Introduction

It has been suggested by many authors (for example Boston, 1994; Dunleavy, 1995; Peters, 1996) that external sources of expertise might be displacing the advisory processes and capacities inside government. This hypothesis has been recently labelled as the ‘externalization thesis’ (Veselý, 2013). By externalisation is meant the relocation of advisory activities previously performed inside government organisations to places outside of government. Externalisation can take different forms and have different causes and consequences.

One particular form of externalisation is outsourcing, which can also be understood as replacing internal policy advice with external advice on the basis of a contract with an actor outside government (usually a private consulting company or individual advisors). In this respect, Peters (1996, p 2) argued that

Peters, however, makes it clear that ‘it is difficult to quantify the extent of this malaise in the public sector’, and acknowledges that this claim is based upon anecdotal evidence (of which there is, according to Peters, a good deal).

Contracted consultancies are also well established as significant actors in the Czech Republic. This chapter deals with outsourcing of policy advice in the Czech Republic. First, we attempt to quantify the extent of outsourcing in the Czech ministries as the most important institutions of the central public administration. Then we describe the types and roles of different commercial providers of policy advice. This is followed by a discussion of why outsourcing happens and its possible consequences. Apart from statistical data, in this chapter we draw upon more than ten years’ experience both consuming and providing outsourced policy analysis in the Czech central state administration as well as interviews from representatives of both the demand and supply sides.

The extent of policy advice outsourcing

Let us first attempt to quantify the extent of outsourcing. Although outsourcing concerns all types of public institutions, in this section we focus upon the expenditures of 14 ministries on consulting and advisory services.