Caspar van den Berg is Professor of Governance at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, The Netherlands. His work has appeared in journals including Governance, Public Administration and JPART. He received the prestigious Van Poelje Prize for best dissertation in the administrative and policy sciences in The Netherlands and Flanders. He was a visiting fellow at Princeton University (2013–2014) and received a prominent four-year Veni scholarship from the Dutch Science Organization (2015). Michael Howlett is Burnaby Mountain Professor and Canada Research Chair in the Department of Political Science at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia. He specializes in public policy studies with an emphasis on natural resource and environmental policy-making. He is currently editor of Policy Sciences, Policy Design and Practice, the Journal of Comparative Policy Analysis, Policy & Society and the Annual Review of Policy Design. Andrea Migone is Director of Research and Outreach at the Institute of Public Administration of Canada. He specializes in public policy and public administration. His academic career includes work on decision-making, globalization, innovation policy, procurement and governance. He was a post-doctoral research fellow at Simon Fraser University, British Columbia Michael Howard is a Conjoint Lecturer at the University of Newcastle, New South Wales. His career has spanned teaching and research in public policy in both academic and advocacy settings, along with policy development and service delivery within innovative government programs. His publications have centered on historical aspects of policy-making and contemporary commercialization trends in the public sector, with a focus on consultants. Frida Pemer is Assistant Professor at the Stockholm School of Economics. Her research centers on how organizations use professional services, and on digitalization in professional service firms. She has published her work in highly-ranked journals like JPART, Governance, Human Relations, Industrial Marketing Management, and the Journal of Business Research. Helen M. Gunter is Professor of Education Policy at the University of Manchester. She is a Fellow of the UK Academy of Social Sciences, and recipient of the BELMAS Distinguished Service Award 2016. She is author of Consultants and Consultancy: the Case of Education (2017; co-authored with Colin Mills) and her most recent book is The Politics of Public Education (2018).

'Policy consultancy - 'the invisible public service' - has for a long time been somewhat of a blind spot in policy analysis. Caspar van den Berg, Michael Howlett, Andrea Migone, Michael Howard, Frida Pemer and Helen M. Gunter make a strong case that policy consultancy is far more important than the previous literature suggests. They sustain this argument by [providing] a detailed comparative analysis of policy consultancy in six countries representing three different types of institutional systems and administrative traditions. The book is a valuable resource to students and scholars in public administration, public management and political science.' Jon Pierre, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

• List of figures; List of tables; Author biographies; Acknowledgements; List of abbreviations; 1. Policy consultancy in comparative perspective; 2. Consultancy in the UK Government: modernising privatism; 3. Policy consulting in the USA: significant but in decline? 4. Entrenched and escalating: policy-relevant consulting and contracting in Australia, 1987–2017; 5. From corporatist to contractor state? Policy consulting in The Netherlands; 6. Policy consultants for substance and process: a review of the supply and demand for Canadian policy consulting; 7. Swedish government agencies' hiring of policy consultants: a phenomenon of increased magnitude and importance? 8. Conclusion: policy consulting in comparative perspective; Appendix A; Appendix B; Appendix C; Appendix D; Appendix E; Appendix F; References; Index.