CIVITAS Georgica

On December 18th, 2010 a final workshop of the project was held with the guiding coalition members in Kutaisi.  Total of 6 guiding coalition members were present (out of 9) as well as Mr. Zviad Apkhazava (former deputy mayor).  Mr. Apkhazava, the original head of guiding coalition,  became deputy head of local council after local elections in May, 2010.  Due to his new position he was no longer member of guiding coalition officially, but he closely followed the work of our project and inquired about results of all workshops. We invited him because he was appointed as the head of human resource recruitment and assessment commission, thus his support will be required to implement any changes with respect to human resource management in Lanckhutui municipality.

The goal of the workshop was to analyse root causes of corrupt behavior and elaborate solutions.  The agenda of the workshop is attached.

The workshop started with reviewing of results of the previous workshop: “Getting to Roots of Problems”.  Namely, we went through the four problem trees developed by participants (which consultants slightly rearranged and redrew).  Following this, an individual task was given to participants to fill in special tables grouping the root causes from the trees into 3 categories: legislative, organizational and cultural/mental.  The combined results of their work are attached. (narabotkebi_english).

The next step was to identify, which of the problems Lanckhuti local government executive branch is capable of solving independently, solution of which problems they can influence and which root problems they can only appreciate (AIC method). We were pleasantly surprised when they put most of the root causes in the “under our full control” category,  many under “can influence” category and very few under “appreciate”.

Before breaking for lunch, facilitators reminded participants Lanchkhuti Local Government vision, which the group previously developed and asked them to think about and formulate organizational values, which this vision conveys. Participants identified the following:

• Unity
• Trust of population
• Responsibility
• Motivation to provide good service/work effectively

After lunch, participants worked on generation of solutions to the root causes.  This provoked an active discussion, since some of the legislative changes have been implemented after the last time we met. Namely, a system of electronic tenders (for selection of the infrastructure projects as well as vendor selection for municipal purchases) was introduced. The guiding coalition members claim that the system will solve many of the problems (root causes) that they have identified. In reality they have only started using the system and are not sure what corruption related problems it will solve and what new problems it may create in the future.  Until this issue becomes clear, participants suggested that they should focus more on solutions with respect to Human Resource Management (Recruitment and Assessment) as they consider this issue to be more urgent, important and within their full control.

Participants were given 15 minutes to focus on developing some solutions for the problems grouped into “under our control” and “under our influence” categories.  The brainstorming session followed.  The important role was played by Mr. Zviad Apkhazava, deputy head of local council, who provided a number of constructive suggestions. Next, guiding coalition members were given four dots that they could use to prioritize the solutions according to: importance , urgency, realistic to implement, will help solving other problems. The results of their work and prioritization process are Solutions.

The last task for the participants was to identify possible risks/obstacles that can interfere with their implementation of the solutions and ways to overcome these obstacles.  The workshop ended with summary of the one year’s work, and sweet Christmas and New Year wishes. Facilitators also promised they will provide official report of their one year’s work to the Mayor (Gamgebeli) in January, which would serve them as a reminder of the changes they have promised they would start implementing from the New Year.

Some of the pictures from the workshop can be seen below:

On October 8-9, 2010 workshop: “Assessing the Risk of Corruption and Getting to Roots of Problems” was held for members of guiding coalition of Lanchkhuti municipality.

Consultants decided to organize this workshop far from the working place of the coalition members as we felt that it was one of the crucial parts of the process and full concentration and engagement of participants was required. During previous workshops we found it challenging to keep participants involved all the time, as they had to attend to their daily duties in the municipalities. So this time we chose a beautiful mountain resort Abastumani and partially weekend to raise motivation and attention of guiding coalition members. And it worked well.

Total of 8 guiding coalition members attended the workshop including: deputy mayor and heads of infrastructure, finance, administration, procurement, information departments and chief specialist from property management.

You can download the agenda of the workshop Agenda_eng . During the first day we spent some time reviewing the work that was previously implemented by the group, refreshed their memory on definition of corruption and its forms (to make sure they remember that nepotism is also form of corruption), and reminding them the four areas vulnerable to corruption, which was chosen by them for deeper analysis and investigation: infrastructure project selection, infrastructure project implementation/monitoring, human resource recruitment/dismissal and human resource promotion. We also went through the process stages of these four areas, to make sure all group members have a clear understanding.

