To read the full-text of this research, you can request a copy directly from the authors.
... As such, transition expertise is closer to the notion of "climate services" than the "climate information" associated with the IPCC agenda (Vaughan & Dessai, 2014), and very far removed from the Mertonian norms of academic science (Merton, 1979). Transition expertise is used to conduct various tasks and activities related to strategy and planning, analysis, evaluation and reporting, facilitation, training and education as well as information and data tools used in decision-making processes (Christensen & Collington, 2024). Rather than academic articles and scientific assessments, the knowledge products of transition experts look more like white papers, strategies, action plans, cost-benefit analyses, reports, scenarios, PowerPoint presentations and policy briefs. ...
Experts play a significant role in shaping global and local norms on how societies should respond to the climate crisis. However, current scholarship on the relationship between expertise and climate change has not fully addressed recent transformations in the field, specifically the emergence and increasingly influential role of what we term “green transition expertise.” We define green transition expertise as a more applied, normative, and contextual form of climate change knowledge that is contrasted with the formalized, pure science of “climate expertise.” If climate experts assess the deteriorating state of the global climate, then transition experts tell states and corporations what they should do about it. We argue that if the social science of climate change knowledge is to further deepen its grasp of the politics of the green transition analytically and normatively, it must embrace a “post‐IPCC” research agenda that turns increasingly toward studying the power of transition experts in directing state and corporate climate action. Based on a review of the literature, we contrast the extant IPCC agenda with an emerging post‐IPCC agenda along three dimensions: expert cast (who are the experts?), expert content (what do they know?) and expert context (where are they located?). By marking a shift in each of these dimensions, the post‐IPCC agenda sensitizes the social science of climate change knowledge to overlooked and increasingly powerful forms of experts and expertise. To facilitate their study, we define six specific areas that require detailed attention as the post‐IPCC agenda develops.
This article is categorized under: The Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Sociology/Anthropology of Climate Knowledge
Policy and Governance > National Climate Change Policy
Climate, History, Society, Culture > Ideas and Knowledge
Many believe that the Big Four are simply global accounting firms with a large menu of additional services. Using both quantitative and qualitative data, we show that their role in the world political economy extends much beyond such description. We argue that the Big Four play a coordinating role in the organization and expansion of global value chain (GVC) in multiple territories, value-chain segments and at multiple scales. Building on the literature of the multidimensionality of power in the GVC, we investigate the multiple dimensions through which the power of the Big Four is exercised. Uncovering the power manifestations of the Big Four as global actors, the article contributes both empirically and conceptually to the dialogue among the literatures on the international political economy, critical accounting and GVC.
Despite their central role in the construction and development of the market for virtues as well as in the design, implementation, and evaluation of corporate sustainability strategies and governmental sustainability policies, sustainability consultants remain at best “hidden” corporate change agents. In this paper, we bring sustainability consultants back to the fore to account for how these actors discreetly regulate and shape contemporary sustainability transformations from the outside‐in. We do so first by unpacking various roles of consultants as engineers , market builders , power vehicles , boundary workers , issue translators , and soft regulators ; then we conceptualize how, through these roles, they contribute to empowering , legitimizing but also potentially supplanting and undermining the activities of corporate change agents operating inside corporations. We finally propose some research orientations for studying further the role of sustainability consultants in corporate transformations toward sustainability.
Existing research interprets the rise of consulting firms in intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) primarily as evidence of the global spread of managerialism. We highlight that consultants are not merely carriers of business-like world cultural norms, but also part of contentious IGO politics and governance. We unpack the consulting black box and reconstruct how consulting firms are hired and active in IGOs. Analyzing the experiences of the World Health Organization (WHO), we show how IGOs have been informally ‘opened up’ to consulting firms (and to their funders) and we investigate what the consequences of their privileged access are in practice. Consultants curate voices and input (including their own) into reform packages, promote certain contents, and engage in self-effacement practices that undermine accountability to stakeholders. The pivotal position of the consultants can have a disempowering effect on actors excluded from the consulting agreement or marginalized through consulting practices. We illustrate our general discussion by zooming in on the consultant-mediated reform of WHO’s Roll Back Malaria partnership in 2015. Our analysis is based on primary documents, key informant interviews, informal conversations, and participant observation.
