as the Lagom group had thought was agreed.

Maya pointed out a section on the need forparticipatory training so that people wouldunderstand partnership principles in developmentwhile Freja asked, “How did they reach theconclusion that the people wanted participatorytraining? Did people come up to them and said wewant to be trained?”

Freja could confirm, however, that the reportwas completely up-to-date and included the latestdevelopment jargon.

Then there was a slight difference of opinion in

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beginning might mean raising their expectations.This would not be very good, especially if thingsdon’t work out.”

The concept of not raising people’s expectationshad often surfaced in our meetings as an importantbut unwritten and unspoken principle indevelopment work.

Heimdall wondered if the consultants shouldbe asked how they would approach such a study tomake it participatory but Vidar replied that sinceit was so small, it would be better to specify howValhalla wanted it to be carried out.

The group struggled to make the wordingperfect so that the study would be reallyparticipatory and that the voices of poor peoplewould actually be reflected in the document. Allthe various ‘layers’ such as gender andenvironment were added. Freja included quite along section on socio-cultural issues and thegroup decided that since they were important, butmuch too long, these would form an appendix.

The tender was sent out and the consultantswere chosen. The group then discussed thepossibility of seeing how the study was actuallyreceived by the people when it was presented. Thiswould be vital to determine if Lagom had indeedmanaged to make a project participatory. Evenbetter, it could be done at almost no cost, since

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Making an Impact: Influencing Worldkom

Anyone wanting to know what Valhalladoes would start by looking at itspolicies. It just so happened that theNordian government began working on

a radical new development policy during thistime. A parliamentary committee, Worldkom, hadbeen given the task of drafting a proposal on howto shape Nordia’s development ambitions to itsnew global politics. As always, this proposal wassent out to the public and numerous organisationsfor their comments.

Worldkom was a formal forum where Lagomcould make its voice heard and scrutinise theWorldkom report wearing their newly foundparticipation spectacles.

They could come up with ground-breaking andsolid recommendations for placing participation ofpoor people on Nordia’s development agenda. It wasan easy decision to take; unlike many other decisionswe had confronted, this was one to which nobodyobjected. The report was distributed to all members,a date was set and a meeting room booked.

As the time of the meeting drew near, coffeeand cinnamon rolls were promptly delivered on a

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the group between the anthropologists and thosemore technically inclined. The two anthropologists,Freja and Sol, believed that there should have beena socio-cultural presentation so that there couldhave been a better picture of the town. Vidar,looking tired, pointed to page 15 of the document,where the whole population of Jorvik had beenlisted. The anthropologists were still not satisfied;they would have liked a detailed description of theethnic groups. Eventually, the matter was dropped.

There were so many questions and problemswith the report that the group members agreed todiscuss matters face to face with the consultants.But the consultants felt they had signed off theproject and the embassy wanted to get on withfinalising plans, so eventually that idea wasdropped too.

Lagom had valiantly tried to influence theoutcome of the project but this experience hadshown how far removed a desk officer was frombeing really able to change the course of action.‘Participation’ had become more than a questionof involving the townspeople in the planning. Itcalled for a particular way of working. It raiseduncomfortable issues about participation, notonly in Jorvik but also in Valhalla, at the embassyand with the consultants.

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do it? None of them really had the time to read thereport properly and putting a response on paperwould be even more time-consuming. But whatthey did have was co-researchers, and not just anyco-researchers. One of them was Sol, an experiencedValhalla consultant. It was an almost unspokenagreement that Sol would draft the group’sresponse and Freja would ensure its delivery. Theydid just that. An excellent response was delivered asagreed to the Director General’s office and Frejaand Sol were thanked politely for it and told itwould be read with interest.

That was the last that Lagom heard about thematter. It was never mentioned again. They hadproduced, delivered and filed a piece of paper andthat was the end of the story. Needless to say, thiswas nothing unusual to those who worked inValhalla, nor did it diminish the group’senthusiasm for its mission. It did, however, workto reinforce the already-existing scepticism withinthe group that nothing written – a memo, a policystatement or an analytic paper – would make theslightest bit of difference to the organisation. Itwas precisely this rather inchoate andunarticulated feeling that would resurface sopowerfully in the group’s last joint venture.

