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The draft proposals for the United Nations Charter that emerged from Dumbarton Oaks allowed only for one brief mention of human rights. The final version agreed at San Francisco gave human rights a much higher profile. Why did this change take place? There is a substantial body of literature that accounts for it exclusively in terms of the activities of the US Consultants (representatives of NGOs), attached to the US Delegation. However, the role of Latin American states, as well as of the Soviet Union, needs to be remembered. The chapter draws attention to the problems surrounding the heroic role of the US consultants. It traces the evolution of thinking about human rights during the war years, culminating in the attendance of some 1,200 representatives of NGOs at the San Francisco conference. There is no doubt, therefore, that state officials were conscious of wide public expectations on the human rights front. Since popular support for the UN would be vital to its future effectiveness, respect for human rights can be seen as a kind of ‘social wage’ in return. This gave the individual a new standing in international society and international law.

Chapter 6 is devoted entirely to a close examination of the substantial history of national and state corrections consultants in the county, paying particular attention to the two consultants whose work was instrumental in shaping the expansion projects that receive the most attention in the book. Both chapters 5 and 6 engage debates about exclusionary languages and practices of late modernity and map them onto ethnographic examples of policy discussions that abstracted human lives into penological concerns with management and control and that privileged experts at the expense of alternative-and very real-understandings of incarceration. In examining consultants’ official reports, practitioners’ testimonies, and editorials and news stories in the media, these chapters trace the epistemological processes by which local carceral politics came to embrace and resemble the carceral state, even as many people in the community claimed a certain degree of knowledge about mass incarceration that absolved them of any complicity in its local replication.

Dr. Lilia Abron is an engineer, an entrepreneur, mother, and activist who works twelve-hour days. She is another true Renaissance woman. Lilia was born at home in Memphis, Tennessee, on March 8, 1945. She was small, premature, and almost did not survive were it not for her aunt, who rushed her to the hospital in a cab because ambulances were not available to black people at the time. She was the second of four daughters of Ernest Buford Abron and Bernice Wise Abron, who were both educators. Both of her parents had attended LeMyone College. Her father entered college and played football. Because of an injury he was ineligible to serve in the military in World War II. He then worked as a Pullman porter, because his father had been a Pullman porter. After the war, when the trains were not as popular, he became a teacher in the Memphis public schools. Lilia’s mother and father were very active during the civil rights era. Lilia’s mother was from Arkansas; and she typed the briefs for Wiley Branton, defense attorney for the Little Rock Nine, the group that integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Because Lilia’s parents were active in Memphis society, Lilia was involved in programs that included the Girl Scouts and the church. She went to public school in Memphis, Tennessee. In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, which led the United States to improve math and science education. The school system tracked each student’s education, even in the segregated schools. Therefore, Lilia was placed in the math and science track. This meant she participated in a science fair, which was held at Lemoyne College. In addition, she had to prepare other science projects. Her segregated schools were well equipped for science teaching. In addition to well-stocked labs, the Memphis high school that she attended offered higher-level mathematics, including algebra and introduction to calculus. She graduated from high school in Memphis and decided to go to college with the intention of studying medicine, which was the one of the few occupations available to black people at the time.

Through mediation by colonial officials, governments and the discipline of international human resources management, technical professionals have tried to rewrite the nature of overseas elite labor. In Nepal, these interventions into how transnational elites engage with the country have frequently had unexpected effects. This concluding chapter brings the story of Expatria in Kathmandu into the present, exploring how political conflicts, changing dynamics of gender and labor and new modes of precarious employment have created a different community of foreigners in Kathmandu, one that was not desired or predicted by technical labor managers. The mediating role of elite workers in Kathmandu, who are by some measurements very powerful and by others marginalized, comes to the fore as expatriates feel the impact of the neoliberal policies that it has been their job to implement overseas.

This chapter references some lessons from three housing futures studies that were conducted by the Cambridge Architectural Research and Eclipse Research Consultants. It shows that the aim of each study was to create a platform which would allow stakeholders to discuss the future of their particular neighbourhoods, towns, and regions.

This chapter turns to the bottom line of outsourced regeneration and self-regulation – the colossal financial riches made, following the money from government to the immediate companies and then through to their ultimate owners, often offshored in tax havens. A first section recaps on the variety of unnecessary costs imposed on the public sector through PFI procurement that would simply not be possible if the scheme was financed and procured directly through the public sector. A second section focuses on the complex yet lucrative financial deals done to raise the upfront investment that provide private banks, financial market traders and PFI investors with enormous, risk-free profits. A third section turns to the generous profit margins commanded by the construction and maintenance firms in these PFI schemes from the lack of genuine competition in the procurement process. A fourth section details how corporate consultants and the big four accountancy firms also financially benefit from advising and auditing on these schemes in ways that create real conflicts of interest. A final section that follows these different profitable financial flows through the MFN regeneration scheme.

Contributions to the topic of consultants and public policy in France are often unbalanced and consultants are typically analysed as a secondary subject of wider studies. Drawing on the sociology of elites, this chapter argues that their circulation between the private and the public spheres invites us to reconsider the so-called French resistance to private consultants, allegedly led by senior civil service, which artificially opposes two groups that are, in fact, in a sociological position of homology. It helps understanding how an hybrid elite of general government works hand in hand in the development and diffusion of NPM ideas within the French state. The chapter summarizes the main steps which contributed to consultants’ increasing deployment in French public policies and seeks to describe the type of services they aim to deliver, as well as what decision makers may consider as their “added-value”. It argues that a critical part of their growth relies on their legitimizing effects over change. By doing so, it highlights public policies’ specific temporality and logic, as well as the national variations at stake in terms of private consultants’ involvement and the extent to which they impact French public sector.

This chapter puts in evidence the various practices of consultants in the construction of the EU. Indeed, although consultants have become important actors in European integration processes, their work in the governing of Europe has seldom been analysed. Drawing upon a conceptualisation of consultants as ‘knowledge agents’ working in a knowledge-based economy, Ross argues that a consultant (and a consultancy firm) does not merely perform a ‘neutral role’, moving knowledge from one place to another. Rather consultants both produce and use knowledge strategically. Applying autobiographical methodology, he describes how, in advising either clients or EU public actors, a consultant can modify these latter’s positions and behaviour by deploying knowledge about the EU and its policies, thus contributing to the very construction of policy ideas. In setting out consultants’ daily practices, the chapter thus offers new insights into the way Europe can be built - through a constant series of informed, expert and ‘knowledgeable’ movements and consequent actions in which the consultant plays a pivotal role.