Governments require sound advice if they are to solve the problems faced by their populations in the public realm. Given that in complex and heterogeneous settings the expertise of regular public servants may be insufficient or biased, the involvement of highly specialized advisory boards has become the norm. It now plays an important part in decision making, and in policy design and evaluation, particularly in the health, environmental and economic sectors (Applegate, 1998; Dobuzinskis, 2007; Vargas, 2013).

This chapter is devoted to exploring the increasing, and rather prominent, role of public advisory boards in the Mexican federal government, with an emphasis on policy analysis instruments and method, conditions for sound analysis, and existing capabilities. The chapter, therefore, is organized in four sections. The first provides a definition of the term “advisory boards”, given its different and at times contradictory uses. The second section describes the construction and criteria used to build a first universe of advisory boards in the Mexican federal government, circa 2015. The third part presents a comparative analysis of two of the most influential advisory boards in Mexico: Coneval, devoted to the evaluation of social policy, and the National Institute of Ecology and Climate Change, responsible for providing technical and scientific advice to environmental policymakers. The fourth section discusses the main findings and presents conclusions.

Defining “advisory boards”

Advisory boards provide both information and analysis for the planning, implementation and evaluation of public policies (Scholten and Nispen, 2015). Their advice is extremely valuable and influential given the scientific or technical expertise of their members, and a certain degree of independence from the bureaucratic structure.

Members of advisory boards tend to be well-respected experts in their specific policy community; thus, they tend to provide robust information and analysis endowed, in addition, with legitimacy. These characteristics permit decision makers to base the design and implementation of specific government interventions on such policy analysis.

In fact, in the United States, Santos has identified four crucial traits of successful citizen advisory boards (Santos and Chess, 2003), that is, those influential in the public policy process: they should include the largest possible number of stakeholders in the decision-making practice, especially minorities or otherwise vulnerable groups who may not be members of an organized group;