Drawing on extensive case study evidence, this study unpacks sustainability reporting’s evolution from a moral values–based practice toward a financialized value–based one. We argue that this transition can be seen as a commensuration project. We examine the dynamics of this process and its implications for sustainability-related outcomes. We find that increased levels of commensuration have moved sustainability reporting away from an original emphasis on morality and values to a focus on strategic value creation for the firm. We theorize this process as a “crowding out of morality” that is enabled by a rigid cognitive framing of social and environmental issues (objectification) and the monetized coordination of relevant social interactions (marketization). We outline implications of our analysis for the scholarly debates on the institutionalization of sustainability reporting and commensuration.
Public administrations increasingly rely on consultancies to acquire policy knowledge, assess stakeholder dynamics, and evaluate governance systems. In this symposium we explore the drivers and effects of this trend. Consultants offer advisory services, articulate governance trends, provide technical and programming expertise, as well as evaluation functions. Historically consultancies were introduced to public administrations to prevent market dominance and to respond to demands for specialized professional services. This relationship morphed into an expanded global market for a wide range of consultancy services that national and international administrations purchase. We explore how consultancies and public administrations interact through a discussion of task‐setting based on recognition of: i) what party can make claims to support a public ethos, ii) what forms of expertise are most relevant for solving the problem, and iii) status in who can best tackle uncertainties. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
Preparing for the possibility of a global pandemic presents a transnational organisational challenge: to assemble and coordinate knowledge over institutionally diverse countries with high fidelity. The COVID-19 pandemic has laid these problems bare. This article examines the construction of the three main cross-national indicators of pandemic preparedness: a database with self-reported data by governments, external evaluations organised by the WHO and a global ranking known as the Global Health Security Index. Each of these presents a different model of collecting evidence and organising knowledge: the collation of self-reports by national authorities; the coordination of evaluation by an epistemic community authorised by an intergovernmental organisation and on the basis of a strict template; and the cobbling together of different sources into a common indicator by a transnational multi-stakeholder initiative. We posit that these models represent different ways of creating knowledge to inform policy choices, and each has different forms of potential bias. In turn, this shapes how policymakers understand what is ‘best practice’ and appropriate policy in pandemic preparedness.
The growing use of external management consultancy services by public sector organisations has generated controversy. Some claim that users have become over‐reliant on, or even addicted to, this source of knowledge. However, our understanding of this phenomenon and the precise nature of its risks is underdeveloped. In this paper, we address these concerns by focusing on whether using consulting services inflates future demand and on its consequences for efficiency. This is examined in the context of the English National Health Service and the adoption of New Public Management practices such as outsourcing and private finance initiative contracting. Based on an analysis of four years of data, the results suggest that using consulting services is associated with demand inflation and has negative implications for client organisational efficiency. These findings reveal a strong management consultancy effect, emphasising the risks associated with demand inflation, with implications for both theory and policy.
This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
This article provides a framework for explaining professional action in multi‐jurisdictional tax and finance environments, focusing on how relationships between clients, professionals, and regulators shape market structures. Given the complexity of tax and financial regulations within and across national systems, professionals experienced in accounting, financial, legal, and policy systems have opportunities to engage to increase information asymmetries rather than lower them. This article draws on the recent literature on Global Wealth Chains to theorize how professionals develop action profiles to exploit opportunity structures through information gaps. We develop a theoretical framework for understanding how professionals may intentionally, and as a matter of strategy, exploit information gaps in different socio‐economic contexts. We provide case vignettes of client‐professional‐regulator relationships in multi‐jurisdictional tax and finance management, highlighting how professional action shapes wealth chains and attempts at regulatory intervention. Our theoretical contribution is to link micro‐level interactions to macro‐level structures of wealth creation and protection in the transnational economic and legal order.
Working Paper constructing and examining a dataset on the mergers and acquistion activities of ESG firms. This is linked to to the concept of infrastructures in finance.
Based on a survey of civil servants in the Norwegian central government, this article describes perceptions of coordination capacity and examines to what degree the variations in perceived coordinating capacity can be explained by structural and cultural features. In particular, it focuses on the significance of wicked policy areas. Overall the coordination capacity is weaker in wicked policy areas than in other policy areas. Controlling for other features the coordination capacity is primarily related to cultural factors, such as mutual trust, level of conflict, and identification with the central government. Some structural features, such as administrative level, also have an effect.