Next, we went back to the vision of Lanchkuti municipality, which they designed at the beginning of the project and discussed if anything should be changed/improved given that they understand the problems much better now. Together the group redesigned the vision, which now sounds as following:

Gamgeoba (executive branch) of Lanchkhuti municipality is trustworthy, unified and strong organization, with transparent procedures and responsible service, where worthy and adequate working conditions are created for effective functioning of qualified and motivated staff.

Then participants where given four individual questionnaires – one per selected area of intervention. The questionnaire contained the table: first column was breakdown of the area (e.g. infrastructure project selection) into stages. Second column was “possible corrupt actions” and third column – “causes or why is it possible to happen?”. Participants had to fill out 2nd and 3rd columns themselves. The questionnaires were anonymous to allow total freedom in expression of concerns. Some participants had difficulties filling out all cells of the table, but the workshop structure suggested by Anna was such that it did not make difference.

After the individual questionnaires, participants were divided into 4 groups according to four areas of intervention. Each of the groups was given 8 questionnaires related to their area and where asked to combine the causes of corruption expressed by the members of guiding coalition. They had to include all causes (whether they agreed with them or not) and put them together on a flip chart. The presentation of the groups and active discussion followed. As the result of the discussion the list of causes was further perfected/improved.

The second day started presentation of problem tree method and explanation of cause-effect relationships via simple examples. The fishbone diagram was also introduced to help participants to group the causes and understand the links better. Next, participants were divided into two groups to work on the problem tree for 1)selection of infrastructure projects 2)implementation/monitoring of infrastructure projects, followed by presentation and discussion. During second part of the day, again two groups worked on problem trees for human resource recruitment and promotion.

It should be mentioned that problem tree development process was not easy. Participants often messed up causes with results and were actively assisted by consultants. The presentation and discussion part was also very emotional and full of arguments, as many of them did not like the roots that they discovered.  With joint efforts we managed to redesign the problem trees in logical order. One example is attached.

When summing up and evaluating the workshop and talking about future work, one or two participants expressed the concerns, which in our opinion are demonstrate the problems in organizational culture. Namely, one participant said: “I understand the problems and need for change now very well, however, I am reluctant to initiate any change as I feel it will not be appreciated, I will face a lot of resistance, which may cost me my job.” This gives us a serious food for thought as we prepare for “finding solutions and planning stages” of our anti-corruption project.

On October 4th, 2010 Georgian consultants Helen and Giorgi had a Skype conference with Ana Vasilache reviewing the workshop agenda and trainers’ plan for  -”getting to roots of problems” workshop.  Ana made some very useful practical suggestions about the process.  Namely, first, she suggested using individual questionnaire to give participants an opportunity to freely and anonymously generate ideas about possible corrupt actions that can occur at each stage of infrastructure project selection/monitoring or in the field of human resource management as well as to think about the causes.  Next, she recommended to use group work to combine the causes for each of the 4 areas (infrastructure project selection/monitoring and human resource recruitment/promotion). This helped us prepare strong foundation for the problem tree analysis.

Ana’s help was very appreciated and useful.  We followed her advice and it worked well during workshop. Thanks a lot!

As the result of functional workshop II the guiding coalition have identified the two areas most vulnerable to corruption, one related to human resource management practices, another to infrastructure project selection and implementation. However, before moving into “getting to roots of problems seminar”, consultants felt the need to meet with the heads of the corresponding departments – infrastructure, municipal purchases and human resource (members of the coalition) in informal environment to get a sense of organizational culture and see a real picture of how the project selection or human resource hiring/promotion is implemented.

The meetings took place on September 23-24, 2010. As the result of 2-hour conversations with those members of the guiding coalition whose work is directly linked to the two identified areas, we got a lot of valuable information about organizational culture.

