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Operationalizing austerity: the role of transnational professional service firms in local government restructuring

Since the 2008 economic crisis, the “Big Four” professional service firms (KPMG, Deloitte, PwC, Ernst and Young) have aggressively targeted the public sector with the aim of expanding their market in management consulting. As a part of these efforts, they have packaged and promoted service delivery reviews to local governments, offering consultations with the aim of identifying areas where savings can be accrued and services streamlined. Taking up Toronto’s Core Service Review (2011) as a case study, this paper examines the efforts of KPMG consultants to operationalize austerity through generating a metric that classifies and gauges the relative necessity of public services. Drawing from the recent literature on neoliberal governmentality, urban policy mobilities, and the sociology of expertise, I examine the conditions of possibility for the production of this metric. Specifically, what kinds of schema were deployed in determining whether a service is a “must-have” or merely a “nice-to-have”? What forms of expertise were relied upon? And to what extent were these experts able to position themselves as authorities in speaking to the proper levels of service delivery? Finally, exploring the public response to KPMG’s final report, I trace the various ways in which local actors have contested the logic of austerity, advancing alternative understandings of public service standards rooted in moral economies of community well-being and accountability.