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tea-trolley outside the room. The meeting began.Not one single member of the Valhalla group hadread all of the hundreds of pages of the document;some had read selected parts while others had onlyglanced at the introduction. The discussion startedfairly well. Those who had looked through thedocument read the quotes they had marked up tothe others. Some quotes were upsetting: the wholereport was flavoured with a certain image of ‘ifonly the world could become more Nordian itwould be so much better for all’. Other quotes weremore promising, relating to the group’s mission:more opportunities for poor people to participate.With very little knowledge about the content of thereport, the group still managed to spend a goodtwo hours having a very opinionated discussionabout it. They were, after all, experienced Valhallastaff who were used to attending meetings withlittle time for preparation! It seemed as if it wasmore comfortable to talk to each other for twohours than to spend the same amount of timereading.

As the meeting drew towards its end, a fewpoints had been scribbled on the whiteboard andmost of the discussion was safely documented in thenotebook of one of the researchers. The group stillfirmly believed that they should produce somethingfor the official Valhalla response but how would they

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The Document

It is generally expected that research projectswill produce some kind of document thatputs an account of findings and lessonslearnt into black and white. Lagom wanted to

produce something that would change Valhalla, sothe question of what kind of documents the groupwanted to generate had always been part of ourdiscussions. Then we began to realise thecontradictions between the impetus to produce awritten document and the experience of deskofficers with the Worldkom report.

In the busy lives of the desk officers,documents are a chore rather than a source ofinterest and excitement. It followed, therefore, thattheir colleagues would be unlikely to actually readanything that Lagom produced unless it couldhold their attention by being quite extraordinary.The written word, we had realised by then, was anarea of profound ambivalence. This was partlyabout time: no time to write, no time to read, andno desire for it either when it’s possible to speak,discuss, agree and argue. Paradoxically, too, thewritten word is also the place where decisions aremade irrevocable. But there was something more

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conference venue outside Nordstad, for a finalretreat and writing workshop. Here, we intendedto produce a short paper written for desk officersby desk officers on participation, and a briefing onthe methodology we’d used.

At the end of the retreat, neither was complete.We’d had an animated discussion, as a result of

which we’d agreed on what needed to be included.We’d busied ourselves creating bits of text. But itsoon became all too apparent that we had someradically different ideas on what exactly thedocument should contain. One view was that itshould be a guide for desk officers onunderstanding participation and its applications.The other was that it should address the deskofficer’s frustration and creativity and encouragethem to clarify their own ideas on participation. Wecould not reach an agreement on the overall formatof the paper and, almost as a reflex, Sol was left tomop up the pieces and pull a document together.

The document that emerged looked and readlike any other document that Valhalla mightproduce – or, as often happened, that a consultantmight produce in the name of the organisation. Itwas clearly written, comprehensive andinformative. It couldn’t be faulted for what it said.But it wasn’t Lagom. And some of those fromValhalla strongly felt that it didn’t represent the

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than this. Aid documents rarely contain anyemotion or demonstrate the desire to make adifference that was the actual motivation for manypeople working in development bureaucracies.Written in the passive voice, aid documents striveto be technically proficient, objective, impassiveand comprehensive.

Some of the group did like to write, and evenmanaged to find the time to do so. The space thatwas Lagom was, though, somewhere where thespoken word ruled, and where it was the veryephemeral nature of speech – spoken in aparticular place, to particular people, whispered,giggled, muttered, or uttered in tones ofexasperation, anger, despair, collusion – that madeit a medium with which we were comfortable. Itbegan to feel as if some of those in the groupbelieved that committing ideas to paper in such away would expose their flaws and those of thegroup in such a way that it was too dangerous, tooraw, too risky for them to contemplate. Anythingsaid could be uttered and forgotten; anythingwritten might be copied, circulated and judged.

Lagom successfully avoided producing anysignificant documents for a readership beyond thegroup other than a progress report that had servedan almost ceremonial function. Then the crunchcame. The group gathered at a salubrious

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real spirit of Lagom. We’d wanted to expressourselves but we’d become a secret that couldn’tbe told to the outside world. Something of ourintentions needed to be communicated beyondthe group but how to do so was difficult toimagine, and we became anxious once more.

The matter was taken back into the groupwhen Freja had an idea, recruited others to helpand produced a document that was unlikeanything that had ever before been written by orfor Valhalla. Freja had realised that if Lagom wereto produce a written document, it had to have thatextraordinary factor that worked like speechworked on people. This kind of document wouldmake a difference precisely because unlike thedocuments that ended their lives within thoseimmaculate cloth-bound official covers liningValhalla’s shelves, this one would be read andtalked about. It would be different. It would makean impact; it would be daring, funny, brilliant. Itwould be Lagom.