· Human Resource Hiring Procedures and reward mechanisms

Georgian legislation does not require local governments to announce open competition for selection of new staff. Therefore, in practice when there is a vacancy in municipality there is no possibility for an outsider (general person) to find information about it as it is not made public through media or any other means. Quite often they have only one or two applicants for a position, usually people who were linked to either local council or local administration in some way before. The stated logic behind this is that they need to work as one team thus they could not trust an outsider; they want the person they are already familiar with. Obviously, qualification of the person plays no role in selection process since there are no objective selection criteria (e.g. qualification requirements) and no formal job descriptions in the organization. (It is interesting to note that the head of HR was quite reluctant to speak about these issues freely and was not happy to admit the situation to us, but her protests, tension and worries gave us a lot of indirect information about organizational culture.) Such human resource hiring procedures has been in effect for the last 12 years.

Moreover, there is no mechanism in place for assessment of employee performance. Thus, any promotion/punishment if it happens is a subjective decision of the head of organization. The bonus system is occasional: has a form of sum of money given to all employees despite there performance on major holidays. The employees have no contract, they are permanent staff. The head of the organization (mayor) has a right to officially, in written form, to warn the employee if his/her performance is not satisfactory and in extreme case to dismiss the person. However, nobody was ever dismissed from the position (except from the person who was under investigation for criminal offense) – another good indication of the organizational culture.

· Infrastructure Project Selection/Implementation

The heads of infrastructure and municipal purchases divisions were more open and freely talked about the process of project selection/implementation monitoring. We have learned that out of the X number of applications received by the municipality, the commission consisting of 5-6 municipal employees and local councilors selects K priority issues based on two criteria: number of beneficiaries affected and if it can be financed from the year’s budget. They are totally free to make this decision and nobody checks how they do the first screening. After this a private company hired by municipality prepares projects on all K issues. Since the company is not paid until the project is financed and even then the fee is not too large, not many companies are willing to do it. In fact municipality has agreement for the same company for the last several years. The ready projects are subject to approval by local council and out of K projects, only N may get financing. Since municipality staff does not have enough technical knowledge to check the quality of the projects, the largest and most expensive projects are sent to Tbilisi, licensed private company for quality check. This was own initiative of the local government of Lanchkhuti after they faced quality problems in the past. According to Georgian legislation, only projects worth 100 000 GEL (about 55 000 USD) or more, must go through tender (closed price quotation), the smaller projects can be awarded directly by municipality to an implementing organization.

The projects, which go through tender, are selected based on the cheapest price proposed (provided that the company is not on “black list” of municipality due to poor performance in the past, has all papers in order and does not owe money to the state budget). The quality of the project maybe checked by the company who developed the project proposals for the municipality, but there is no mechanism to prove to the bidder that their price is unrealistic. However, it helps the local government to be aware of the risks.

The project under 100, 000 GEL are announced in local paper and usually companies come directly to municipality with their proposals. The decision is made collectively by heads of infrastructure, purchases and property department, based on previous reputation and if company has paperwork in order. Thus this is also totally subjective decision, which depends on the professionalism, honesty and good will of the specific people.

The monitoring of implementation is done by external audit company (audit costs are included in project budget) as well as inspection group consisting of municipality staff. Audit company prepares report after completion of each stage of the project, after which the inspection group monitors and then the payment for the stage is made. Prepayment practice is not used. If the timeline of the project is not respected, the company will be fined for each week of delay.

As we can see there are much more control mechanisms with respect to infrastructure project selection/monitoring (compared to HR management), however, the procedure is still very vulnerable to corruption, since many decisions are made subjectively by municipality employees and thus everything depends on their good will and honesty. If someone decides to engage in corrupt behavior (nepotism, patronage or kick back), there are plenty of opportunities to do so.

More importantly, organizational culture supports patronage and nepotism. Trust and personal relations are valued more that professionalism.

On July 22, 2010 Functional Analysis Workshop II was held.  It was lead by the two consultants from Civitas Georgica and attended by 9 guiding coalition members.  This meeting had two purposes:

1. to meet new guiding coalition members – There were some human resource changes as the result of local elections in May 2010 and some key positions were occupied by new people. After consultations with the Mayor we decided to involve new people in the guiding coalition based on their new position in municipality rather than involving old members, who have been elected to local council and thus have no executive/decision making power anymore.  Namely, the chairman of the guiding coalition was changed, since the mayor has new deputy now: Mr. Nugzar Glonti.  Also the head of property management department was replaced and the new person now is Mr. Zaza Kavzinadze.
2. To present results of the three surveys (vulnerability analysis by guiding coalition members and municipal employees and customer (public) satisfaction survey.) and decide together on the areas, which local government will focus on to eliminate opportunities to corruption and achieve organizational integrity.

