Paper short abstract:

The paper draws on reports and documents that were made public during the state capture scandal in South Africa to analyse how management consulting firms influence political preferences and contributed to shape development plans set by the South African government in the years 2010s.

Paper long abstract:

This article is part of a larger research project on management consulting firms in the South. It examines the role of management consultants in the state capture scandal in South Africa. There are political debates and judicial enquiries into the role of these firms in facilitating corruption and misappropriation of public funds. But little attention has been given to the role of these firms in creating desirable futures. The article draws on original reports and documents to analyse how these companies helped to establish certain policy preferences and shape the development plans set by the South African government. Most of these visions were based on the idea that the continent would be the new growth frontier and that after the Asian tigers and dragons, African lions would emerge. In this perspective, the government was expected to take specific measures to improve productivity, to take advantage of what was believed to be the future structure and opportunities of global trade and to increase the specialisation of the South African economy and its various niches. The paper will also consider how the vision plans and policies devised by the consultants created a service for the services they then provided to their clients, namely training, reworking institutions and public procurement systems.

Paper short abstract:

This paper describes and conceptualizes the partnership between GIZ and the AU Commission. It focuses on the daily interactions between GIZ advisors and AU staff in Addis Ababa and investigates how GIZ’s consultancy work impacts on visions of African border governance and development.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on the partnership between “Gesellschaft für internationale Zusammenarbeit GmbH” (GIZ), a private German development agency, and staff at the African Union Commission’s Department for Political Affairs, Peace and Security (AUC PAPS) in Addis Ababa. It forms part of a slowly growing corpus of critical research on IOs in the Global South and their external partnerships. The role of GIZ as a de facto consultancy that advises the AU and its member states on various governance issue has not been the subject of an academic analysis yet. This paper describes and conceptualizes the daily interactions, interpersonal dynamics, and decision-making processes between GIZ advisors and their counterparts at the AU, using the example of joint knowledge production in the context of the AU Border Programme (AUBP). Perceptions of the respective “other”, diverging career incentives and assumptions about how things should be done differ significantly, leading to a variety of challenges in the partnership on the ground. Informed by organizational anthropology and sociology perspectives that aim to make sense of “Aidland”, this paper is based on extensive field work in Addis Ababa, including interviews with programme staff and consultants, participant observation and document analysis. I argue that this partnership cannot be fully understood through a clear-cut “donor-recipient” lens. Instead, it is fraught with various forms of contestations and pockets of agency. By highlighting the marges de manoeuvre available to both GIZ and the AU Commission, this paper makes an empirical contribution to the debate on agency in international development cooperation.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents the initial findings of new project mapping the role of management consultancies and professional services firms in government in Nigeria, and contextualises the rise of consultancies as a new frontier of private sector involvement in governance.

Paper long abstract:

This paper responds to the quiet but steady growth of management consultants in the heart of government (Ylönen and Kuusela 2019). Echoing longstanding concerns with corruption and good governance, the phenomenon of management consultants in government raise new questions about the relationship between privately employed actors and the public nature of state bureaucracies.

Against a backdrop of blurred public-private boundaries, management consultants present a puzzle: where they act as state agents they in effect occupy public office but are still compelled to advance the private interests of their employer (Sikka 2009) and contribute to a ‘revolving door’ between the state and business (Peretti 2016). Similarly, management consultants promise to eliminate leakages, yet governments have struggled to quantify the added value of management consultants (Public Accounts Committee 2010). Thus management consultancies simultaneously promise improvements in good governance, whilst ushering in governance arrangements which echo pre-existing forms of corruption. Whilst scholars have interrogated these new relationships in the West and China (Saint-Martin 1998; Chong 2018), we know little about the role of management consultants in in Africa and the Global South. This paper presents the initial findings of new project mapping the role of management consultants in government in Nigeria and invites feedback on conceptualisation and methods.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines three trajectories of how development consultants have captured policy space. First, how Management consultants shaped Mauritius' tax haven, how OTF shaped Rwanda's development strategy and how new consultancies have restricted policy space for heterodox development strategies.

Paper long abstract:

The role that consultants play in shaping development strategies and policy space has received scant attention. Ultimately, it is of course down to governments receiving advice to act upon the suggestions of consultants. However, government officials inevitably act upon both their own ideological inclinations but are also influenced by development trends into what kind of evidence is considered 'rigorous' and what policies are the 'right' ones to follow.

In this paper, I trace the activities of three different types of development consultancies, their roles and how they continue to influence development policy. In Mauritius, in the 1980s, Arthur Anderson officials were key to the initiation of Mauritius' tax haven strategy. Officials that set them up became both politicians and key figures within the offshore sector, sustaining its growth and ensuring it retains a major influence in Mauritius. In Rwanda, in the late 1990s, the Michael Porter-influenced On the Frontier wrote all of the country's sectoral development strategies, becoming key advisors to all government ministries. Later, many of these officials were absorbed within government from the President's Office and the Rwanda Development Board. Since the 2010s, new expatriate-owned (with some local ownership) development consultancies have become commonplace across many of Africa's fastest-growing countries. Here, I discuss how many of these consultancies including Laterite, Vanguard Economis, Imani, ETA and others have acted in different ways to constrict policy space and largely reduce space for heterodox development strategies.