Blueprint for Government Consulting Reform

Governments across the world are recalibrating their use of external consultants and investing in their in-house consulting capabilities. This is both a priority and a sensitive area of reform. The prioritization of the reform is driven by clear benefits and efficiency gains associated with improved triage of governments’ reach to the market for consulting services, value maximization from the required contracts and insourcing at scale for critical needs. In France, for example, consultancy spending was reduced from €271.5 million in 2021 to €73.4 million in 2023, following the implementation of such reforms. The sensitivity is informed by ongoing national audits, finance inspections, parliamentary inquiries and public scrutiny into the upward trend in the use of consultants, the associated economic and non-economic costs parliamentary inquiries of public sector capacities. This is coupled with a strong awareness within governments of the need to reform and, importantly, to address the structural drivers behind such demand. Effective reforms act along three complementary axes: ●stewardship of government-wide use of external consultants; ●direct provision of in-house consulting services; ●governance of risks in use of external providers. For the first time, this reform blueprint provides a strategic and practical framework for diagnosing current trends, assessing internal capacities and designing government consulting reforms. It is intended primarily for governments, oversight institutions, procurement authorities and expert communities.