Ante
This week, the office became a new kind of living organism.
There was a proposal that the team was working to submit and each person had a distinct job to do in order to contribute. It was remarkably coordinated –a bit like a dance. Some would write, other worked on compiling data and information, & more still worked on editing the document in its entirety.
It was quite a thing to be a part of. Until not, I had through of the office as distinctly separate. Some work in the Caribbean, some in Northern Africa, and yeah, we’re all dedicated to the same kind of work but I hadn’t seen everyone dedicated to the same actual project.
It was nice to be a part of such a cohesive group. It was also very illustrative to see how much time and effort goes into a completed proposal. It certainly was a learning experience for me.
This whole summer has been a learning experience, really. Like the learning sessions.
Throughout the summer, Tim has been leading us through what he calls “learning sessions.” These are meetings designed to help us understanding the purpose of the work we do so that we have a better understanding of how is done and why it is so important. We started by addressing ethical concerns. I’ve mentioned this a bit before but the purpose was to evaluate Roy Moore’s actions as a judge so that we could see that these issues aren’t always as black and white as you might think. This is very important when evaluating the rule of law because we work in different cultures, who support different values, and it’s important to be able to step back and re-evaluate our ethical climate. It’s easy to get swept away in the flood but it’s important to try to stay grounded in our values while also being mindful and respectful of the cultures we visit and their values.
We went on to compare different ways of defining what “rule of law” really is. We did this so that we could start by building a conceptual framework. After that, we read a book by Rachel Kleinfeld (“Advancing the Rule of Law Abroad” if you’re interested) which gives an extensive discussion of different theoretical underpinnings to Rule of Law projects. In particular, she creates a dichotomy between two camps of theories: the first-generation & the second-generation. [Word of warning: her bias against the first-generation weighs heavily in her analysis and evaluation]
Lately, we have moved on to a very informative book on the differences between the civil law tradition and the common law tradition. It’s very historical and informative but we’re only just getting started so we’ll see how it goes.
But beyond the learning, I’ve been doing a lot of practical work, too. I’ve been reading reports and drafting summaries for program desk review. A lot of these reports assess the needs of the communities that we work in so that we can design better programs and write better proposals.
Everything NCSC does is based on the information we have. Before we can design (much less carry out) we have to research and understand the problems. Before we can even begin that, we need to build out this conceptual understanding of how rule of law programs work.