An introduction

This chapter is born out of the ambivalence I confess to feeling as a result of having undertaken a range of tasks covered by the term ‘consultant’ for a number of international organisations in South East Europe and beyond since about 1997, reaching a peak in the early 2000s, mainly concerned with aspects of social welfare reform. It reflects on the limits of the ‘consultancy’ role, building on earlier works that, using different registers, explored the growing salience of consultancies in transnational social policymaking (Stubbs, 2002, 2003). I continue to argue that engaging in consultancy gave me access to material that, as a researcher, I was highly unlikely to be privy to, and provided much-needed insights into the ‘black box’ of policy translation missing from more institutionalist accounts. Subsequently, my involvement, with others, in a critique of the very programmes that I had helped to put in place, however, merely served to compound ambivalence upon ambivalence.

This text revisits some of my consultancy experiences and examines them through a translation lens, suggesting that transnational reforms are always translated and never merely transferred or transplanted. The chapter reflects some of my current concerns with understanding reform attempts in the ‘semi-periphery’ of South East Europe as arenas of struggle, neocolonial ‘contact zones’, sites of diverse performances, on- and off-stage interactions, and improvisations marked by ‘radically asymmetrical relations of power’, containing elements ‘ignored or suppressed by diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination’ (Pratt, 1992: 7).

The chapter explores two broad sets of reform efforts in which I was involved. The first relates to a relatively minor role I had as a consultant on a United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF)-led Regional Consultation on Child Care System Reform in South East Europe, culminating in a conference in the Bulgarian capital, Sofia, in 2007. Here, I use material first prepared, jointly, with Reima Ana Maglajlić, who was a consultant on the same programme (Stubbs and Maglajlić, 2012, 2013). The second relates to the UK Department for International Development's (DFID’s) efforts in the early 2000s to reform social welfare systems in Bosnia-Herzegovina (B-H), discussed in a paper co-written with Noémi Lendvai (Lendvai and Stubbs, 2009b).