The first half of the meeting we spent on recalling the progress of their work, old guiding coalition members explaining to the new ones what stages they have went through and where they are now.

Following this, consultants presented results of the surveys. A lively and active discussion followed. Some members were surprised/not pleased with the results. Particularly interesting was comparing opinions of themselves, regular municipal employees and citizens. Special focus was placed on problematic areas that appeared in all three or at least two survey results.  Afterwards, guiding coalition members analyzed and weighted each issue and acknowledging difficulties discarded some areas that they can do nothing about (as  e.g. some require legislative changes on national level etc.) Finally, the following issues were selected for deeper analysis and improvement:

1. Human resources management:

• Recruiting/dismissal
• Promotion, bonuses, assessment

2. Property management (including land and leasing issues)

3. Improvement of municipal territory

• Selection of infrastructure projects
• Control of implementation/monitoring of implementation of infrastructure projects

We agreed to meet in September and work on getting to roots of these problems and finding reasons why these areas are viewed as most vulnerable to corruption by them, their employees and general public.  Overall, the meeting was very satisfactory. Some pictures of the event can be seen below:

1. Municipal employee survey

As the result of Functional Analysis Workshop 1, guiding coalition members identified some areas vulnerable to corruption as described in our previous blog post. However, we wanted to validate results of this analysis by comparing it with similar survey of municipal employees as well as public opinion survey about perceived level of corruption in their local government.

Originally it was planned that guiding coalition members, most of whom are heads of departments within municipality will perform municipal employee survey themselves, using the similar corruption vulnerability analysis questionnaire, which they themselves filled out. However, this time, taking into account suggestions made during Functional Analysis Workshop I, we made the questionnaire more detailed, breaking down each local government function into sub-functions, to avoid any misinterpretation.

However, after analyzing the questionnaires received from municipal employees, it became obvious that we would have to conduct the survey of employees again ourselves, because collected data was unreliable. Many questionnaires were filled out incorrectly, some rows were left blank, and some numbers seemed completely random.  It is possible that guiding coalition members either did not provide enough explanation of the corruption formula or did not give clear instructions to their employees how to complete questionnaires, which resulted in confusing responses.

Thus, we packed our things and went to Lanchkhuti for the whole week of July 19-23, 2010.

We started by conducting municipal employee survey ourselves and interviewed 20 employees, taking proper time to explain corruption formula and the vulnerability analysis process.  Moreover, guiding coalition members decided to fill out the more detailed version of questionnaires as well, to make the results more easily comparable.

Next we spent the whole day analyzing the data. The results were as follows:

Corruption Vulnerability Assessment by Municipal Employees, most corrupt functions/procedures:

At the same time the new survey of guiding coalition members yielded the following pictures with respect to corruption:

As can be seen from the two table above there are lots of issues in common.

2. Public Opinion survey

Public opinion survey was conducted by students using questionnaires prepared by consultants and based on 1 day coaching that consultants provided to the students. Total of 200 respondents were interviewed, of both genders, different ages, with different levels of education. Some were interviewed entering or exiting town hall, others shops or other places of public gathering.  (Originally it was planned to get responses from additional 400 people via newspaper, however it became practically impossible to do it since the questionnaire was too long (4 pages) and newspaper refused to print it as it would require the space of the whole issue ).

On July 21-22, 2010 we analyzed the 200 questionnaires and summarize the results in the form of the presentation (survey_results_eng), which we showed to guiding coalition during Functional Workshop 2.

Moreover, for comparison we included in the presentation the results of corruption vulnerability analysis performed by the guiding coalition members as well as municipal employees. As can be seen in presentation (survey result eng) there were some areas/issues that showed up in all three survey results.

