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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.