The new document, Voices of the Bureaucrats –Crying Out for Help featured a diary of a deskofficer, inundated with emails and meetings andgrappling in the midst of it all to have any space tothink or do anything differently. It captured theurgency of action, the sense of purpose and thefrustration – anger, even – that many of the group

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Voices of the Bureaucrats – Crying Out for HelpHere, if you work with poor people you’re a saint. If youwork with rural roads, you’re an ogre.

We have to get people to respect the bureaucratic workthey’re doing. They work with their hearts but don’trespect it. Part of our work is to get the funds throughthe machinery.

There are a lot of documents floating around. The wordsare very important but they just seem to float away.

These are the unheard voices of bureaucrats withinValhalla. Representatives of the bilateral aidorganisation that was one of the first to put theparticipation of poor people on the map of development.Every day they struggle with the administrativemachinery: correspondence that has to be registered,contracts that must be entered into the database, andfinancial reports that need to be followed up. They travellong distances to work on overcrowded trains, walkingcarefully on streets covered in ice in the early Januarymorning, enduring the long months from October untilMarch when the only light they see is the radiation fromthe computer screens. Some of them do this becausethey believe that the world can change, thatgovernments can be made to listen to the poor womenand men of their countries and the forces ofglobalisation can be harnessed into something good. Itis rumoured that others know how the diligentbureaucrat can claim more immediate rewards in theform of expatriate benefits – the lovely golf courses,sundowners at the yacht club and the big house in acountry where the sun shines 12 months of the year.


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could do the opposite of what the group intended:it might create an impression that this group werenot serious and mean that no-one would takethem seriously. And that would be serious.

More work was done on the Voices of theBureaucrats document to seek consensus withinthe group. Attempts were made to change its tone,editing out any of the lines that might disturb,inserting some diagrams for those who like thatkind of thing and generally softening its punch.But like any document written by a committeeand purged through endless drafts of what madeit hang together in the first place, it just didn’twork. And the document remained as anelectronic file saved in an ageing folder.

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members felt in relation to the grindinglymundane bureaucratic process and it did so inprose packed with verve and allusion. It was atotally different document and those who liked itloved it; others hated it. At the same time, it was adangerously different piece of writing, somethingthat implied taking a real risk: stunning if it cameoff, perhaps worse than embarrassing if it didn’t.

As the excerpt on page 50 shows, Voices of theBureaucrats began by putting the people whowork for Valhalla firmly into the picture.

This evocative account of donors’ everyday lives– the perks, as well as the hardships – was, somefelt, too close to the bone. It would upset people. Itwould annoy people. It would put people off. Forsome of the group, the Voices of the Bureaucratsdocument was delicious because it was sodifferent; for others, it compounded the kind ofrisks the group had taken with the Event. Asagreement on the final version began to coalesce,Lofn took a position of steely nerve and spoke out.

Lofn was uncomfortable with the idea of yetanother head-above-the-parapet moment. Herfear was that it would disrupt the slower, moreincremental, change that could be brought about ifonly no-one noticed what was happening. It was notjust the case that no single document couldactually make change happen, it was the fact that it

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Making Sense of Valhalla – The Red and the Blue

Our original concept note was entitled‘Making Sense of Participation inValhalla’. It was only after the grouphad abandoned the document, though,

that we actually began to make sense of Valhalla.It was Maya, who came up with a view of Valhallathat helped explain our dilemma. Holding one redpen and one blue pen, her head lowered over apiece of flip chart paper at a learning workshop inearly 2003, she drew a picture showing two sets ofinterlinked dots, one red set linked with red lines,and one blue set, linked with blue lines. Therewere no lines linking the blue and the rednetworks but they sat alongside each other.

Maya described the red dots as being theformal positions and artefacts of the organisation:its hierarchy, its policies, its formal meetings anddocuments with the blue dots representing theinformal processes: the people you know, thetelephone calls, the stories about what happenedwhere, the unwritten ideas, the ways things reallyget done.