Function Workshop 1 was held with the guiding coalition of Lanchkhuti municipality on April 23^rd, 2010. We were lucky this time, as we had Nicole Rate and Adrea Buzec from FPDL visiting us from Romania. On Thursday 22nd, we had a rare opportunity to go through the workshop design with them and receive some feedback, suggestions for improvement. It was very helpful, thanks!!!

Apart from professional help of course, we were very glad to see good friends again and welcome them first time in Georgia! We spent several wonderful evening together.

The Functional Workshop 1 was quite successful. We had some changes in composition of the group: the deputy mayor had to resign since he is taking part in local elections on May 30, 2010 and according to Georgian legislation, he has no right to serve as executive. Thus, he was absent from the meeting, which on one hand was to our advantage, since he usually tries to dominate the conversation and discussion.  The other members of guiding coalition were present and quite involved in the process, in particular heads of the following departments: finance and budgeting; infrastructure, procurement and property.

It should be mentioned that it was the first time we started actively introducing and using term corruption with the group. Before, we were more focusing on internal structure and organizational assessment of Lanchkhuti local government. Thus, we were a little bit nervous, how they would take it and careful in using the wording: stressing “the opportunities” for corruption rather than existence of corruption.

Surprisingly, we faced much less resistance from the group than expected. The term “corruption” did not scare them away. Although several members tried to point out that with existing relationships and people who work for town hall corruption is unimaginable, but facilitators directed this conversation into assessment of “possibilities for corrupt behavior, if all of existing staff members change.”, which broke down the opposition.

The agenda of the day is attached. agenda_eng

The meeting started with Nicole Rata congratulating Lanchkhuti local government for their courage to participate in the project and talk openly about corruption, followed by brief outline of Craiova experience. Then facilitators started discussion about local government functions, deliberately distinguishing them from responsibilities of separate departments (this was done to later make the process of assessing vulnerability to corruption easier, so that participants are not pointing fingers at particular departments represented in guiding coalition, but are evaluating the general functions, which can be shared by several departments of local government). After the functions were identified (the group added several to the list proposed by facilitators), the term corruption was introduced through exercise. Participants in groups were asked to draw their associations/attitudes towards the word corruption.  Their drawings are listed below.

As we can see all of them associate corruption with something negative. This was followed by formal presentation on corruption and its forms as well as corruption IQ test.  As expected, such forms of corruption as nepotism (rooted in culture/traditions) and “gift of gratitude” vs “bribe” provoked questions and disagreement between the participants. Several cases were discussed and analyzed.

After the lunch, facilitators introduced corruption formula and explained how to apply it. Then participants were given time to assess their local government’s functions using the formula.  According to participant assessment Public Procurement was identified as most vulnerable for corruption, followed by issuing permits, local tax collection and human resource management (see table below):

During discussion, which followed, these results were analyzed. Participants mentioned that infrastructure management was not assessed as vulnerable to corruption, because one of its main components was procurement (so some may have assessed infrastructure procurement in procurement function). Since it was agreed to conduct the wider assessment of vulnerability to corruption by other staff member of local government (this will be done by guiding coalition members themselves, among their staff) facilitators promised to split infrastructure procurement from other functions of infrastructure management, to avoid duality of interpretation. At the end of the day guiding coalition members were shown the graph of public spending split according to local government functions.  Particular attention was paid on social assistance spending v.s. prevention measure spending (e.g. on natural disasters). The workshop ended with a wrap-up and the homework.

Overall, the workshop was quite successful and is set good foundation for the participants to see and analyze possibilities of corruption in their local government.

On March 5, 2010  Building Guiding Coalition Workshop was held in Lanchkhuti Municipality.

The meeting started at 13:00 sharp and all participants were on time (we were pleasantly surprised by this knowing Georgian  “punctuality” in general).  We were slightly surprised to see several new faces (compared to previous meeting), but deputy mayor explained that unfortunately heads of two departments were out of town and had to be substituted by other members of their departmenst.  We highlighted the importance of all members of guiding coalition to stay committed and be present at all meetings and suggested that may be we should make some changes to the original list of members,  to substitute those who are “super busy” at work with maybe deputies who are more available and will be more committed to take part in the work of guiding coalition.

