LIST OF PANELS

Building from the 2019 IPPA panel discussion, “Consultants as Policy Actors,” this panel explores the role and impact of consultants in the policy-making process, with a focus on policy ideas and practices. Over the past three decades, policy consultants have been taken up by governments around the world in addressing a wide array of policy problems in different areas, including big issues -- such as health governance, climate change adaptation, sustainable development, and e-government -- as well as more mundane problems such as snow removal, hospital construction and everyday accounting. Through this time the nature of the policy ideas with which they are associated seems to have evolved, as they have moved from the role of “rational planners” in the 60’s to “cost-cutters” in the 80’s, to legitimate actors in debates on policy problems and solutions today. Moreover, their position in the policy making process has been transformed, as they have become increasingly embedded in policy networks and processes as “co-pilots in the steering of government organizations” (Saint-Martin, 2013; 2017). 

As consultants have become powerful intermediaries in packaging and circulating policy ideas and practices across jurisdictions, a variety of disciplinary approaches have emerged that set out to understand their power and influence. Research on consultants has considered their role in the diffusion of specific policy instruments and governance arrangements, such as privatization and outsourcing; how their inclusion in policy processes have contributed to a shift to new policy logics; and how their involvement in the policy process serve to depoliticize policy decisions (Beveridge, 2012; Jupe and Funnel, 2015; Keele, 2019; O’Mahoney and Sturdy, 2016).  

References

Beveridge, Ross. 2012. “Consultants, depoliticization, and arena shifting in the policy process: privatizing water in Berlin.” Policy Sciences 45(1): 47-68.

Craft, Jonathan. 2013. “Appointed Political Staffs and the Diversification of Policy Advisory Sources: Theory and Evidence from Canada.” Policy and Society 32(3): 211–23.

Craft, Jonathan, and Michael Howlett. 2012. “Policy Formulation, Governance Shifts and Policy Influence: Location and Content in Policy Advisory Systems.” Journal of Public Policy 32(2): 79–98.

Hodge, Graeme and Diana Bowman. 2006. “The ‘consultocracy’: The business of reforming government.” In Graeme Hodge (Ed.), Privatization and Market Development. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar.

Howlett, M., and A. Migone. 2013. “Policy Advice through the Market: The Role of External Consultants in Contemporary Policy Advisory Systems.” Policy and Society 32(3): 241–54.

Howlett, Michael, and Andrea Migone. 2013a. “Searching for Substance: Externalization, Politicization and the Work of Canadian Policy Consultants 2006-2013.” Central European Journal of Public Policy 7(1): 112–33.

———. 2013b. “The Permanence of Temporary Services: The Reliance of Canadian Federal Departments on Policy and Management Consultants.” Canadian Public Administration 56(3): 369–90.

———. 2014. “Assessing Contract Policy Work: Overseeing Canadian Policy Consultants.” Public Money & Management 34(3): 173–80.

Howlett, Michael, Andrea Migone, and Seck L. Tan. 2014. “Duplicative or Complementary? The Relationship between Policy Consulting and Internal Policy Analysis in Canadian Government.” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue canadienne de science politique 47(1): 113–134.

Howlett, Michael, and Adam M. Wellstead. 2011. “Policy Analysts in the Bureaucracy Revisited: The Nature of Professional Policy Work in Contemporary Government.” Politics & Policy 39(4): 613–33.

Jupe, Robert and Warwick Funnell. 2015. “Neoliberalism, consultants and the privatization of public policy formulation: The case of Britain’s rail industry,” Critical Perspectives on Accounting, 29: 65-85

Keele, S. (2019). Consultants and the business of climate services: implications of shifting from public to private science. Climatic Change, 157(1), 9-26.

Kirkpatrick, Ian et al. 2018. “The Impact of Management Consultants on Public Service Efficiency.” Policy & Politics.

Leys, Colin. 1999. “Intellectual Mercenaries and the Public Interest: Management Consultants and the NHS.” Policy & Politics, 27(4): 447–65.

Martin, J. 1998. Reorienting a Nation: Consultants and Australian Public Policy. Aldershot: Ashgate.

Saint-Martin, D. (2017). Management Consultancy and The Varieties of Capitalism. In and M. H. Brans, Marleen, Iris Geva-May (Ed.), Routledge Handbook of Comparative Policy Analysis. Taylor & Francis.

Saint-Martin, Denis. 2013. “Making Government More ‘Business-Like’: Management Consultants as Agents of Isomorphism in Modern Political Economies.” In John Mikler (Ed.), The Handbook of Global Companies. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.

Saint-Martin, Denis. 2000. Building the New Managerialist State. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

O’Mahoney, J., & Sturdy, A. (2016). Power and the diffusion of management ideas: The case of McKinsey & Co. Management Learning, 47(3), 247–265. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507615591756

Veselý, Arnošt. 2013. “Externalization of Policy Advice: Theory, Methodology and Evidence.” Policy and Society 32(3): 199–209

CALL FOR PAPERS

This panel investigates the changing position of policy consultants in the policy-making process. We are interested in the variable ways in which consultants have been taken up by public officials, how they adapt and translate policy ideas to different policy milieux, how they are differently entrenched in the policy-making process, and what kind of impact they have on policy. We invite papers that interrogate the role of consultants in the generation of policy across different regions and institutional settings, their position in elite networks and their influence in the governance process. We are further interested in how consultants may have varying roles in different political, economic and institutional environments, and thus invite contributions considering their role in various polities, including the global south. Below we outline some broad questions that contributors might consider engaging with, although others are welcome:

Which policy ideas and types of knowledge are consultants particularly associated with? What is their role in diffusing these ideas?
How do consultants contribute to the introduction of new rationalities and technologies to the policy-making process?
How do they influence the circulation of knowledge across jurisdictions and how do they help to put this knowledge into practice?
How is the policy making context related to their role and potential influence? How do political and institutional factors, particular to different polities, policy sectors or policy subsystems, condition their role and influence?
What kind of power relations pervade the interaction of governments and consultants? How are they positioned in elite and international policy networks?
How do consultants frame themselves as credible actors? Whom do they engage?
How are community activists able to effectively engage with the consultation process and ‘talk back’ to the advice that consultants provide?