Consulting the future

Through 2023-25, I’ve held a research fellowship at the University of Auckland, and working with Prof Nick Lewis within the Politics, Economies and Place research group. Work has focused on global management consultancies’ role in ‘imagineering’ a post-neoliberal capitalism:

Imagineering inclusive capitalism: The Big Four at COP and Davos [In preparation]
This paper examines the work of the Big Four global management consultancies (Deloitte, EY, KPMG, PwC) in creating the conditions for a climate-change conscious after-neoliberal economic formation coordinated through extra-state governance. We use the case of Big Four participation at global events like COP28 and the World Economic Forum in Davos to illustrate their aspirations and practices in imagineering this emergent formation, which has been dubbed ‘inclusive capitalism’. The Big Four wield significant influence through their auditing, corporate restructuring, and advisory work for states and major companies. While this influence has attracted growing critical attention in recent years from academics and investigative journalists who have questioned its extent, transparency, and legitimacy, their work as imagineers of future economic formations has yet to attract much attention. We argue that their extensive presence at the COP conferences is an indication of this work. In a world of shifting geo-politics and economic globalisation, COP28 and Davos 2024 represent high points, perhaps even end points, in the inclusive capitalism project before the second coming of Trump. They are also rare moments at which the Big Four hove into public view and put their authority and reputational capital on the line publicly. This paper outlines how at COP28 the Big Four invited various publics to join the Net Zero project, while at Davos they invited us to trust them to lead their clients to create a better future. These performances illustrate how the Big Four have inserted themselves into social movements and governmental projects as great assemblers. They reveal the work of GMCs as intermediaries in the assemblage of an emergent economic formation and key actors in an extra-state programme to stimulate, authorise, template, and legitimate this formation assemblage and perform it into being.