Assessing Policy Consultants as Experts in Public Policymaking

Contemporary policymakers extensively rely advice from various expert actors across policy domains and at different stages in the policymaking process. The growing involvement of expert actors in public policymaking and governance has attracted considerable research attention to questions about their role and impact in political decision making. Yet, capturing the actual influence of various experts remains challenging, particularly in a more diverse, fragmented and contested landscape of policy-relevant knowledge. For consultants as a particular type of expert actor, these issues are especially pronounced as the nature of their practices makes isolating policy-related work from other types of consultancy challenging. Existing research provides insight into the important functions consultants serve throughout the policymaking process beyond merely supplementing public expertise or temporarily augmenting bureaucratic capacity. Yet, explanations for how, when and why consultants are engaged as experts for government are divergent, and private consultants' actual infleunce over public policymaking remains an open question. This paper examines existing research on policy consultants and highlighting divergent perspectives across disciplines and different contexts. Key themes include variations in consultants' roles, democratic and episteimc tensions, and the blurring of traditional public-private sector boundaries. Identified knowledge gaps include a dominant focus on Anglophone cases, inconsistent and poor-quality data, and difficulties in distinguishing policy-related consultancy from other types of consultancy engagement. Building on the varied consultancy literature and the Policy Advisory Systems (PAS) literature, it seeks to map patterns of consultancy use in Norway. By highlighting similarities and distinct findings from previous research, possible pathways for moving beyond current limitations and advancing systematic empirical assessments of consultants' influence in democratic decision-making and its implications for democratic legitimacy are suggested.