Paper short abstract

This paper explores the recent emergence of the management consultant as a key actor in international development, asking how the Big Four are helping to create, shape and authorise new forms of knowledge and expertise within the UK's development sector.

Paper long abstract

While the increasing presence of management consultants in the public and private sectors has drawn attention over recent decades, their growing role in international development has gone largely unnoticed. Between 2015 and 2018, the UK's Department for International Development (DFID) awarded £517m worth of contracts to the 'Big Four' (KPMG, PwC, EY & Deloitte), reflecting the emergence of the management consultant as a key actor within the development landscape. The Big Four's presence is indicative of profound shifts within 'Aidland' (Mosse (ed.) 2011), seen in a turn to private sector-led strategies focusing on finance, technology and infrastructure as the central pillars of development. Consultants have traditionally appeared in anthropological literature on development as sector specialists and mediators between donors and practitioners (Mosse 2005; Green 1986). In parallel, literature in geography (Roberts, Jones and Frohling 2005), development studies (Elbers, Knippenberg and Schulpen 2014) and organisation studies (Girei 2016) has examined the spread of 'managerialism' into NGOs. This literature, however, has not attended to the growing role played in development by management consultants. While DFID's relations with the Big Four have been criticised for promoting privatisation in the global South (Hilary 2005), the involvement of management consultants in development now extends far beyond this, to include the co-construction of development agendas (PwC 2017), implementing business environment reform (KPMG 2016) and facilitating the roll-out of welfare programmes (EY 2014). This paper thus asks how management consultants are helping to create, shape and authorise new forms of expertise within the UK's development sector.

Paper short abstract

This paper shows how the growing necessity of quantitatively measuring and evaluating the impacts of sustainability standards affects the way standards are designed and implemented. It also affects how standards developers conceptualize sustainability and how they imagine sustainable futures.

Paper long abstract

People who work to develop, implement, and promote ("market") sustainability standards in global agro-commodity supply chains face pressure to show not only that the products they claim are certified are actually complying with their standards, but that certification generates positive social, environmental, and/or economic impacts. They respond to this pressure by obsessively measuring, evaluating, and reporting these impacts, accounting for everything from gender equality to cultural heritage, and pushing the logic of audit culture to its limits. Based on more than 50 interviews with people working to develop and implement standards for sustainable tea production in organizations like the Rainforest Alliance and Fairtrade International, I show how the focus on demonstrating quantifiable impacts changes the way standards are designed (e.g., the inclusion of new data collection and disclosure protocols in popular sustainability standards), how they are implemented, how certification is achieved (e.g., how the relationship between farmers and auditors changes, as well as what gets audited and when), and how sustainability is conceptualized (e.g., what gets included and what gets ignored in definitions of sustainability and related impact evaluation methods). The paper also shows how quantitatively accounting for impact changes the way the future of sustainability is imagined, pushing standardizers to embrace invasive surveillance technologies like drones and satellites in order to collect and disclose social and environmental data, all in the name of transparency, accountability, and, ultimately, sustainability.

Paper short abstract

The paper concerns the role of auditors at the intersection of multiple modes of environmental governance. It examines the issuance of Chinese green bonds in Europe by asking how their 'life cycle' is negotiated across differential processes of certification that blur the public-private divide.

Paper long abstract

In the attempt to address climate change by mobilising financial resources, the EU commission is producing a new framework for sustainable finance. This taxonomy performs new ideas of sustainability at a global level and designates a key role to auditors and revisors. In this process, the operationalisation of green financial instruments is increasingly assigned to organisations and market-based practices that - via legitimisation by auditing firms such as the Big Four and their expertise- are blurring the public-private divide. By focusing on the specific issuance of green bonds by European and Chinese public and private actors, we ask how audit firms intervene in processes of certification and standardisation of green financial products across boundaries.

Specifically, the paper aims at analysing the distinct EU-China modes of governance and their evolution. While in Western markets, auditing figures as tools of regulation to 'harness' the green financial sector, the Chinese case evolves from opposite premises, with auditors seemingly occupying interstices of power out the state control. Drawing on the work of Michael Power (1997), we investigate whether an "expectation gap" occurs not only in the realization of the EU regulatory programme through auditors practices and technologies but also in the implementation of a global green finance common language - how firms are translating asymmetries of sustainability among different forms of capital and sovereign institutions. Specifically, using a multidisciplinary lens we analyse the Chinese-EU distinctive green bonds frameworks and standards to grasp existing frictions between actors and their diverging interests and worldviews.