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.