The role of consultants in Smart City initiatives
A little about Dr. Uttara Purandare’s research
Since the start of the last academic year, Dr. Uttara Purandare has joined the SCI research team. After dedicating her doctoral thesis to smart cities and the role played by consultants in this dynamic in India, she is now collaborating with our Academic Director, Prof. Nathalie Crutzen, and Prof. Martin De Jong (Erasmus University Rotterdam) on this topic, opening up her field of research to other contexts, in particular Wallonia.
What can we learn from her research? In this article, Uttara shares her observations with us and tells us more about her career as a researcher.
Before talking about results, let's first talk a bit about your career: how and why did you decide to go into research?
When I started doing my Master’s in Public Policy at the International Institute of Social Studies in The Hague and at the University of York (2014-2016), I realized that I really enjoyed the process of research — how it builds incrementally and iteratively. More importantly, I could see the importance of quality academic research on real world problems and policies. This changed my perception of academia. It was also during my Master’s that I became interested in research on urban policy and governance.
After this, doing a PhD was a very exciting prospect and I was offered a position by the IIT Bombay-Monash Research Academy. This is a joint programme between an Indian university and an Australian one. I started my PhD in July 2018. The Covid-19 pandemic caused a number of challenges with fieldwork, etc. but I could submit my thesis and I received my PhD in 2023. My thesis is titled Whose Smart Cities? Management Consultants, Governance, and Inclusion in India’s Smart Cities Mission. I focused on studying the various roles that management consultants play in India’s public sector, the impact this has on governance, and how the public sector is being transformed—not always in positive ways.
Why exploring the Smart City topic?
By the time I was considering pursuing a PhD, the smart city concept was becoming more and more popular across the world. From the get-go, the concept was a very exciting one to research because it brought together so many different strands—urban development, digital technologies, big data, sustainability, and a complex web of public and private actors. In 2015 India launched a very ambitious policy, the 100 Smart Cities Mission. I was curious about how the policy would play out in India and thought this would be a logical continuation from my Master’s thesis which also focused on urban India.
Smart Cities in India: what can we learn from your doctoral research on this subject?
Research on smart cities in India is really interesting and there are many scholars who study it from different angles and focus on different cities. My research on the Smart Cities Mission or SCM, as the policy is known, has concentrated on the design and implementation of the policy. This has covered three themes:
- the governance structure of the policy,
- the language of the policy,
- and the actors involved in designing and implementing the policy, especially private sector management consultants.
The Smart City Mission structure
The SCM is a fairly complex policy that builds on previous interventions but it has also created a number of new structures and processes since 2015. This makes it an important policy to study because its implications will outlast the life of the policy itself. Khaliq Parkar and I published a working paper in 2023 titled Decoding Digitalization of Urban Governance in India. It goes into significant detail on the ‘policy, people, and processes’ of the SCM. The paper not only deconstructs the structure of the Mission to make it more legible, it also demonstrates the processes of urban digitalization in India.
Using discourse analysis
Another aspect of the Mission that I have focused on is the language used in SCM documents and what that can tell us about the aims, priorities, and principles of the Mission. For a paper titled The Language of Smart Cities, I conducted a discourse analysis of 9 policy documents, about 670 pages. I focused on how the language has changed and evolved since the Mission was launched in 2015 and what that tells us. I also argue about the importance of understanding the gaps between policy language and policy in practice. The paper finds that while the language of the SCM has been increasingly inclusive and bottom-up – which is a positive shift – in practice, the Mission focuses far more on technologically-driven top-down solutions. While this paper focuses on documents published by the federal government, it offers a methodological framework to study smart city documents published at the city-level as well.
The role of consultants
The aspect that I have worked on most, which I continue to focus on, is the role of private sector management consultants in the Mission. These include firms like the Big 4 and Big 3 firms that work directly with the federal government as well as at the city-level. Previously I have focused on identifying the roles that consultants play in the Mission, how their presence is justified, and what impact this might have on policy design, implementation, and governance. These were the central research questions for my PhD thesis.
And what about your current research here at the Smart City Institute?
The postdoctoral research position I currently hold represents a really exciting opportunity to delve into the European smart city context and expand my research areas beyond India. As part of this postdoc, I spend one year at HEC Liège and one year at the Rotterdam School of Management in Erasmus University Rotterdam. We are interested in studying the role of non-state actors in smart city initiatives, and the impact this has on local governance.
How do you link it with your previous research and what are you working on?
Management Consultants in Indian Smart Cities
During the postdoc, we are building on some of my doctoral work. The first paper that we have worked on continues to focus on management consultants in Indian smart cities. The paper is titled Do Management Consultants Influence Public Policy? Insights from India’s Smart Cities Mission. Our primary research question sought to understand whether management consultants have a direct influence on policy design. This is a difficult thing to trace and other authors have tried to understand whether their impact is more superficial or if it is indeed fundamental. What was interesting also was to consider a case from India because much of the research on management consultants is from North America and Western Europe.
In the paper, we find that consultant influence is uneven across levels of government; and in India there is a simultaneous ‘hollowing out’ effect at the city-level while the federal government is becoming more centralizing. We argue for the importance of regulating consultant engagement. We presented this paper at the International Research Society for Public Management (IRSPM) Conference in April 2025.
> More about the presentation
And last May, I had the pleasure to present this paper at the very first UNIC thematic conference in Malmö, for which we received the “Best Paper Award”. Apart from the recognition, this was a wonderful award to get because of what the UNIC network represents—research and collaboration in and on post-industrial cities in Europe. While our paper focuses on India, it does address a host of issues that cities around the world are grappling with. And collaborative research projects offer an opportunity to learn from one another.
> More about the UNIC award
How are consultants perceived in Walloon Smart City initiatives
For our current research paper, we are continuing to look at private consultants in the public sector but in a very different context — the smart cities initiative in Wallonia. We are still developing this research but very briefly we are delving into how private sector consultants are perceived by the regional government and by municipalities in smart city development. We are trying to understand the services offered by more local smart city consultants and firms that are embedded in the Walloon region, and how municipalities might employ these services.
While this paper is still a work-in-progress, we have gained numerous interesting insights from our interviews with various stakeholders in the Walloon region. We have found that consultants are perceived as partners in smart city projects, and that municipalities have found their interactions with consultants to be very fruitful, and even necessary. We have also observed that the network of policy actors in Wallonia is very small. While on the one hand, this creates an atmosphere of trust and collaboration, on the other hand there can be some less positive outcomes like conflicts in interest. We presented an outline of this paper at the UNIC conference in May under a working title It can be found here.
To conclude, could you share your impressions after this first year as a postdoc?
I have had an engaging and challenging year, in all the best ways. The most exciting thing for me has been to learn more about the governance and policy context in Wallonia. Not only have I been researching smart city development here, but I have also been understanding better how policies are developed and implemented, the different ways in which consultants are engaged with, and the impacts of this. It has been particularly interesting to conduct some of the interviews in French with the help of my colleagues, and also to be able to visit some of the smaller cities in the Walloon region!
A last question: would you have one reading to recommend to our readers to start with Smart Cities?
An important read that I think is very balanced is Citizens in the ‘Smart City’: Participation, Co-Production, Governance by Paolo Cardullo. The book contextualizes the smart city concept within its neoliberal origins but it moves beyond this. It shows how cities can develop their own approaches to smart city development and the strength of centering the citizen in this approach. The book presents strategies that policymakers and researchers can use.
