Perceptions on the Role of Consultants in Wallonia's Smart Cities Initiative

The Walloon region in Belgium has been actively promoting smart city initiatives in its provinces and municipalities. Apart from providing funding for projects that use digital technologies to address various challenges that municipalities themselves identify as most pressing, the Walloon government has also partnered with organisations that can actively assist municipalities. These include academic institutions that organise workshops and publish guidelines on smart city development, non-profit organisations that can advise on data governance, and public sector consortiums that can help coordinate and implement projects. The call for projects published in 2023 adopts a multi-stakeholder approach, underscoring the importance for municipalities to work with citizens, community organisations, and local businesses. In this call, the Walloon government also empowered municipalities to ‘entrust a third party with the submission and management of their application to this call for projects.’ This paper is interested in understanding the types of organisations that constituted the ‘third parties’ municipalities could work with. It tries to discern what the perceived benefits of this engagement are, according to the Walloon government and according to municipalities. Specifically, the paper focuses on consultants and consulting firms that have worked on these applications. How have they come to work with the region of Wallonia or with municipalities? What services do they offer? What are the perceived benefits of engaging with consultants? Is there a difference in engaging with local consultants as opposed to large, international consulting firms? The paper contextualises Walloon’s smart city policy within policy advice literature. It looks at the various stakeholders that are part of the policy before focusing on private sector consultants. The paper aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role of private consultants in governance, an area of research that is largely critical of this relationship. In particular it tries to understand how the role of consultants is perceived and whether locally embedded consultants that specialise in a specific field are perceived differently as compared to the more traditional management consulting firms.