ABSTRACT
Over the past three decades, the Big Four professional service firms (KPMG, Deloitte, PwC, and Ernst & Young) have turned to the public sector in expanding their market for advisory services. As a part of these efforts, they have packaged and promoted a variety of evaluative programs to governments around the world with the aim of assessing infrastructure procurement. Drawing from comparative case studies in the UK, Canada, and Germany, this chapter explores the role of Big Four firms in corporatizing infrastructure procurement and developing arm’s length forms of control in the public sector. It is argued that these firms have contributed to the corporatization of infrastructure procurement in three ways. Firstly, these firms have extended “business-like” models for infrastructure assessment to the public sector through Value for Money (VfM) analyses that import speculative financial logics into the procurement process. Secondly, these firms have contributed to the formation of policy-pipelines, facilitating the quick diffusion of these models across jurisdictions. Thirdly, they have become increasingly integrated with public agencies in generating policy priorities, bringing corporate and governmental power together in a public–private policymaking complex. We conclude by discussing the implications for public policymaking, as decisions about infrastructure procurement come to be reframed as techno-managerial issues evaluated at arm’s length from political deliberation.
