Book Review
The Consulting Trap
How Professional Service Firms Hook Governments and Undermine Democracy
The consulting trap represents public sociology at its best: Chris Hurl and Leah Werner offer many detailed and informative case-studies of consultancy failures in the Anglo-American sphere and in the global North. The book documents the lengths to which citizen activists, journalists, researchers and academics (including Book reviews 2270 International Affairs 100: 5, 2024 the authors) have had to go in order to gain access to the sequestered knowledge about how consultants, academics, civil servants and politicians design, administer and finance public services.
This is a meticulously researched and trenchant critique of how outsourcing the design and delivery of public services to the consulting industry impedes democratic participation in decision-making about the ends and means of public administration. Transnational professional service firms (TPSFs) rarely consult with those affected by political or administrative decisions, or with experienced and knowledgeable experts in the field. This seriously impedes learning about the success or failure of new administrative processes and procedures. Worse still is their refusal to publicly record and share knowledge generated in the public sector, constraining efforts to prevent the repetition of costly mistakes or to fast-track successful programmes where they are urgently needed.
Hurl and Werner uncover how a lack of transparency and accountability results in opaque governance arrangements. The fact that private sector consultants are rarely academically or professionally qualified, or subject to formal procedures for audit and evaluation, means that their services rarely serve the public interest. Despite this lack of formal accreditation, consultancy firms are entrusted with astronomical amounts of public money, often charging exorbitant fees. One example shows a consultant charging fees of more than £6,000 per day for ineffective management of the COVID–19 response in the United Kingdom (p. 2). Knowledge gained in the public sector is sequestered and used to line the pockets of unidentifiable private investors, whose assets are held in shell companies located in tax havens across multiple jurisdictions. One case-study documents the privatization of open-source IT codes for exclusive resale to future customers at excessively high prices, tantamount to plagiarism or outright theft (pp. 4–5). There have been a few prosecutions for malpractice or fraud—but none of them were criminal cases, so no one has been held accountable.
The political dimension of the enclosure and resale of public knowledge acquires a particularly poignant edge when this knowledge is sold to administrations in the global South. Hurl and Werner modestly admit that they are not expert in this area, but see this as a vital concern (p. 151). They refer readers to other sources, especially to academics and intellectuals based in the global South, who condemn this practice as neo-colonial. Akin to a Trojan horse, TPSFs harbour a cargo of neo-liberal ideologies that favour contracting out functions of the state; imposing austerity measures in the name of efficiency savings; and promoting the privatization of wealth. Private sector consultancy is widely deemed to be inappropriate for designing governance systems and administrative functions likely to meet the needs of populations in the global South. Consequently, interventions by TPSFs have been almost universally detrimental to the health, wealth and well-being of these populations, radically undermining the evolution of national governance arrangements intended to improve the livelihoods of their populations.
Across jurisdictions, neo-liberal ideologies and practices have favoured a reimagining of the government as a multidimensional enterprise operating on a global Energy, environment and global health 2271 International Affairs 100: 5, 2024 scale. This risks making public administration increasingly opaque, as governments are unwilling to disclose the extent to which they have become dependent on consultants and at what cost. Outsourcing much of the traditionally highly competent work of experienced public servants and public service workers has devalued their commitment to make a difference. Indeed, they become increasingly demoralized as their value-driven role is reduced to an alienating technocratic performance.
Hurl and Werner end the book with a search for solutions to combat the consulting trap. The authors offer practical examples, particularly from Canada and the UK, of how politicians, civil servants and citizen activists have attempted to seize back the oars and ‘row’ the ship of government themselves, ‘steering’ it on a more democratic course. Decisions about the aims, ways and means should not be outsourced: that public sector officials need to ‘row’ as well as ‘steer’ has become an increasingly popular mantra in the sociology of public administration. What makes this book particularly valuable is how the authors have woven together political and economic critique, the sociology of knowledge and accounts of informed and determined democratic activism with deep knowledge of public governance and administration. The result is a passionate and immensely readable book.
— Hilde Rapp September 2024 International Affairs Volume 100, Issue 5