About the book
The idea for the book's format was inspired
by similar "documentary books" which I edited in Bosnia
almost ten years ago. Those books, The Road to Peace and IFOR
on IFOR, started out as photo books about NATO's mission in
Bosnia, but they turned into something a lot more interesting.
In order to find out what all these foreign armies were actually
doing, I went round interviewing soldiers and asked them where
they were from, how they saw the situation, and what they did
from day to day. By asking these simple, personal questions
– and showing an interest in them – I seemed to
open a door onto their lives and gave them something that many
had never had before: the opportunity to talk about their experiences,
their feelings and their views. These personal discourses were
a lot more reflective and coherent, and full of insight, than
I had expected.
When I thought about it some more I realised
that soldiers (or public officials for that matter) rarely have
the opportunity to express in-depth opinions about the issues
they are working on, let alone talk about their own personal
experiences. Not only are most journalists and writers not really
interested (although they do claim to be when they want an interview),
but there is no place in most media outlets for such reflections.
It is a rare and wonderful opportunity to be able to publish
a book based on the kind of personal interviews that you can
see in this book, Partners for Europe.
"The people behind the mission" are
often more interesting than the mission itself. For some time
now I have noticed how organisations tend to create artificial
scenarios in order to promote themselves. The history of advertising
is all about how big companies try to build an image and feeling
about their products – happy, exciting, new, sexy –
and this is done by using the skills of designers, writers,
photographers, artists, filmmakers and other outside specialists.
The people who actually present the product, and create that
sense of well being, are invariably actors or models –
people who either look beautiful and glamorous, or sound inspiring.
But do these people know anything about the company, or product,
they are promoting? Does it matter if they don't know?
There are many advantages to outsourcing the
promotion and marketing of an organisation: it is rarely a priority
within an organisation; when experts try and communicate, it
can get confusing; even writing a basic newsletter is more complicated
and time consuming than most people assume. As every mother-in-law
knows, it is much easier to advise people about how to do things
than it is to do it yourself; and this is as true for organisations
as well as people. But there comes a point when the marketing
and communications activities almost become an independent entity
to the organisation itself, and the ones who are invariably
forgotten in this whole process are the workers themselves;
the people making the product, developing the services, keeping
the whole show on the road. There are very few organisations
that actually promote their own staff, or the ideas of their
own staff.
The main purpose of this book is to promote
the idea of partnership as a useful methodology – as well
as a requirement for managing EU funds – and we decided
that the best way to present this was to interview people who
are actually working on building such partnerships. But partnership
is a subject which can seem dull and irrelevant to most people,
and we had to come up with a way of presenting it that somehow
brought the subject to life, and showed that this methodology
is not only interesting, but may well be useful as a means of
dealing with a wide range of challenges. We couldn't just present
a list of projects in partnership, or a list of rules about
how to run a partnership group; it had to be different, and
interesting.
What better way to "package" the
story of partnership than in the context of people's personal
experiences. The subject is presented here by people whose backgrounds
and current work is really interesting, and it gives us the
opportunity to look at partnership from different points of
view. In this book we get insights from the strategic, social,
economic, rural and personal points of view. Hopefully the book
will be a useful guide for those who want to learn about partnership
and know how to value the opinion of others.
We plan to ensure that copies of this book
are in all Romania's public libraries, thus making it publicly
available for people who need to learn about the mechanics of
EU integration. We also managed to show something of the LRPD
(Local and Regional Partnership Development) programme, which
has achieved a lot more than it set out to do and has impressed
everyone who has come into contact with it. Normally, one of
the problems with donor-funded programmes in Romania is that
they rarely promote their results or activities and the general
public often don't know what the money went on. There have been
many good projects funded in Romania; projects that could have
an impact at a national level if only the "lessons learned"
had been disseminated effectively. Fortunately we have had the
means with which to do this for the LRPD programme, and the
message about partnership is vitally important for the future
of Romania and it is essential that it gets out. We hope that
this message can reach people in the public sector, to whom
this book is primarily targeted, as well as to the people and
institutions that have an interest in the subject.
