Beyond Consultocracy and Servants of Power: Exploring and Explaining the Role of Private Market Consultants in Public Policy Formulation

Private market consultants participate in public policy formulation, yet we know little about the content of their work, and what explains their impact on public policy. Using interviews, analysis of public documents, contracts data, and additional sources, this dissertation develops and empirically evaluates and specifies a novel conceptualization of consultants’ policy formulation roles, through analysis of their routine activity in health policy subsystems in two jurisdictions: Victoria, Australia, and Ontario, Canada. It demonstrates that contrary to how they are currently conceptualized in policy literature, consultants do much more than merely inform policy formulation. In what this dissertation terms “core” formulation roles, consultants provide policy advice and develop policy proposals; and foster their adoption by promoting buy-in among stakeholders and providing symbolic capital. In more peripheral roles, termed here “linkage” roles, consultants connect the government to the broader policy subsystem: they provide interpretation and legibility of its complexities, and inform policymakers on policy preferences of various stakeholders. In these roles, consultants have various types of impact on policy formulation. The dissertation further explains the variation in these roles, specifically – between core and linkage policy formulation work. It demonstrates that in Victoria, Australia, consultants are institutionalized in core policy formulation roles; while in Ontario, Canada, they are primarily involved in linkage roles, with sporadic inclusion in core formulation work. The research considers the conditions under which consultants became included and institutionalized in core policy formulation roles (where their impact is greater). It analyzes the impact of the diverging implementation of New Public Management (NPM) reforms and argues that major and rapid changes in state policy capacity, as was the case in Victoria, can prompt the inclusion and institutionalization of consultants in core policy work; and that this inclusion is susceptible to path-dependency and lock-in processes, and can support the development of consultants’ institutional power. Where state policy capacity remained robust, as in Ontario, consultants’ entrance and institutionalization in core roles were mitigated and restricted.

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