'I Make the Papers Look Credible': Consultants’ Educational Role in Accessing European Union Funding in Romania

This paper discusses the role and impact of consultants over the economic area of European Union (EU) funding. It argues that consultants are actors who mediate and inter-mediate between entrepreneurs and bureaucrats by translating the bureaucratic requirements into business endeavours and vice versa. In doing so, consultants commodify EU funding, through the exploitation of its symbolic, technical and economic space as a terrain on which to (re)construct market relations. Consultants act as agents of change, being both a by-product of this tectonic shift of EU integration and its exponent. As by-products of European integration, but also entangled in local historicities, consultants decode and transmit information regarding EU funding to the applicants. As exponents of European integration, consultants act as market-makers by treating criteria of eligibility as production factors. The paper is based on ethnographic material collected over two years in a county from Southern Romania.