The Impact of Private Consultancies in EU Governance: A Document Analysis of Knowledge Production for Rail Liberalisation

Private consultancies play a crucial role in the construction of knowledge of regulatory governance. At the EU level, it was estimated that 80% of all evaluations are contracted out. Therefore, the legitimacy of a regulatory intervention stems from the quality and neutrality of ex ante impact assessment and ex post evaluation of regulations. Relying on a content analysis of 45 evaluation studies and 16 impact assessments conducted between 1999 and 2017, this paper aims to shed a light on the role of consultancies in knowledge creation and broader legitimacy of EU railway policy. Looking at the documents of evaluation studies and impact assessments as a component of net- works of regulators and evaluators, the paper assesses the impact of the private consultancies expertise on the design of the EU rail liberalisation reform. Specifically, I address two classical research puzzles in the literature of knowledge creation in governance. The first is about whether the evidence produced by private consultancies rhetorically justified already taken political decisions or whether evaluation studies are an instrument for discovering new evidence and novel regulatory reform alternatives. The second concerns whether the private consultancies knowledge is neutral and informed by scientific evidence or whether biased towards railway incumbents or new entrants, and whether the preferences of customers and citizens have been taken into consideration.