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Paper short abstract

Private sector management consultants play an increasingly important role in public policy development and governance. This paper studies the nuances of consultant-government relations at the federal and city levels, and the impacts of this, using India’s smart cities policy as an empirical case.

Paper long abstract

As private sector management consultants become increasingly prominent policy actors, it is important to understand the ways in which they come to work within the public sector, the actual influence they have over policy ideas and approaches, and the kinds of impacts this participation has on development goals and on government capacity. The paper uses India’s smart cities policy as an empirical case. Given the intersection of digitalisation, urban governance, and the project-approach of the Smart Cities Mission (SCM) (2015-2025), this policy is a particularly interesting case where we see different ways in which management consultants have entered the policy arena, the roles they have played, and the extent to which urban governments have been hollowed out.

The central questions this paper answers are: what are the pathways by which consultants entered smart city development in India and how have they been able to establish themselves as policy actors therein? What are the impacts of this, especially on local governments? The paper builds on existing research, in-depth interviews with key stakeholders, and documentary analysis. It finds that consultant influence increases from the federal to the city level, and that, at least when it comes to the SCM, the federal government has played an outsized role in entrenching consultants. This paper directly contributes to this panel, especially its focus on institutional arrangements and the production of expertise. It also speaks to the conference’s wider theme on digital futures, shifting contours of power, and the framing of development in today’s world.

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This paper analyses how elite technocratic actors shape what counts as ‘successful’ social protection in Pakistan and Brazil. Using document analysis of Ehsaas and Bolsa Familia, it shows how epistemic hierarchies depoliticise development and privilege donor-aligned expertise.

Paper long abstract

This paper investigates how elite technocratic actors - policy advisers, donor specialists, consultants and transnational experts - shape the knowledge infrastructures that define 'effective' social protection in the Global South. Using Bacchi’s (2009) 'What’s the Problem Represented to Be?' framework, it traces how policy documents, evaluations and donor narratives in Pakistan’s Ehsaas programme and Brazil’s Bolsa Familia construct particular representations of success and legitimate expertise.

Across both cases, the analysis shows that what is framed as objective, technical or evidence-based is in fact produced within narrow epistemic hierarchies. Authority is concentrated among actors trained in elite academic institutions and embedded in donor networks, whose econometric and managerial logics shape policy design and evaluation. Their influence determines which indicators matter, which outcomes count and which forms of knowledge are elevated or dismissed.

In Pakistan, the longstanding imprint of IMF programmes reinforces these hierarchies. Fiscal conditionalities, targeting frameworks and quantification-driven evaluation metrics bolster the dominance of economists and data specialists, narrowing political debate and legitimising depoliticised policy templates. Lived knowledge from frontline implementers, communities and local administrators is marginalised or translated into pre-existing technocratic categories.

Brazil’s Familia, despite its stronger rights-based framing, reflects similar patterns: elite policy economists and internationally recognised evaluators play a central role in defining success and circulating Brazil’s model globally.

By juxtaposing these contexts, the paper demonstrates how epistemic hierarchies within transnational development ecosystems shape not only policy solutions but the very definition of the 'problem', while sidelining relational, contextual and lived knowledges.

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This paper examines how elite experts deploy "depoliticized" technical knowledge to manage agricultural populations in India's Flue-Cured Virginia tobacco sector across colonial and neoliberal periods.

Paper long abstract

My paper examines how elite experts deploy "depoliticized" technical knowledge to manage agricultural populations in India's Flue-Cured Virginia (FCV) tobacco sector. Through historical and ethnographic analysis spanning from colonial administration (1942) to contemporary neoliberal development (2015-2017), it traces how epistemic hierarchies rooted in claims to rationality and scientific expertise function as mechanisms of social stratification and political control. A 1942 townhall meeting during the "Grow More Food" campaign reveals colonial officials dismissing tobacco farmers as "mad people" and deploying threats of land confiscation when cultivators refuse expert directives to abandon cash crops in the face of impending famine.

This mechanism—of depoliticization through technocratic discourse—has persisted across time. Contemporary fieldwork demonstrates how state and corporate experts continue to pathologize farmers’ resistance as backwardness rather than recognizing it as legitimate political action, rendering farmers' agency itself the problem requiring expert intervention. And yet, the analysis reveals a more complex dynamic still: tobacco cultivators strategically navigate these epistemic hierarchies, forming calculated alliances with corporate entities like the India Leaf Tobacco Development Corporation to successfully resist state mandates. Both state actors and corporate elites function as competing sources of paternalistic governance, vying for farmer allegiance to advance their respective developmental agendas. Under neoliberalism, this triangulation has intensified as the regulatory state withdraws from direct market participation while maintaining its claim to technical expertise, leaving farmers increasingly vulnerable to corporate monopolies. The paper thus illuminates how elite control of "apolitical" agricultural expertise serves to reproduce hierarchies while obscuring the fundamentally political nature of development interventions.