We started by getting to know each other better exercise, asking participants to name what they consider their major professional achievements during work for the Lanchkhuti local government organization. Participants liked this exercise, though the process was a little manipulated by the deputy mayor, who talked a lot about achievements of local government as a whole as well as accomplishments of his staff, but not himself (we had to push him back on track several times to talk about his personal accomplishments).

We than briefly presented the process of leading organizational change through the famous  “penguin story” (“Our Iceberg is Melting”  by John Kotter), which provoked lively discussion about methodology used in the story among the participants.

This was followed by an exercise where participants split in two teams had to construct the process of leading the organizational change.  They were given cards with different steps of the process and they had to put them in order.  The results of the two team were different, so very active discussion followed.

Following this, we then had to break for 1.5 hours for lunch and also for the guiding coalition members to attend to some of their daily responsibilities. This was their special request and all of them (except deputy mayor) promised to return from break on time. And they kept the promise.

After the break consultant proposed several exercises,  so that participants can assess their personal strengths and weaknesses and evaluate how powerful are they as a team (this was achieved though an exercise in which each member had to state what powers other members are perceived to possess and an exercise in which personal strength and weaknesses were summarized on one flipchart and negative traits were canceled out by opposite positive traits possessed by some other member of the team).  Participants willingly participated in both of these exercises and completed the tasks with full responsibility and discussed things eagerly.

The meeting ended with giving out the homework for the next time and agreeing for the next meeting to be held on March 25th, 2010. The meeting lasted for about 3.5 hours (excluding break).

Overall consultants are satisfied with the meeting as they managed to trigger participants interest towards the process and give them some food for thought.

On February 17 consultants Giorgi and Helen met with Gamgebeli of Lanckhuti municipality Mr. Giorgi Goguadze and explained to him in detail the project content and the commitment required from Lanckhuti local government. Deputy Gamgebeli Mr. Zviad Apkhazava also attended the meeting.

Gamgebeli welcomed the project launch in Lanchkhuti and expressed his readiness to assist consultants in their work.  He particularly liked that project is not providing external expert advice but is focusing is on using local municipality staff for diagnosis and treatment of all existing or potential problems with municipality services.

Together with Gamgebeli the list of members of Guiding Coalition was constituted, which currently looks as follows:

1. Mr. Zviad Apkhazava, Deputi Gamgebeli as leader of the group
2. Mr. David Chakashua, head of infrastructure service
3. Ms Lia Imnadze, head of organizational service (it also involves human resource management)
4. Ms Maia Apkhazava, head of procurement Service
5. Mr. Kakha Chkhartishvili, lead specialist, Finance and Budgetign Service
6. Ms Maka Gogichaishvili, head of Social service
7. Ms Eter Chkonia, head of public relations department
8. Mr. Amiran Gigineishvli, local councilor from Jurukveti teritorrial entity.

On Februrary 18, 2010 first meeting with the guiding coalition was also held. Gamgebeli, Mr.Giorgi Goguadze introduced the consultants to the group, who presented the project and explained level of responsibility and intestity of work for the group. The group reaction was positive, everyone seemed interested to participate.

The next meeting was scheduled for March 5.

The pilot consulting project “Cooperation for Development: Working together for organizational integrity and preventing corruption” has started in Lanchkhuti municipality. The similar project is implemented simultaneously in three countries: Georgia, Croatia and Poland with expert support of FPDL -Romania and World Bank and financially supported by local government initiative of OSI.

The project based on methodology developed by Robert Klitgaard of Harvard Kennedy School of Government and popularized by Mayor Ronald MacLean Abaroa, who successfully applied it in La Paz, Bolivia, is first project of this type implemented in Georgia. The project treats corruption as development issue, which can be fully eliminated and/or prevented only by building organizational integrity of public institutions i.e. establishing procedures and reward/punishment mechanisms that leave no opportunities for engaging in corrupt behavior.

The project is using Guiding Coalition of municipality staff and local councilors as a driving force for the process of analyzing local government organization, identifying the problematic areas and developing solutions. It involves one year systematic work by Guiding Coalition facilitated by anti-corruption experts. An Action Plan aimed at preventing corruption and improving local government services will be an output of the project.