Procured Expertise in the European Commission: Understanding its Impact and Embeddedness in Europe’s Energy, Environment and Climate Action Policies

Abstract

Between 2012 and 2023, the European Commission published 6,275 contract award notices for the purchase of works, supplies and services, totalling billions of euros. These services included procurement of expert ‘consultant’ services to inform policy formulation, ranging from information provision and process support to evaluation and implementation services. However, very little research to date has focused on this procured expertise, its purpose for use, impact on policy formulation, or the extent to which it is embedded in the European Commission. Research has instead concentrated on public affairs consultants in EU-focused lobbying (Lahusen, 2003; van Schendelen, 2006) or the use of management consultants at the national governmental level (Fincham, 2012; Howlett and Migone, 2014; Berg et al., 2020).

This research contributes to the study of expertise in the European context and its impact on EC policy formulation through utilising a case study focusing on energy, environment and climate action policies. Through a mixed method approach drawing on documentary analysis of the 6,275 contract award notices published over the last decade, qualitative semi-structured interviews to understand the potential impact of procured expertise on EC policy formulation, and comparative textual analysis of the procured expertise against the EC policy documents to assess the impact of procured expertise on policy formulation, this research tests the applicability of three theoretical approaches to determine their respective validity in terms of theoretical explanations of the EC’s procurement of expertise for policy formulation, namely, institutionalism, resource dependency, and complexity theory.

The data presented in this research is significant because it provides a quantitative demonstration of the EC’s procurement trends over the last decade. It also goes further to show the demonstrable impact of procured expertise on EC policy formulation in the formulation of Emissions Trading Scheme policy, the End of Life Vehicle Directive, and the EC’s Hydrogen Proposal. In so doing, this research provides a valuable contribution to both the academic and practitioner literature on expertise and expert consultants in the European Union, demonstrating the high impact of procured expertise on the European Commission’s policy formulation and the accompanying high degree of embeddedness in the European Commission’s policy eco-system. A theoretical conclusion is also drawn that demonstrates that institutionalism and resource dependency theory have merit in their applicability to this research, but that complexity theory also brings a different and valuable approach to explaining facets of procured expertise.

Date of Award	1 Nov 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	King's College London
Supervisor	Scott James (Supervisor) & Tomas Maltby (Supervisor)