There has been a global trend away from delivering ‘climate information’ towards producing ‘climate services’ for decision-makers. The rationale for this shift is said to be the demand for timely and actionable climate knowledge, whilst the means of its delivery involves a shift from public good to more privatised forms of climate science. This paper identifies important implications of this shift to climate services by examining the role of consultants, drawing on an in-depth study of adaptation consultants in Australia. The role of consultants is instructive, not just because these private sector experts are engaged in climate services, but also because publicly funded climate science agencies are increasingly encouraged to behave as consulting firms do. Four imperatives of knowledge businesses—to be client-focussed, solutions-oriented, resource-efficient and self-replicating—are described. The paper argues that an emphasis on climate services shifts the incentives for climate science away from the public interest towards the ongoing pursuit of profit. There is a subsequent diversion of effort away from publicly accessible and transparent climate information to private knowledge for discrete clients. Climate services also emphasise knowledge for climate solutions as opposed to the politically charged identification of climate risks. The paper concludes with a warning that the trend towards climate services undermines the knowledge required for societies to adequately respond to the scale, speed and severity of climate change. At the heart of this issue is a climate services paradox: how to achieve customisation without exclusion.
In the past few decades, many sector-specific case studies have been conducted on the use of consultants in the public sector. However, the overall picture of the qualitative changes facilitated by consultants remains fragmented, and a comprehensive framework on how "consultocracy" affects governance is lacking. This article shows how the increased use of consultants has impacted the operational logics of public administration and governance at large. Drawing from a large multisectoral case study from Finland as well as existing studies, a fourfold typology of how consultocracy shapes public administration is introduced. We argue that increased reliance on consultants contributes to the monopolization and privatization of public knowledge and ensuing dependencies, erosion of tacit knowledge, weakening of accountability, and strengthening of instrumental rationality. This research emphasizes the importance of understanding the links between these developments and the need to implement a comprehensive research agenda on consultocracy.
In recent decades, numerous professional service firms have gone 'global' in search of new markets and to support clients requiring services across nations. Whilst a lively debate has developed over the organizational implications of this phenomenon, the role of the firms in globalizing the wider world economy has received less attention. In this paper, we address this imbalance through an inter-disciplinary synthesis of the literature at the intersection of the professions and economic globalization and apply a political perspective to frame our analysis. Our contribution is twofold. First, we argue for a broadening of the research agenda to better elucidate the critical role of professional service firms as agents of economic globalization. This role, we argue, should become a core research theme given the firms are not just businesses offering services across the globe but also active participants in the globalization of the world economy. Second, we shed light on and conceptualize the specific power strategies deployed by the firms as part of their role as agents of globalization. We develop an integrative framework which, firstly, distinguishes between 'design' and 'implementation' and, secondly, specifies how the firms exert power to their advantage in each of these related areas. This model provides a theoretical scaffolding for understanding how professional service firms shape and indeed become hegemonic agents of economic globalization.
There has been a resurgence of interest in the role of scientific knowledge and expertise in International Relations, but it is not clear what the theoretical value-added of this work is. This article places recent work on scientific knowledge and expertise in a longer-term perspective. The history shows that knowledge has played an important role in International Relations theory since Carr and Morgenthau, but that thinking has been trapped within a simple conceptual framework centered on tracing how knowledge shapes the beliefs and interests of international subjects. This mode of theorizing first entered International Relations via Mannheim and has been further developed by Foucauldian and practice-based approaches since the 1990s. Outlining the history of knowledge from Carr through Haas to the present makes it possible to identify the distinctive contribution of recent work: whereas International Relations has focused on how knowledge shapes subjects such as states and international organizations, recent work by Corry, Sending, and others reorients International Relations to the constitution of governance objects. On the object-centered view, knowledge plays a key role in the construction of the hybrid entities like the economy and the climate that structure the landscape of international politics.
This article challenges accounts of global environmental politics which come from a liberal institutionalist position and focus on the development of international regimes. We argue that a perspective which starts from the role of the state in promoting capital accumulation can much better explain the content both of state policies and of particular international agreements. We first outline the way that fossil fuel companies have been able to secure their interests in state policies on global warming. We then develop the argument that their ability to do this is best explained in terms of the structural power of capital, deriving from the role of the state within capitalist societies. Finally, we suggest that this may also be producing transformations within global warming politics, as insurance companies in particular become involved. Such involvement, particularly given the heightened power of finance under conditions of globalization, suggests the possibility of constructing coalitions which may turn the constraints which the structural power of capital has produced to date into opportunities to promote attempts to deal with global warming.
Globalization has significant implications for the professions, with the societies and the regulators around them changing and the realities of professional work in large organizations taking on increasingly transnational dimensions. However, while there is no lack of empirical studies of the globalization of individual professions and firms, the implications of processes of globalization, reregulation and governmental rescaling for neo-Weberian sociologies of the professions has not received the same attention. This article seeks to rectify this gap in knowledge by developing a transnational neo-Weberian sociology of the professions that takes account of the rescaling of the world that the professions inhabit and the important new research questions generated about the multi-scalar influences on the forms of regulation, power and legitimacy that underlie professional projects.
