As one of the founding fathers of Politeia, Ruud Veldhuis believed initially that the network might be able to help its member organisations in acquiring EU projects. Now that he has left Politeia, he has to admit the network has never really succeeded in fulfilling that promise. Meanwhile Ruud himself has obtained quite some European experience. He tells about two projects for which he sought European funds. One was a success. The other was a failure.
Could you describe the project for which you succeeded in obtaining subsidy from Brussels?
The Education for Democracy project in the Ukraine aimed at installing democracy in the minds of the young generation and in the minds of teachers, civil servants, university staff and professionals in civil society in the years 2000-2003. I was approached for the project in the Ukraine by Civitas International, a global network for civic education. During the first investigation mission to Kiev, the EU expert arranged for me to become project leader. The Instituut voor Publiek en Politiek received a contract to lead the EU part and the Ohio State University was contracted by the US State Department to lead the US project (see Alden Craddock’s report in the last issue of Politeia).
How much work goes into such a EU project?
There is a lot of paper work involved, both in the application and in the reporting. Applying for such a project can easily cost you two or three weeks of work and if the project goes to someone else all that time will have been wasted for nothing. In order to further reduce its risks, the European Commission often demands that the main organisation should have at least 50 employees nowadays. This is not only advantageous for large organisations but indirectly also for large countries, since an organisation for citizenship education covering the whole of Germany will generally have more employees than its equivalent in say Luxembourg. All this paper work has given rise to special agencies that offer support in acquiring and handling subsidies. This is a form of specialisation essentially. The actual organisations supply expertise with respect to the content of the project. The supporting agencies supply expertise with respect to the management of the project.
Have you experienced the bureaucratic demands as proportional?
For a long-term project like the one in the Ukraine, you have to write a progress report every six months. You receive pages of instructions on how to report, in how many pages, using what forms and what matrices. Moreover, you cannot solve problems you encounter in the process on your own. If you had said in your application you were going to use this and this expert, including his CV in the application, and this expert happens to be unavailable – due to illness for instance – you cannot just invite another one. No, you have to ask special permission, sending in the CV of the new expert. If permission is granted, a side letter is added to the contract. The same procedure is followed when you or the specialist have to fly more often to Kiev than was anticipated while writing the proposal. You have to propose a change in the budget, make a new calculation, and wait for permission. Due to all these extra procedures, I would say that there has gone much more time into the project than was reflected in the fee we received in return. There was also something special about this particular project: it was transatlantic. An external (American) agency had been hired to evaluate the cooperation. Every six months both my coordinator in Kiev and I received an email that we could each fill in a form on their website. We consulted with each other on how to do this. Furthermore the Americans visited us two to three times in Amsterdam and two to three times in Kiev to get a personal impression. It was fascinating, instructive and time-consuming.
Do you see why Brussels does things this way?
It is a combination of two things. Firstly, the European Commission wants to prevent corruption and favouritism by putting up large projects to public tender and by shifting public servants rapidly from function to function in order to keep them from developing deep relations with people in the field. Secondly, Brussels aims at keeping the body of public servants as efficient and small as possible by focusing almost exclusively on process management and leaving the content of the projects to external experts. In the case of my project, the European Commission first hired an external expert to investigate the needs in the Ukraine. His findings determined what the project should entail, as was reflected in great detail in the ‘Terms of Reference’. The various proposals could then be evaluated on the basis of these Terms of Reference by public servants without specific expertise in civic education. This approach enables the European bureaucracy – in sharp contrast with their image – to be remarkably ‘lean and mean’. There is a risk however that progress reports are inadequately evaluated by the EU delegation when there happens to be no specific expertise on the project’s content in the delegation.
You sound quite positive actually.
Sure. It’s not all bad. I should mention another drawback though. The slowness of the bureaucracy can be lethal to the continuity in the field. After the project in the Ukraine had been running for two and a half years, it had already been decided that a continuation of the project was in order. The whole public tender procedure took so long however that there was a gap of a year between the end of our project and the beginning of its continuation. I received orders from Brussels to close our office in Kiev and give our computers away. A year later, another organisation came to Kiev and had to start all over again with renting an office and buying computers. It is perfectly okay for rich Westerners to give away computers to people with less purchasing power in the Ukraine of course, but the whole procedure can hardly be called very efficient.
Could you describe the project for which you failed to obtain subsidy from Brussels?
After the Instituut voor Publiek en Politiek had had much success in the Netherlands with VoteMatch – an Internet tool that helps voters determine what political party suits them best –, the information office of the European Commission in The Hague approached us with the idea of providing all member states of the European Union with a VoteMatch for the 2004 elections of the European Parliament. Armed with letters of recommendation by the information office, we then started a true lobby campaign to create support within the European Parliament. In the end, our visits to Strasbourg were to no avail however.
Why did it miscarry?
We never found out completely. What could have been a factor is that some politicians were afraid VoteMatch would have a political bias and would favour some parties at the cost of others. We are always very careful to prevent this from happening, but we have not succeeded in convincing everybody of this perhaps. With hindsight I would say that it probably wasn’t a very bright idea to try and do this at the European level. It was all or nothing as a consequence, while the political sensitivities and the enthusiasm about the idea varied greatly from country to country.
Do you have any suggestions for the future?
Back when I helped found the Politeia network, one of the ideas behind it was to inform each other of what was going on with respect to European subsidies. Now that Politeia is apparently rethinking its position, it might be an idea to pick this up again. You might consider a light version, in which the member organisations of Politeia merely share with each other what they happen to pick up, but you could also imagine a more ambitious approach in which someone is paid by the network to ensure that the member organisations are always abreast of everything that might be relevant to them in Brussels.
Krijn Peter Hesselink, Instituut voor Publiek en Politiek, Amsterdam