Supervisors' questions

My supervisors have raised the following questions:

• Why the discrepancy in estimates of amounts spent on public sector consultancy?
• What accountability is there and how is it exercised?
• Do rule bound approaches to public sector accountability actually help or hinder discharge of effective consultant-client interaction?
• Should examination of project process be of client only or of client and consultant or of how they work together?
• Considering audit requirements and consultancy: 1) how is consultancy made visible and accountable? 2) what is the impact of power relations between client and consultant? This relates to the transaction between parties and Foucauldian space.
• Take the contrast between formal systems for accountability and evaluating with informal systems of how learning and capability develops and conclude how to "capture" these.
• What kind of evaluation of consultancy takes place? and what might come in useful? What part does accountability in the usual public sector sense play in all this?

In an attempt to consider these questions, and aiming to write a review of the literature I'm looking for causes and effects. So I sketched out the relationships I saw between various elements of the problem.

This exercise lead me to consider my research question to be:
Can a study of the client-consultant relationship be helpful to understanding how accountability is constituted in the public service?