Global governance has come under increasing pressure since the end of the Cold War. In some issue areas, these pressures have led to significant changes in the architecture of governance institutions. In others, institutions have resisted pressures for change. This volume explores what accounts for this divergence in architecture by identifying three modes of governance: hierarchies, networks, and markets. The authors apply these ideal types to different issue areas in order to assess how global governance has changed and why. In most issue areas, hierarchical modes of governance, established after World War II, have given way to alternative forms of organization focused on market or network-based architectures. Each chapter explores whether these changes are likely to lead to more or less effective global governance across a wide range of issue areas. This provides a novel and coherent theoretical framework for analysing change in global governance.
This chapter examines the phenomenon of climate consulting, a new and rapidly growing field of professional services. Presenting findings from an in-depth investigation of climate adaptation consulting in Australia, it draws on John Allen’s three spatial vocabularies of power—territorial, networked, and topological—to highlight three different ways in which private sector advisors are shaping public policymaking. The chapter shows how the work of consultants has been critical to rendering the complex public policy problem of adaptation governable, largely through the unproblematic translation of pre-existing technical and managerial approaches to decision-making under uncertainty for new existential risks posed by climate change. The use of consultants in this way reconfigures public policymaking in ways that simultaneously stimulate new economies of expertise and a crisis in expertise. This has profound implications for the ability of public policy to effect the transformational changes required to tackle pressing environmental issues like climate change.
Ideas play an important role in policy change. Theories of policy change, including rational and bounded learning, bracket what needs to be explained: the creation of new ideas. We develop a theory of creative learning in international organizations (IOs). It posits that IO officials respond to new problems and state practices by creating novel concepts and policy ideas. New ideas help officials to manage multiple pressures in their organization’s strategic situation. They enable officials to mediate principal demands while seeking to mobilize client states. We theorize three modes of creative learning that generate new ideas: conceptual combination , translation , and repurposing . Empirically, we explain a major change in global environmental policy: the rise of green growth ideas among major IOs, including the OECD, the UN, and the World Bank. Green growth ideas include new arguments drawn from Keynesian and Schumpeterian economics, which claim that environmental policies can drive economic growth. We show how these ideas were a creative response to the problem of climate change and emerging state interventions in support of clean energy. Our theory of creative learning applies beyond IOs to domestic politics and takes on added significance in times of transformative change that challenge the scripts of policymaking.
The management literature frequently assumes that management consultancy is the predominant source of external management knowledge for organisations. However, its use is invariably confined to a few Western, developed economies. Such variation is rarely acknowledged, let alone explained. In this conceptual article, we draw on diverse literatures to explore what drives national variations in consulting usage. To achieve this, we develop a basic framework of influencing factors and briefly apply it to the Japanese context. We conclude by explicating how our analysis has a wider application with respect to other knowledge sources in comparative studies.
Prior to the 2015 Paris Conference of the Parties (COP), every state was requested to submit a pledge of their own design. To date, there has been a lack of large-n studies that provide a broad picture of these pledges. We employ Discourse Network Analysis to examine critically the climate pledges of all 162 actors at the Paris COP. Our research offers four main contributions. First, we provide data regarding the mitigation and adaptation components of every national pledge. Second, we identify six types of mitigation targets, and visually cluster every state according to these formats. Third, we argue that the pledges of the Umbrella Group of non-EU developed states, and of the group of oil exporting countries, showed greater internal similarity than the group comprising Brazil, China, India and South Africa. Finally, we critique the method as a means of analysing the new global climate governance context and argue that the method offers an innovative and unique means of understanding this complex policy landscape, when applied in a specific and focused manner.
The 2015 Paris Climate summit consolidated the transition of the climate regime from a "regulatory" to a "catalytic and facilitative" model. A key component of this shift was the intergovernmental regime’s embrace of climate action by sub- and nonstate actors. Although a groundswell of transnational climate action has been growing over time, the Paris Agreement seeks to bring this phenomenon into the heart of the new climate regime. This forum article describes that transition and considers its implications.
Global warming skeptics often fall back on the argument that the scientific case for global warming is all model predictions, nothing but simulation; they warn us that we need to wait for real data, “sound science.” In A Vast Machine Paul Edwards has news for these skeptics: without models, there are no data. Today, no collection of signals or observations—even from satellites, which can “see” the whole planet with a single instrument—becomes global in time and space without passing through a series of data models. Everything we know about the world’s climate we know through models. Edwards offers an engaging and innovative history of how scientists learned to understand the atmosphere—to measure it, trace its past, and model its future.
