John Duncan

What Does Government 2.0 Mean To You?

In my blog I recently argued that communication was one of the core tasks of a professional diplomat. With the next major summit of Gov20 taking place in Washington in a few weeks, I have also posted in the Reuters “Great Debate” blog series some personal thoughts on how and why diplomacy is responding to the challenge and opportunities of web-based communication. Below is the text of that blog.

I came to this as someone who worked on mainframes in the 1970s, whose first PC was a AMSTRAD PCW with 512 KB memory. With that background and living in Switzerland, just down the road from where the world wide web was invented (CERN) it is perhaps not surprising that I view this technology largely as a range of new tools.

It is true that the improvements over the subsequent 30 years are extraordinary. My daughter’s iPod shuffle has more storage capacity than our home PC of only a decade ago. But, having once jammed an IBM mainframe in a perpetual loop, I am also conscious of the “Rubbish in–Rubbish out” principle. The tools are only as good as the use one makes of them.

The speed of communication and the geographical reach is equally extraordinary; developing the reality of an interconnected and interdependent world and new virtual communities. The arrival of these new means of communication is perhaps even more important and encouraging given the parallel development in the more traditional media, particularly television, of news as entertainment.

If net-based communication is changing the way we all access information and opinion, the impact on diplomacy and government affairs may well be equally profound; perhaps most significantly in terms of transparency and democratic accountability.

Both multilateral and bilateral ambassadors spend much of our time communicating the view of governments, both those of our own and those to whom we are accredited. So it can be said that we are often “marketing” ideas — what does the world we want look like and how to get there. It is noticeable that the diplomatic community reacts just as badly to spin as does the general public.

World Bank President Robert Zoellick commented in his address to the International Institute for Strategic Studies last year in Geneva, that: “ The interconnections of globalisation require our generation to recognise anew the nexus among economics, governance, and security”. So the 21st century diplomatic agenda is also a more complex one.

Traditionally diplomatic interlocutors can be divided into decision makers and opinion formers. Governments are not bureaucratic monoliths. Rarely are more than six people key to a decision. Our task as diplomats is to find those key players and convince them.

Opinion formers act as the multipliers. Having a well argued case is seldom enough by itself. Human beings still retain their tribal instincts, in sport as in politics and foreign affairs. We seem hardwired to view things all too often in terms of “us and them”, and diplomacy is no exception. Diplomats need the opinion formers as the people who give the “third-party endorsement” that reinforces our message; a classic marketing technique to respond to a trust deficit.

The internet allows the creation of a new world-wide “us” of shared interests and values. Social media networks and the blogoshpere provide new tools to speak directly to that wider community of actors that Zoellick refers to; going beyond the confines of traditional state-to-state interface, to test and be challenged on our ideas in a dialogue and sometimes in a partnership with civil society.

The figures speak for themselves. At an average international meeting one is talking to between perhaps 27-200 diplomatic colleagues. A post on the perhaps unfortunately named Twitter may get up to 800 or more, with a blog post several thousand.

And the numbers alone are not really the point. The net, Facebook and Twitter have more than their fair share of the minutiae of celebrity lives and get rich quick promoters, but the “political” virtual communities are self selecting and can filter out this background noise.They comprise a wide range of people from think tanks to journalists, students, to members of the public who care about the issues and are often willing to become involved with other decision makers. They offer direct access to the community that may provide third-party endorsement and at its best the creation of a constituency for change.

There are some who claim that these communities are essentially English speaking, if not Anglo-Saxon. The evidence suggests otherwise. It is clear that a number of those who regularly follow me on Twitter do not have English as a mother tongue. Some of the most successful FCO blogging ambassadors, such as Mark Kent in Vietnam and Alan Charlton in Brazil write in the language of the countries they are accredited to.  The Foreign Office uses close to 40 languages in its net-based communication.

For government officials, engagement with this new virtual community is a challenge. It is unfamiliar and fraught with the risk of making mistakes. But there are also opportunities to multiply the effect of what we are already trying to do.

However one of the important lessons from the last two decades it is that we should be careful to avoid allowing our enthusiasm for new ideas and a new world order to cause us to underestimate the opposition to change.  The international arena has given us some sharp reminders on that score. In the end we still have to persuade the decision makers. The Internet simply offers new and powerful ways to do so. Officials and governments should, and many are, seizing the opportunity

Posted at 16:59 04 September 2009 by John Duncan  |  Comments[1]

THE END OF DIPLOMACY AS WE KNOW IT?

This week Europe’s World magazine published a blog by the former British diplomat Carne Ross claiming “It is time to scrap ambassadors” Another former colleague Charles Crawford has responded on his own blog; so it is perhaps time for a serving Ambassador to give a view from the inside.

