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Reut Marciano

Management consulting firms are increasingly involved in public policy in recent years in various jurisdictions. Consulting firms stand in a unique intersection of institutions and ideas since they regularly operate both in the private and public sectors and are often involved in advising policy actors in more than one jurisdiction. Despite being involved in policy, they are unelected and unaccountable to the public through regular democratic mechanisms. This unique position has drawn attention in research in multiple disciplines, with studies quantifying their increasing use by governments; research considering the discourse and narratives consulting firms employ when advising government, their association with specific policy ideas and practices - often as connected to neo-liberal and pro-market paradigms and how their involvement in policy is related to issues of accountability, de-politicization and public service capacity. To date, however, little is known about the roles they play in public policy formulation. Research in that avenue is important to more clearly direct the research on consulting firms’ influence and impact in public policy.

This paper makes an advance in closing this gap on consulting firms’ role in policy, by adding new data from 30 interviews with senior consultants and with their clients, in provincial ministries and service providers, in the healthcare policy subsystem in Ontario, Canada. I draw on the new data and integration with existing research in policy studies, organizational sociology, and business management to develop a conceptualization of consulting firms’ roles in policy formulation. I utilize the concepts of policy advice and policy management; and of policy content and process, as used in existing literature on other policy advisory actors. I argue that consultants take four major types of roles in policy formulation: (1) subject-matter experts and points of access to extra-jurisdictional networks - in which consulting firms offer advice in their areas of expertise, or utilize their broad international or cross-sectoral networks (2) legitimisers and risk mitigators, in which consulting firms provide symbolic “window-dressing” for chosen courses of action (3) conduits for stakeholders’ policy preferences - in which they operate as an arm of the state in transferring positions and insights from stakeholders that later feed in to policy (4) and finally, “seeing for the state” - where consulting firms take part in constructing the a picture of the policy field for the state. I consider how these roles came into play during the recent COVID19 pandemic, when governments in Canada and elsewhere relied extensively on consulting firms in producing policy responses.
This paper contributes directly to research on consultants’ role in public policy, by adding empirical data on their role in policy formulation. While their roles as experts and legitimizers have been discussed before in literature, the analysis of their role as channels for policy preferences and as an arm of the state in understanding the policy field, is an original contribution of this work. These roles, however, might take different shape and importance in different jurisdictions, depending on specific and local context, as I further discuss in the paper.