The Governance of Management Consultancy Use: A Review of Practices, Problems and Possibilities

The provision of expert advice in government and its potential threat to democracy is not a new phenomenon (Grundmann, 2018), whether as technocracy or through experts acting as mere ‘servants of power’ (Brint, 1990). In recent decades, policy advice has been increasingly externalised and commercialised to diverse professional service firms (PSF), notably, and our focus here, management consultancy firms and divisions of other PSFs such as the ‘Big Four’ (Craft and Howlett, 2013). This process has been attractive to some policy actors for the relative speed of delivery (‘fast policy’), the offer of an ‘outsider’ or ‘modernising’ (e.g. management-based) view and the greater opportunity, as clients, to shape the content of policy directly. However, critiques emerged in the 1990s/2000s, especially around what was termed consultocracy - how public scrutiny and/or democratic processes were being by-passed in favour of consultants and their market-based approach (Martin, 1998). These and other concerns continue today. This chapter seeks to examine how they have been addressed by outlining the governance of consultancy use and its limitations and begins to explore some of the possibilities for improvement.