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This paper tracks the historical trajectory of management as a professional discipline in post-independence India between 1950s-70s. It follows managerial experiments conducted across rural and urban settings by Indian industrialists, UN developmental pedagogues, and Ford Foundation consultants.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims to trace the historical trajectory of management as a professional discipline in post-independence India between 1950s-70s. It follows a team of textile industrialists from Ahmedabad (western India), UN-funded developmental pedagogues trained in psychology and rural sociology, and Ford Foundation consultants as they conducted experiments across the rural-agrarian and urban-industrial regions to establish the putative validity of managerial leadership. It tracks the discourses and practices of certain key figures who traversed the overlapping worlds of the state administrative offices on the one hand, and private businesses and industries on the other hand. The paper will trace the global shifts in the post-World War II period—fraught with Cold War anxieties—which generated the emergence of managerialism as an abstract organizational norm, as opposed to bureaucracies, for forming modern/rational capitalist democracies. Further, the paper aims to understand how such global frameworks emerging from the world of private companies and big business were translated within the context of the developmental discourse in post-independence India, and the relationship of the then emerging field of managerial studies with the concerns of the postcolonial state, filial networks of capital, labour productivity, and industrial efficiency. The first half of the paper will track certain experiments conducted by the aforementioned experts in the factory sheds of Ahmedabad. The second half will reveal how this Ahmedabad-based global network of technological, developmental and managerial expertise spilled over to the western Indian countryside and produced peculiar managerialist reflections on the social constitution of the rural society.

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This paper shows how elite experts shape “inclusive” policy in Haryana, turning caste injustice into numbers and sidelining the real on-the-ground issues. The process may reproduce social stratification and overlook who is actually able to claim affirmative-action benefits.

Paper long abstract

Development policy increasingly speaks the language of inclusion, positioning states and donors as guarantors of justice and participation. However, the making of “inclusive” policy is mediated through elite actors such as consultants, researchers, NGOs, bureaucrats, and commissions. Their claims to neutrality define what should count as valid knowledge and whose problems matter. On similar lines, the current study examines the debates on the sub-categorisation of Dalits to show how questions of historical injustice are translated into technical issues of measurement, targeting, and efficiency.

Using policy documents, court judgments, and qualitative interviews with Dalit communities, the paper discusses how statistics on “shares in employment” and ideas of merit are used to justify redistribution within already marginalised groups. In this process, policymakers overlook the fundamental question of what actually enables (or prevents) communities and individuals from claiming affirmative-action benefits in the first place. These processes elevate expert opinion and institutional authority while sidelining everyday experiences of exclusion (Rao, 2024). Instead of removing politics from caste, technocratic inclusion may reshape and reinforce wider patterns of social stratification.

Placing the Haryana case within broader changes in the development sector, the paper shows how inclusion operates both as a moral claim and as a tool of governance. The paper ultimately attempts to ask: who speaks for inclusion and whose futures are shaped by it?

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Paper short abstract

A critical discourse analysis of depoliticization of education through the introduction of 'School Management Committee' which is responsible for the governance of public schools in India. The committee functions on the principles of participation of stakeholders in the governance process.

Paper long abstract

This paper aims to explore the dynamics of depoliticization of school education system in India with the state introducing education reforms through policies and legislations inspired by the neo-liberal reform agendas. The core focus of the paper is on analysing the governance of school education system in the country and establishing a link between the depoliticising effects the reforms bring about through the new governance provisions of ‘School Management Committee’ (RTE, 2009) and ‘School Complexes’ (NEP, 2020). The RTE (2009) calls on parents to acts as “agents who should be morally compelled to send their children to school” and who should participate in educational management and monitor school functioning by becoming a member of the School Management Committee (SMC). A critical analysis of the SMC from the lens of post-politics literature facilitates the reconceptualization of this new mode of governance within the ‘new development architecture’ which emphasises on the participation of the stakeholder in the process of governance and which suggests “public-private governance as the order of the day”. Primary research conducted with the methodological framework of Critical Discourse Analysis informs the depoliticization of education through the new modes of governance in the Indian public education system. As a part of the transformation process there is widespread endorsement in current education debates of terms like ‘participation’, ‘devolution’ and ‘responsive bureaucracy’ for the purpose of efficient governance of the schools which the paper critically analyses to uncover the depoliticising effects. The conclusion highlights the widening educational inequalities that depoliticization lead to.

