What impacts do for-profit stakeholders have on international development? In this study, the authors turn their attention to the UK and the business of development to explore how outsourcing funds and programs to for-profit agencies and consultants plays out across the aid sector. Check out the abstract below, and then click through to the main article to learn more:
Outsourcing the Business of Development: The Rise of For-profit Consultancies in the UK Aid Sector
Peer-reviewed research by: Brendan Whitty, Jessica Sklair, Paul Robert Gilbert, Emma Mawdsley, Jo-Anna Russon, Olivia Taylor
While much attention has been paid to the ways in which the private sector is now embedded within the field of development, one group of actors — for-profit development consultancies and contractors, or service providers — has received relatively little attention. This article analyses the growing role of for-profit consultancies and contractors in British aid delivery, which has been driven by two key trends: first, the outsourcing of managerial, audit and knowledge-management functions as part of efforts to bring private sector approaches and skills into public spending on aid; and second, the reconfiguration of aid spending towards markets and the private sector, and away from locally embedded, state-focused aid programming. The authors argue that both trends were launched under New Labour in the early 2000s, and super-charged under successive Conservative governments. The resulting entanglement means that the policies and practices of the UK government’s aid agencies, and the interests and forms of for-profit service providers, are increasingly mutually constitutive. Amongst other implications, this shift acts to displace traditional forms of contestation and accountability of aid delivery.
Click here to read the full open-access article, published in 2023 in the journal Development and Change.
Full Reference //
Whitty, B., Sklair, J., Gilbert, P.R., Mawdsley, E., Russon, J.-A. and Taylor, O. (2023), Outsourcing the Business of Development: The Rise of For-profit Consultancies in the UK Aid Sector. Development and Change, 54: 892-917.
This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
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