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write lists of things to do and documents toproduce. Whenever we acted we went with theblue but we were masquerading as red: we wereeffectively making red excuses to be there, becauseno-one in the group felt it was permissible to useofficial time or the Nordian taxpayer’s money todo anything blue. We all knew that blue was asimportant as red in getting things done but therewas a strong sense that blue was somethingpersonal and that personal was indulgent.

Valhalla’s documents follow a format that iscompletely red but conveying what the groupwanted to communicate with their colleaguesthrough a red document felt wrong exactlybecause those in the group who objected to such adocument were perhaps the first to bin or filesimilar documents without a second glance.

What Lagom wanted was to capture people’sattention and to do the very thing that mostValhalla documents fail to do: speak to them aspeople, in a highly personal way. Communicatingin this way carried a huge risk. Lofn argued that itwas better to use blue methods and blue routes forchange but not to attract attention by ‘outing’ thegroup by distributing such a blue document.Others argued that it was a red document that wasactually needed, one that could be used tacticallyto justify blue activities or recommendations.

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The dilemma Lagom faced was that, withoutexception, the kind of documents one might findin Valhalla were red. Often representing officialdecisions, they were authorised or commissionedby those controlling formal channels through theorganisation. These documents tend to be bland;their function was as much to knit theorganisation together as to guide it towardsaction. Voices of the Bureaucrats was neither blandnor driven by the need for organisationalcoherence. It did not explain, set out a position ormake recommendations. It was, instead, a blue callto action. It was cheeky, speaking the unspeakable.Blue all the way through, the document could notpossibly have been mistaken for anything evenslightly official. This was its strength but was alsoits weakness. The fear that Lofn had mostpowerfully articulated had rippled through thegroup: that the document, like the Event, wouldbewilder rather than have the intended effect.(Quite what that effect was had never really beendiscussed but we had hopes for it all the same.)

Lagom had begun as a red network, an officialgroup which was to carry out an official learningproject. But its different gatherings, from the pubto the Lagom meeting to the Event, were eachdifferent shades of blue. Tension had arisenbecause the redness made us scared; it made us

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Conclusion

What conclusions are we to draw fromthese episodes in the life of Lagom?The tales we tell here speak of someof the difficulties faced by the group

in effecting change in their immediate organisationalenvironment, let alone on ‘development’ outthere. Yet, at the same time, these are tales oftaking charge, of a willingness to step out of line,do things differently and take the kind of risks thatwould seem anathema to what we’re taught tobelieve that bureaucrats are able or willing to do.

We rarely hear words of praise or admiration forpeople working for development bureaucracies.More often, they are described as middle-of-the-road, second-rate, obsessed by procedures, out-of-touch with what is really going on, behind-the-times, bureaucratic, thick-skinned, cushionedfrom reality, paper-pushers, rule-enforcers, boringand naïve, cloddish and arrogant... But those whowork in Valhalla are also public servants, many ofwhom chose to work in internationaldevelopment because they had a passionate desireto make a difference. No-one actually likes all theconstraining procedures, the red tape, rules and

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In retrospect, it seems extraordinary that wecould ever have thought that one document –whether a red one or a blue one – would be able tospeak to the organisation-at-large on a topic asambiguous and multifaceted as participation. How,given the many differences in culture betweenValhalla’s departments and individuals’ styles ofthinking and reasoning, did we think we couldreach everyone with a single piece of writing?

Lagom had worked on an assumption ofuniformity and a need for formality. Yet everythingwe’d learnt about Valhalla told us of anorganisation in which individuality was prized, inwhich unwritten rules accompanied the creativeprocess of rule-bending to get around a formidableand cumbersome bureaucratic system, and inwhich communication (and much of what wouldbe thought of as ‘organisational learning’) happensthrough informal, often barely visible, networksand interactions. Making the blue into red, or evenfinding a suitable shade of purple to communicatewith, just wasn’t going to do what was needed.

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sensibility... we also have to get people torespect the bureaucratic work they’re doing.They work with their hearts and don’t respectit [the bureaucratic work]. Part of our work isto get the funds through the machinery.

What makes the ‘passionate bureaucrat’ tick isa sense of connectedness with action, with seeingthings done – the impatience manifest in Vidar’srestless energy, Hildr’s indignance, Lofn’s carefulstrategy, Heimdall’s quiet passion, Hermod’sdesire for things to be done properly and Freja’sfiery frustration with business as usual – and withmaking the most of limited resources to bringabout the kind of change that so many of thosewho work for Valhalla want to see happen.