This paper shows that climate change is a ‘wicked’ problem, which presents multiple challenges for public management. These challenges are already with us, but are likely to increase in the short and medium terms, possibly very rapidly. Academic public management research appears to have been slow to address these issues. Yet potentially there are several strong points of contact between climate change issues and current public management research themes. This will, however, require interdisciplinary and international approaches.
The concept of “policy advisory systems” was introduced by Halligan in 1995 as a way to characterize and analyze the multiple sources of policy advice utilized by governments in policy-making processes. The concept has proved useful and has influenced thinking about both the nature of policy work in different advisory venues, as well as how these systems work and change over time. This article sets out existing models of policy advisory systems based on Halligan's original thinking on the subject which emphasize the significance of location or proximity to authoritative decision-makers as a key facet of advisory system influence. It assesses how advisory systems have changed as a result of the dual effects of the increased use of external consultants and others sources of advice – ‘externalization’ – and the increased use of partisan-political advice inside government itself – ‘politicization’. It is argued that these twin dynamics have blurred traditionally sharp distinctions between both the content of inside and outside sources of advice and between the technical and political dimensions of policy formulation, ultimately affecting where influence in advisory systems lies.
Following the rise of the New Public Management (NPM) in the 1980s, policymakers increasingly mobilized management consultants from the private sector in the course of reforming their bureaucracies. To describe this situation some coined the term “consultocracy,” assuming that the emergence of the NPM created a growing demand for business management expertise in government circles that allowed consultants to penetrate the state and become powerful policy actors. Rather than taking these matters as given, I ask how has it been possible for consultants to become (or not) influential players in the process of administrative reform. It is argued that Britain, and to a lesser extent Canada, have been more likely than France to give rise to a “consultocracy” when implementing NPM reforms in the 1980s because in these two countries, management consultancy emerged earlier and is more strongly developed than in France because of its historical link with accountancy. Whereas French consultants only began to enter public administration in the 1980s, British and Canadian consultants have been involved in the last 30 years in the construction of the state's management capacities. Through their participation in these institution-building processes, they established networks of expertise with the state and acquired the experience of work in government. Over the years, this created opportunities for consultants to make their voices heard in the inner circles of decision-making and made possible the exercise of influence that they are now said to have on policy.
In contemporary global environmental governance, private companies are both recipients of as well as contributors to the development
and spread of environmental practices, norms, standards, and legislation. One sector that seems to be of particular significance
is the environmental consultancy industry. It assists public and private actors in developing environmental solutions and
ensuring implementation and compliance by providing particular knowledge, management, and assessment skills. However, little
attention has been paid to the environmental authority and agency of companies active in this field. This exploratory study
on global environmental consultancy firms is guided by the basic research questions on agency in earth system governance:
What is agency? How do actors acquire authority and become agents? How can we evaluate the effects these agents generate?
KeywordsAgency–Environmental consultancy firms–Environmental authority–Globalization
The search for scientific bases for confronting problems of social policy is bound to fail, becuase of the nature of these problems. They are wicked problems, whereas science has developed to deal with tame problems. Policy problems cannot be definitively described. Moreover, in a pluralistic society there is nothing like the undisputable public good; there is no objective definition of equity; policies that respond to social problems cannot be meaningfully correct or false; and it makes no sense to talk about optimal solutions to social problems unless severe qualifications are imposed first. Even worse, there are no solutions in the sense of definitive and objective answers.
In the 1980s and 1990s the world of governance witnessed a far-reaching change from the Weberian model of bureaucracy to the 'new managerialism'-a term used to describe the group of ideas imported from business and mainly brought into government by management consultants. Over the past fifteen years, the British, French, and Canadian governments have spent growing sums of money on consulting services and, as a result, policy-makers inside the state have increasingly been exposed to the business management ideas that consultants bring into the public sector. Nevertheless, there are major differences in the extent to which reformers in the three countries embraced these ideas in the process of bureaucratic reform. Accordingly, this is a book about policy change and variation. It seeks to explain why the changes produced by the new managerialism have been more radical in some countries than in others. Building the New Managerialist State shows that the reception given by states to managerialist ideas depends on the openness of policy-making institutions to outside expert knowledge and on the organization, development, and social recognition of management consultancy. Available in OSO: http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/management/9780199269068/toc.html