Certainly today’s ambassadors face major challenges to the way we do business and the need to demonstrate value for money in a climate of severe pressure on the public purse. But I tend to agree with many of Charles’ points and that Carne’s piece reflects some rather old fashioned views. I am old enough to remember the CPRS report that embassies could be replaced by the fax.

Paradoxically today’s Foreign Service is in some ways returning to its roots, to the task of communicating. If the core task of a diplomat was simply to faithfully represent the views of governments then Carne Ross might have a point. But it is more than this. Diplomacy involves an understanding of how to communicate those views to others.;  the building of personal relationships and trust. Diplomats need to be able to explain both sides of an argument, their own governments policy and the response of other governments to that.  It involves a degree of empathy (but not necessarily sympathy) to find out where the cross over in shared interest lies in order to form what David Miliband has described as“Coalitions of Consent”.  

Governments and the public service must respond to the communication revolution created by the internet and modern IT. Here Carne Ross is right and this is in fact happening in both the US and UK with the Gov20 phenomena . David Miliband himself a regular blogger will attend the next Gov 2.0 Summit in Washington next month. If this revolution reinforces the need for diplomat’s to have good  communication skills, it also allows us to achieve the restructuring of the  Foreign Service overseas operation that has been in train for well over a decade.

In the early 90s as the Soviet Union collapsed I was part of a group of (then young) diplomats opening new embassies across Eastern Europe. It was impossible to in the time and with the funds available to set up the traditional British embassy with all the trimmings, so we had to create a “virtual presence” often operating out of hotels, or in shared premises. Our teams were small and everyone from minsters to businessmen wanted to learn about and visit these countries and their new leaderships. Frequently we needed to bring in additional staff for short periods to share a workload that even larger embassies would have found a challenge.

Today the UK Arms Control mission in Geneva follows that same model. Only 10% of staff are permanently based here. The remainder only join us when and for as long as, their expertise is needed.  Modern communications tools;  from video conferencing to email and the internet, make this a viable  and cost effective approach.  Across the FCO network embassy’s are looking at these sorts of options.  Our bilateral embassies in the Nordic/Baltic countries already work as a network by pooling their expertise on a regional basis.  Bilateral Ambassadors  in addition to their traditional role and to providing a service to British citizens and companies, work increasingly on behalf of  a variety of  UK government departments and through both traditional and new players such as the NGO community.

It would be naïve to assume that such a sea change is anything other than difficult or without its detractors. But the professional life of an ambassador is already a far cry from that portrayed by spy fiction writers, chocolate manufacturers or indeed Carne himself.

In the next few days I will offer some further personal reflections on  “Diplomacy as marketing”  and the new communication agenda  in my blog on the Reuters Great Debate site.

Posted at 14:22 28 August 2009 by John Duncan  |  Comments[6]

Welcome

Welcome to our new Blog. As the UK's roving ambassador for Arms Control and Disarmament I have been running a blog diary for the past 18 months, so it is good to be on-line with a more interactive version. I look forward to comments and views as we show you what the work of a multilateral mission involves.

The Arms Control and Disarmament team is very different from most UK overseas missions. The core team is based in Geneva at the Conference on Disarmament. The Geneva team are the hub to 10 Virtual Teams drawn from across government, civil society and academia who come together to carry out the actual negotiation that is at the heart of our work.

Making a Better World for a Better Britain is more than just a strapline for us. It actually describes what we do since our job is to negotiate the international agreements in Arms Control and Disarmament that we hope will make the world a safer place. Many of the major treaties in this area were negotiated here in Geneva; from the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty going as far back as the Geneva Conventions, which protect civilians and POWs in time of war.

Of course negotiating treaties may seem a particularly dry and legalistic area of work with hours spent discussing texts and the meaning of words. But all diplomacy is fundamentally about people and relationships. Time and again we see that our ability to build compromises and to secure deals is based on personal understanding and trust between the negotiators. Having a good argument is rarely enough to win the day.

But perhaps more important is the effect our work has on people's lives. I think few people would question that the agreement to ban Cluster Munitions in Dublin last May will have a real world benefit to ordinary people caught up in war and conflict.

Over the next 4 weeks my Geneva team will be in New York for the First Committee of the United Nations General Assembly. We will be joined there by members of our Virtual Teams as the UN membership reviews the political landscape of Arms Control and Disarmament - everything from Nuclear weapons to landmines and depleted uranium. Some 60 resolutions will be put forward urging action and proposing solutions. I hope you will join us on this journey. It is a busy time for all the team, but we hope to give you a glimpse of what our work involves and will do our best to answer your questions. The links on the side bar will tell you more about the issues and our main webpage gives background and information on what we do.

Posted at 13:53 30 September 2008 by John Duncan  |  Comments[5]