Governments worldwide increasingly use external consultants to devise and deliver on growing range of public functions, from policy advice, program design to service delivery. Yet to this day, very few have strategies to manage this growing dependency, or know how to identify when outside expertise is genuinely needed versus when needs are better served by internal capacity.
In 2023, six European governments (Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Greece and Latvia) approached the European Commission with the request for support. The Commission mandated UNESCO with a simple but challenging mission: develop practical reforms to address this issue.
Over three years of research, analysis, and concrete reform work with governments, UNESCO developed the Blueprint for Government Consulting Reform, a strategic and practical framework which enables governments, oversight institutions and procurement authorities to diagnose their consultancy dependency, assess its risks and benefits, and design and run reforms that help restore government agency without abandoning the benefits external providers can offer. As the project concludes this month, the Blueprint is now available to any government facing the same challenge.
Diagnosing the level of dependency
The problem is not that governments use external consultants, it’s rather that they sometimes do so without a clear strategy on the purpose, the scale, and conditions of use. In such cases, the consequences of overreliance compounds across engagements and over time: Consulting spending grows, decision-making drifts toward external actors, government capacity erodes and vendor lock-in takes hold. Yet until now, governments had little concrete tools to diagnose the problem or how to fix it.
What stood out across countries was that the challenge goes well beyond individual contracts or spending. Overreliance and risks accumulate across government and over time. The benefits of external expertise are also not fully captured. The critical reform question is not whether to use external consultants, but for what purposes, at what scale and under what conditions. That means buying external expertise better where it is needed, while building in-house consulting capacity for strategic and recurrent needs.
Iulia SevciucHead of the UNESCO Inclusive Policy Lab, UNESCO
The Blueprint addresses this by giving governments tools to assess their own situation: How much are they spending? Which functions are being outsourced? Where are the risks and benefits? What internal capacity exists or could be built?
The framework isn’t one-size-fits-all. Instead, it presents three complementary approaches that governments can adapt based on their own maturity and priorities: stewardship of government-wide consultancy spending, direct provision of in-house consulting services, and governance of associated risks.
More importantly, the Blueprint reframes the conversation. External expertise and internal capacity are not trade-offs. It’s not about rejecting external consultancies. The real challenge is structural: how do governments keep strategic control, build and maintain the expertise they need, and stop relying on outside providers for core work that should rest with the public sector?