At first those who lived their daily workinglives in Valhalla didn’t admit that they neededtime to think, time to play even. This didn’t fitwith the image of what a responsible – let alone apassionate – bureaucrat is supposed to do withtheir time. But being Lagom and tangling with theBeast of Bureaucracy created the space to thinkand to play; and how good it felt to have, in themidst of the routines of a daily life full of emails,meetings and documents, that time to stand back,to laugh, to muse, to give voice to feelings andhalf-formed ideas, to learn.

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regulations that have to be followed butsometimes rules are justified: as checks on thepower of the individual and to maintainaccountability to the public purse.

The emotions and ideals that guide andmotivate the work of many people in Valhalla, andwhich prompted them to join an organisation thathopes to make the world a fairer, better place, havefew outlets in development bureaucrats’ dailywork routines. The emphasis is on being effectiveand efficient. Time is a commodity to be usedparsimoniously and to good effect. Talking caneasily become chatting or gossiping; interacting,musing, reflecting, discussing, even laughing, allof this takes time away from the other things thatmight – or indeed must – be done. Every deskofficer is aware of the guilt of ineffectiveness.Without opportunities to give permission todream, to build the spirit, to restore flaggingpassions and animate weary minds, what prospectis there for bureaucrats to do things that will makea real difference?

One Valhalla senior manager put thecontradictions that those whom he calls‘passionate bureaucrats’ face very clearly:

The idea of participation is being concernedabout the people... we need to invest in that

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as members on key policy committees, Lagommembers were able, wherever they could, to insertlines of text, quibble over new procedures andinscribe into bureaucratese some of the ideas thathad bubbled up in the group’s discussions. Theycontinued to go on duty trips and to meetings,conferences and workshops. But their contributionsin those formal spaces were qualitatively differentthan they might have been without the space andtime for thought that the group had offered. All ofthis could be paraded as Results. And it could evenbe measured by taking a word or phrase insertedinto a policy here, or into a consultancy Terms ofReference there, as well as by tracking back fromchanges that Lagom members were able to bringabout in business as usual. But to declare theseacts and name their effects would derail theirpotential to make incremental changes: preciselybecause they would then become visible.

For all our hopes and aspirations, Lagom wasnever able to really be red enough to succeed in itsstruggle with the Beast of Bureaucracy andachieve what many of us had hoped for: to bringabout significant changes in the organisation. Butthat was Lagom’s strength as well. Lagom allowedthe space to be uncertain, questioning, indecisive,undecided, and the time to mull over an argumentor to reflect on a question that had been needling.

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Words like fun, pleasure, laughter are notgenerally part of the vocabulary of writings oninstitutionalising participation. It is almost as ifno-one would dare suggest that so serious amatter as participation could actually be tackledthrough people’s everyday lives because it isimportant and because they believe in it and it iseven enjoyable to work with, not just a duty. Theimage of the faceless bureaucrat of the publicsector organisations is totally at odds with thediverse personalities and passions of the peoplewho work within them. The stories we tell hereemphasise that human element, bringing thedulled images painted of intransigentbureaucracies alive with the experiences of realpeople who are struggling to make a difference.

So what difference did it all make? Groupmembers carried the new questions they hadcome to ask into their departments. Lofndeveloped her own version of our methodology, afour-meeting-long ‘mini Lagom’ that got hercolleagues thinking more deeply about whatparticipation might mean in their work. Quietly,and at times quite surrepticiously, Lagommembers undertook many of those small acts thatthey came to see as the blue entry points forchange. Occasionally, some found the chance toinfluence the reddest of documents and processes;

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As Vidar explained, “I spend all my working lifetrying to be so damn effective. It’s such a relief nothaving to do that, I can even be creative.” Lagombecame a place in which a group of very differentpeople from different corners of the organisationcould find kindred spirits, bring meaning to theirwork, strengthen their resolve to persist with smallacts that might, over time, make a difference – andfind a space for taking pleasure in everydayworking lives that can all too often be such asource of stress and frustration. The Beast ofBureaucracy remains untamed but the spirit ofLagom remains undimmed – and for those whowere part of it, bureaucratic ‘business as usual’ willnever be quite the same again.

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The Beast of Bureaucracy - Institute of Development StudiesThe Beast of Bureaucracy and Other Tales...

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