Global expertise, local convincing power: Management consultants and preserving the entrepreneurial city

Abstract

The advice of management consultancies on urban policy is particularly influential in moments of crisis involving entrepreneurial principles. As global experts, management consultants appear as appropriate assistants for steering growth-oriented, competitive urban development. In order to show how consultants turn the urban into an entrepreneurial project to be managed, I discuss the literature on urban policy and consultants then examine the activities of private management consultancies in six German cities. Empirically, I first explore the specificities of urban policy advice given by globally operating consultancies (their methodological approach and the projectisation of the urban; global networks and comparative–competitive thinking; fast databases; reputation; externality). Second, I critically reflect on how the consultants’ advice is fundamentally reshaped by local actors in the process of policy making (through participation, appropriation, slowdown and politicisation). The paper thus critically evaluates the rise of expertise–policy relations and calls attention to mechanisms for patching the fractures of the entrepreneurial city.

Consultants as intermediaries: Their perceptions on citizen involvement in urban development

“…Citizens are mostly seen as passive actors who need to be taken on board (Vogelpohl, 2018). This viewpoint reproduces the existing power inequalities within cities and limits the empowering possibilities of participation processes (McCann, 2001;Vogelpohl, 2019). The main task of consultants is to fulfill the assignments of their principals.…”

“…In UDPs, consultancy firms have various responsibilities to government agencies, market parties, and citizens, which range from making financial calculations to the drafting of strategic plans and development agreements (DAs). For this research, we regard consultancy firms as market parties that act as intermediaries for principals of the public or private sector, giving them (strategic) advice or managing their projects and processes (cf Raco et al, 2016;Vogelpohl, 2019).…”

“…Moreover, governmental agencies lose the opportunity to gain expertise and practical knowledge by hiring consultants (Grijzen, 2010). Combined with budget cuts in public administration, this loss reinforces the dependence of governmental agencies on the expertise of consultants (Prince, 2012;Raco, 2013;Vogelpohl, 2019). Grijzen (2010) stresses the loss of the knowledge and the capacity to solve complex problems in (local) planning departments because of the hiring of planning consultants, which strengthens the dependence of those departments on said consultants.…”

Making Global Policy

“…The processes by which policy has moved across nations or organisations have gone by different social science labels. This includes the overlapping notions of policy ambassadors (De Oliveira, 2017), policy circulation (Vogelpohl, 2019), policy diffusion (Orenstein, 2005;Milhorance, 2018), policy learning (Meseguer, 2005), policy mobilities (Prince, 2010;Peck and Theodore, 2015), policy transfer (Evans, 2019;Hadjiisky et al, 2017) and policy translation (Stone, 2013). They share the common concern to identify the forces precipitating the movement of policy ideas and instruments across national borders.…”

“…These are actively diffused by private and public individuals, (international) organisations, states and networks (Evans, 2019;Peck and Theodore, 2015). Development of international norms regarding 'best practice' or regulatory standards is now undertaken in the professional deliberations of various sector-or issue-specific transnational policy communities in matters as varied as pension reform (Orenstein, 2005) or tobacco control (Mamudu et al, 2015) or urban policy (Vogelpohl, 2019).…”