Chapter 2 — Setting the Scene (plain-language version)

What this chapter does

Before the argument can start, three things need to be established: what kind of consulting this thesis is actually about, what makes European infrastructure advisory specifically different from other kinds of consultancy, and who gets affected by infrastructure decisions besides the people who hired the consultant.

This chapter handles that groundwork. It also explains why the thesis is written by a practitioner from inside the profession rather than by an external researcher.

What kind of consulting: the professional qualification framework

The thesis uses a specific definition of consulting, anchored in the Chartered Management Consultant (ChMC) framework — a professional qualification scheme launched in 2021 in the UK that sets out what competent management consulting looks like across three stages of a career.

The ChMC framework describes four skill areas every consultant should develop:

1. Ethics and professional standards — how the consultant behaves and what obligations they carry
2. Leadership and management — how they lead engagements and teams
3. Client operating environment — how well they understand the context their clients operate in
4. Personal and professional development — how a consultant actually becomes a better consultant over time

And three career stages:

• Foundation — early career, learning through supervised analytical work
• Applied — mid-career, working more independently, managing projects, producing the firm’s visible analytical output
• Chartered — senior, exercising authoritative professional judgment

The ChMC is one of several similar frameworks across different advisory sectors — analogous frameworks exist in international management consulting (the ICMCI’s Certified Management Consultant designation operates across 49 countries), in financial advisory (CFA, CAIA), and in other sectors. The thesis uses ChMC as its specific scaffold because it fits European infrastructure advisory and because it was recently developed with enough institutional detail to support systematic analysis. The findings that follow — about AI mediation disrupting formation at each stage — apply wherever an analogous three-tier progression structure governs professional development.

European infrastructure advisory: why this domain is different

The thesis focuses on a particular family of consulting work: advisory services for European infrastructure — railways, energy systems, water, defence, urban planning, environmental infrastructure, and related areas.

Three things make this domain distinctive.

First, a public-service tradition. European infrastructure has been shaped by a long tradition of treating infrastructure as serving the public, not just shareholders. In France this is service public. In Germany it’s Daseinsvorsorge — roughly, essential public services. Across Europe, the tradition holds that a railway or a water system or an electricity grid serves the population as a whole, and that the decisions made about it should reflect that obligation. This tradition has shaped what infrastructure advisory work is for, what questions it asks, and what counts as a good recommendation.

Second, heavy regulation. European infrastructure operates within formal regulatory frameworks — energy regulators setting tariff structures, transport authorities governing access conditions, water regulators overseeing service standards. These frameworks recognise the public-interest character of the work and constrain what clients can do. When an infrastructure advisory firm gives advice, it is giving advice that will be tested against those frameworks, sometimes in formal regulatory hearings.

Third, a strengthening European governance layer. The European Green Deal, the EU AI Act, strategic-autonomy initiatives — all of these create additional European-level obligations on top of national regulation. Infrastructure advisory in 2026 operates within commitments to climate transition, sustainability, and European strategic priorities that advisory work for a retail chain or a software firm simply doesn’t face.

None of this means infrastructure consulting is intrinsically superior to other kinds of consulting. But it does mean the stakes are higher, the time horizons longer, and the public accountability more formally structured. It’s the domain where the thesis’s argument is most clearly visible — and where it can be most rigorously tested.

The third group nobody talks about

In any standard consulting engagement, there are two parties: the client (who pays) and the consultant (who advises). The contract sits between them. The deliverable is addressed to the client.

But in European infrastructure, there is almost always a third group: the communities, publics, and future generations whose lives are shaped by the decisions being made, who haven’t hired anyone, and who often have no formal seat at the table.

Call them the third box.

A water tariff reform affects every household in a city — households who didn’t commission the study. A rail expansion determines which communities get connected and which get bypassed — communities who weren’t in the room when the recommendation was made. A grid interconnection shapes energy security for a generation — a generation that doesn’t yet exist.

Two thinkers help explain why this matters.

John Dewey, the American philosopher, argued that publics aren’t pre-existing groups — they come into being through the shared consequences of decisions. The water tariff creates a public of people whose household budgets are affected. The transport network creates a public of people whose mobility is shaped. These publics are real even when they aren’t organised and don’t have a formal voice.

Hans Jonas, a German philosopher writing about technology and ethics, added the intergenerational dimension: when decisions bind the future, responsibility extends to people who don’t yet exist. A fifty-year infrastructure asset being designed today will shape how someone born in 2040 lives. The advisory work that supports that decision carries an obligation to that future person, even though they can’t participate in the decision.

The third box is not unique to European infrastructure — management consulting to a retail chain also affects workers, consumers, and communities who didn’t hire anyone. But those third-box effects are diffuse, informal, and carry no regulatory or legal standing. In infrastructure, the third box has formal institutional architecture: statutory consultation requirements, regulated tariff processes, environmental assessments with legal standing. The obligations are explicit and enforceable.

The third box recurs throughout the thesis — not as an abstract principle but as the constituency that advisory work ultimately answers to. Every chapter returns to it.

How the research was done: writing from inside

The thesis is written by a practising infrastructure consultant. This matters methodologically — it shapes both what the thesis can see and what it might miss.

Fourteen years advising on regulatory and strategic questions across European transport, energy, and water infrastructure gives the author access that an outside observer couldn’t have: what the work actually feels like from the inside, what senior consultants worry about in unguarded conversations, what happens in client meetings that doesn’t appear in deliverables. The puzzle driving the thesis — that something is changing in how junior consultants are being formed — became visible from inside practice, not from reading academic literature.

The risk is the obvious one: an insider might mistake their own situation for the situation of the whole field, or be reluctant to see what’s uncomfortable. The thesis handles this by being explicit about where it’s drawing on lived experience and where it’s drawing on published evidence — and by engaging seriously with research that might complicate the argument rather than just confirming it.

One limitation the thesis acknowledges honestly: it is a conceptual argument, not a systematic empirical study. There are no interviews, no surveys, no longitudinal data. The argument is about what is structurally at stake — what the underlying mechanisms are — not a measurement of exactly how much has already happened. Measuring it would be valuable further work.

What has been established

By the end of this chapter, three things are in place:

1. The institutional anchor — the ChMC three-stage formation framework provides the structure against which the rest of the argument operates.

2. The domain’s character — European infrastructure advisory is not generic consulting; it has a public-interest tradition, a regulatory architecture, and a third-box exposure that makes the formation question more visible and the stakes higher than in most other consulting contexts.

3. The methodology — reflexive practitioner research, with the privileges and burdens that position carries.

The scene is set. Chapter 3 builds the philosophical tools needed to understand what AI mediation is actually doing to this domain and to professional formation more broadly.