In the middle of 2004 Mark Barrett, the team
leader of the LRPD programme, asked me "how long would
it take to write a book about this programme?" I thought
back to those busy years in Bosnia, and what came to mind were
the final months when I wrote the introductions, organised the
production and finished off the project. I replied bravely,
"two months should do it." Six months later I was
still struggling with my final interviews. What the passage
of time had conveniently erased from my memory now came back
with a vengeance: just arranging interviews took a long time;
each interview itself can take half a day; and the transcribing
of them is incredibly time consuming. But the biggest (and least
visible) job involved was simply "thinking it through";
in other words making sure that the approach, structure and
content were right.
The production of the book went through various stages; all
of which were very distinct from one another; all of which require
different skills and the involvement of different people. Each
phase was interesting in its own right and is worth mentioning
here, if only as a guide for those who might want to try something
similar.
The first phase of doing a book like this is
to work out who to interview, and then work out how to find
them. It is quite hard to plan this stage, as tracking down
people can be difficult. Others don't want to be interviewed
and some are never really available. A certain amount of opportunism
is involved here; if so-and-so is not available one needs to
interview someone else; sometimes you meet interesting people
by chance and can arrange an interview on the spot. This is
what I would describe as the "data gathering" phase
and the only things I remember thinking were, "What is
my next question? Is my recording equipment working? Who can
I interview next?" It's not really possible to think too
critically at this point, or to really know which interview
was any good, or where it would fit in the overall structure
of the book. You just want to know if so-and-so can be found
and if the recording equipment is working. This process went
on for many months and I travelled frequently to the North-East
of Romania, which is where most of the subjects were.
The next phase of the process was to transcribe
the interviews to paper, and then onto a computer. Some people
asked why I didn't just transcribe direct onto the word processor,
but writing by longhand onto paper is the best way to patiently
analyse the interviewees thoughts and ideas. What was particularly
interesting about this phase was that if I started to add my
own words to somebody's expression it tended to lose coherence
and sound wrong; but if I would go back to the original recording,
and listen again, I would sometimes find the right combination
of words from the subjects themselves (words that I may have
missed on the first hearing).
This phase could be called the "data entry"
phase and it was the kind of work that needs to be done in isolation,
away from the office, away from distractions; one needs to sit
down and listen to tapes for days on end, then type up the notes,
and then listen to the tape again. I was unable to do much of
this in Bucharest, where I am based, as there was too much going
on to find the time for this kind of reflection. Most of the
interviews were written in a cottage in Sucevita, in North-East
Romania and a hotel room in Cluj-Napoca.
It was only after all the interviews were typed
up and edited that I was able to read through them and start
to think properly about a structure. The initial structure I
had proposed – based on the six counties of the North-East
region – now looked weak: I had more interviews from Botosani
than Vaslui; and how would the people in Neamt feel about that;
not to mention those in the counties of Iasi and Bacau, who
don't have any "representatives" in the book. But
this is not a book about counties or locations and does not
attempt to present all six of the North-East counties. It was
clear that the original structure wasn't right for the wealth
of ideas I had gathered from the interviewees and – with
the timely advice of Mark Barrett – we came up with the
current chapter structure.
Doing this book was fascinating work and all
of those I interviewed were both interesting and impressive
– even though I didn't include everyone in the final version.
I would like to thank all those, both British and Romanian,
who agreed to be interviewed for this book; people who opened
up and shared their ideas and hopes for the future and trusted
me to use their words carefully. I would also like to thank
the LRPD team for having the faith to commission such a book,
and my own family (two of whom work in publishing) and production
team – whose collective inputs and support were essential
in taking this book from a vague idea on the back of a napkin
to a reality.
Rupert Wolfe Murray
Editor
January 2005