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Corporate-funded fellowships place young professionals inside Indian state offices, embedding corporate logics in everyday governance. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, the study shows how these programmes shape expertise, influence state practice, and raise questions about accountability.

Paper long abstract

Corporate-funded fellowship programmes have become a prominent feature of India's development landscape, positioning young professionals within state departments and district administrations. Presented as temporary capacity-building interventions, these programmes have evolved into enduring institutional arrangements through which corporate foundations actively shape the state's governance practices. This presentation examines how fellowship models—supported by India's largest corporate philanthropies—function as sites where development professionals are produced and where the boundaries between public authority and private expertise are continually negotiated.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork across multiple state–philanthropy partnerships in India, I trace the everyday work of fellows embedded within state systems. These young professionals occupy ambiguous positions—neither fully state actors nor external consultants. Through their routine practices, corporate rationalities emphasising efficiency, data-driven governance, and measurable impact become integrated into bureaucratic processes, framed as neutral technical improvements. I examine how practices of data collection, monitoring, and evidence generation become central to claims of expertise, shaping what counts as legitimate knowledge and how development is to be understood by state systems.

The presentation interrogates what happens when capacity building becomes permanent infrastructure rather than transitional support. As state departments grow reliant on fellows' presence, questions emerge about whose knowledge counts, and how dependencies on private expertise reshape democratic accountability. I examine how these programmes structure pathways into development work, transforming both the professionals who move through them and the state institutions that absorb their labour.

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This paper employs Critical Discourse Analysis to understand how texts produced by elite philanthropy help in its legitimacy construction and maintenance, and to analyze how the use of a particular language by elite philanthropy is legitimized within the development space.

Paper long abstract

From pre-independence to contemporary times, elite philanthropy has been a prominent presence in India's development landscape, particularly in the areas of education and healthcare. The intensity of this involvement is increasing as elite philanthropy is now embedded in the country's social policies. Policies such as the National Education Policy 2020, propose involving elite non-state actors in achieving the country's development goals, thus legitimizing elite philanthropic involvement in the development space. This paper examines how such legitimacy is constructed and reinforced through the discourse propagated by elite philanthropy. A part of this discourse is produced through the use of texts, such as policy briefs and annual reports, which advocate solutions for complex and politically charged social problems in an apolitical way.

Specifically, this paper employs Critical Discourse Analysis to examine the India Philanthropy Reports produced by Bain & Company and Dasra, aiming to understand how texts produced by elite philanthropy help in legitimacy construction and maintenance, and to analyze how the use of a particular language by elite philanthropy is legitimized within the development space. The use of CDA is an apt methodological tool for uncovering the hidden relations of power embedded in the texts. The India Philanthropy Reports are chosen because they provide an overview of the Indian philanthropic landscape, featuring a variety of philanthropic organizations and offering a self-portrayal of elite philanthropists. The focus on these reports also helps in mitigating the issue of elite access, which is ever-present in philanthropic studies.

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Paper short abstract

Drawing on interviews with Nigeria’s self-identified ‘technocrat’ class, this paper explores management consultants in government at a time when i)the development industry is being destabilized and ii)consultancies are jockeying to claim definitive expertise on frontier policy issues like climate.

Paper long abstract

This paper builds on growing interest in the role of management consultants as key actors in government (Hurl and Vogelpohl 2021). The role of consultants has typically been complicated in the Global South as they are not just engaged in the generic task of government but in the broader project of development – either through a reliance on development actors as clients or through a positioning as engaged in development as a specific form of expertise. The comparative sheen of management consultants is nowhere more distinct than in countries like Nigeria where the state has historically struggled to command credibility either domestically or internationally. Drawing on the author ongoing engagement with technocratic projects of government in Nigeria, this paper presents a work-in-progress analysis of 28 ethnographically informed interviews with management consultants active in the Nigerian public sector conducted in Lagos, Abuja and remotely in 2023. It presents the informants as members of a self-identified ‘technocrat’ class, characterized by both sought-after international mobility and the same generalized precarity that afflicts workers in Nigeria. Situating Nigeria-specific debates within the wider themes raised by the panel it highlights the ambiguities of the consultancy industry in light of two contemporary pivot points: i) the retrenchment of aid spending which both opens policy space for alternative private actors, whilst weakening their revenue base as donors withdraw and ii) the rise of climate and climate finance as a ‘frontier’ policy space where consultancies seek to establish themselves as definitive knowledge actors.