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.