This forum article discusses how the Covid19-pandemic as a major public crisis is transforming the relationship between governments and management consultants, contributing to the deepening presence of consulting firms in policy-making and governance. It shows how the crisis has entrenched private advice in public policymaking as governments are spending millions of dollars on transnational professional service firms like McKinsey, KPMG, Deloitte and Accenture to coordinate their pandemic responses. Drawing from comparative research of India, Australia, UK, Germany andCanada, we outline how interests have been aligned through both the state's demand for quick advice and the readily available supply of expertise provided by firms seeking to expand their markets. In this context, we note that professional services firms have been able to leverage their scope, scale, speed and networks in deepening their role in governance, moving beyond simply advising governments to providing core administrative functions. We conclude by discussing the implications for democracy and the possibilities for contestation.
Prior research on consultants in policymaking described their expanding policy involvement and impact. This research focuses on consultants' policy formulation roles and on how and why these roles vary across jurisdictions and contexts. It draws on comparative research on healthcare policy in Ontario, Canada, and Victoria, Australia. Based on analysis of contracts and expenditure data, and 59 semi‐structured interviews, this research finds that consultants in Victoria are partners in formulation, used routinely for a variety of tasks, including core formulation work. Their role is institutionalized through formal and informal rules. In contrast, consultants in Ontario perform non‐core formulation work and are primarily active in linking the government to other sites and pools of knowledge. The paper ties this variation to public sector internal capacity and policy sector complexity. It offers new empirical data and provides a nuanced understanding of the roles of consultants in policy formulation.
Consultants are increasingly a part of public policy formulation, and their policy involvement draws extensive interest in research and public debate. However, there is a gap in how we think about their formulation role: they are often conceptualized as a type of expert, while their actual interaction with and contribution to policy formulation is much more varied. This paper develops a conceptualization of consultants' formulation roles. It demonstrates that rather than just informing policy formulation, consultants take multiple roles and interact with policymaking and makers in multiple ways. Using a policy network/subsystem distinction and a substance/process distinction as the main axes for analysis, the paper develops four role categories: (1) experts and knowledge brokers, in which consultants provide policy advice and analysis; (2) seeing for the government, in which they construct a picture of the policy field; (3) legitimizers and validators, in which they provide symbolic capital to policy; and (4) channels for stakeholders' policy preferences, in which they manage deliberation and synthesize actors' policy preferences. The paper provides much‐needed clarity on how consultants engage with policy formulation and policymakers and forwards our understanding of how consultants exert their policy influence.
This article develops the concept of policy advisory system (PAS) management in recognition of the need to better theorise and empirically study how governments approach the complex systems of advice around them. In our analysis, we go beyond the conceptualisation of degrees of government’s “control” over advisory sources. We use the dimensions of government agency and discretion and argue that PAS management falls into four forms: authoritative, dependent, laissez-faire, or absent. Using evidence from Australia, Canada, Britain, and New Zealand, we explore how governments operationalise these approaches through a range of choices and practices. The analysis points to the need to recognise that attempts to manage these systems occur both proactively and reactively with clear differences in the broad or narrow scope of management efforts.
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