America First: How Consultants Got into the Public Sector

Outsourcing the Business of Development: The Rise of For‐profit Consultancies in the UK Aid Sector

“…7 7. Although see Kipping (2021) for whom the story of private sector entanglement in the public sector is much longer.…”

“…Since the mid‐20th century, these for‐profit consultancies have played a central role in the expansion of global capitalism (and have thus contributed to the growth in inequalities driven by this capitalist expansion in most countries around the world). They have enacted this role through their influence over the management of corporate and financial activity, and their role in training a global cadre of young professionals to work across the private sector (Kipping and Clark, 2012: 5) and, increasingly, also across international NGOs and state bureaucracies (Giridharadas, 2019: 22–34; Kipping, 2021: 44). Unlike previous types of development consultant, for‐profit consultancies are lucrative, often global firms, which arguably (albeit to differing extents) play a significant role in processes that are driving the widening global inequalities that many, more traditional, development professionals still believe their work is designed to resist (Boussebaa and Faulconbridge, 2019).…”

“…2. We acknowledge that management consultancies and the major accountancy firms have very different histories and lineages (Kipping, 2021;McKenna, 2006;Weiss, 2019). However, for the purposes of this article, we focus narrowly on their common involvement as contractors or service providers to the UK government agencies responsible for development spending.…”

“…For‐profit consultancies and public sector agencies have become increasingly entangled (Froud et al., 2017; Hurl and Vogelpohl, 2021a). Kipping has described relations between the public sector and private consultancies in the USA as being ‘mutually constitutive’ (Kipping, 2021: 37), and the term ‘consultocracy’ has been used to describe the role consultants have in government decision making (Hood and Jackson, 1991). New Public Management reforms (Arnold and Cooper, 1999; Christensen, 2005; Jupe and Funnell, 2015; Lapsley, 2009; Lapsley and Oldfield, 2001; Leys, 1999; Shaoul, 2011) and the implementation of cost‐cutting austerity measures following the financial crash of 2007 (Beveridge and Koch, 2021; Hurl, 2018) have provided rich case studies of the growing‐together of the public and private sectors, as the reductions in internal state capacity have necessitated the use of external expertise.…”

Regulating the wild west? Management consulting reform in Canadian government

“…The literature on the rise of management consulting in government, however, typically links the start of this growth to the adoption of New Public Management (NPM) precepts and subsequent public sector reforms in the 1980s and 1990s which correspond with a general increase in contracting among government agencies (Saint‐Martin, 1998; Vincent‐Jones, 2000). NPM thinking, it has been argued, led governments to deploy more “pragmatic,” or “business‐like,” approaches to the provision of traditional civil services, including bridging the private/public divide in service delivery through contracting out and other techniques such as public‐private partnerships and privatization (Kipping, 2021; Rosenblum & McGillis, 1979; Saint‐Martin, 1998). The “contract state” that emerged (Vincent‐Jones, 2000) subsequently expanded the use of contract employees in many areas, in some cases even engendering what has been termed a “shadow” (MacDonald, 2011), or an “invisible” public service of contract employees (Dobuzinskis et al, 2007; Howlett & Migone, 2014a; McCauley, 2022).…”