The Sociality of Competition

This chapter centers the institutional realm of consultancy contracting in aid (Sundberg 2024 ). It examines how articulations with New Public Management at Sida and other state aid agencies have affected procurement practices as well as consulting markets and companies in both donor- and recipient countries. In recent years, a longstanding emphasis on measurability, transparency, and free and fair competition in procurement has been supplemented by measures to substitute some control with trust-based management, where Sida staff place their trust in contractors as organizations rather than in the persons representing them. Simultaneously, efforts to soften the administrative workload of procurement have led to the consolidation of consultancy contracts into fewer, larger units, with an increasing number of services purchased through so called framework agreements. These changes have impacted the competitive criteria for consulting firms. Particularly, they accentuate the importance of social relationships and relational labor, which partly have different implications for consultants based in donor- and recipient countries.