Chris Hurl is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. His research investigates urban governance, state formation, and the politics of the public sector in Canada.Anne Vogelpohl is a Geographer and holds a Professorship for Social Sciences at HAW Hamburg, Germany. She investigates contradictions between expertise and participation and between global politics and urban everyday life.

• 1 Introduction: The rise of professional service firms as public policy actors.- 2 America First: How consultants got into the public sector.- 3 Taming uncertainty: Climate policymaking and the spatial politics of privatized advice.- 4 Who drives India’s smart cities? Understanding the role of consulting firms in the Smart Cities Mission.- 5 Boutique consultancy and personal trust: Advising on cities in Moscow.- 6 Everywhere from Copenhagen: Method, storytelling, and comparison in the globalization of public space design.- 7 International consultancy firms and African states: New Debt Bonds.- 8  ‘The DNA of Government’: Professional Service Firms, calculative technologies and the politics of municipal benchmarking.- 9 Connecting local government with global finance: Professional service firms as agents of financialization.- 10 ‘Infrastructure’ and the Big 4: Public-private partnerships, corridors, and the expansion of capital.- 11 The corporate takeover of public policy: The case of public private partnerships in Britain.- 12 Camouflaged privatization: The influence of the Fratzscher Commission and PricewaterhouseCoopers on Berlin’s schools.- 13 Hegemonic privatization and its discontents: Reflections on the statecraft of contract-based local governance in England.- 14 Expert advice? Assessing the role of the state in promoting privatized planning.- 15 Conflicting interests: Professional planning practice in publicly-traded firms.- 16 The governance of management consultancy use: Practices, problems and possibilities.