Saudi Arabia’s reliance on Western consulting firms is no longer a matter of “importing expertise,” as regime propaganda insists. It has become a state of full dependency—one that began with the drafting of Vision 2030 and has expanded relentlessly ever since. By 2025, Saudi Arabia’s consulting market reached $4 billion, according to Source Global Research. This figure does not reflect ambition or strategic sophistication. It reflects a structural void inside the state apparatus, an institutional incapacity that no glossy vision document—however well-designed—can conceal.
A country that claims to be leading historic transformations has outsourced its thinking, planning, culture, and economic strategy to foreign firms that shape the future on its behalf. The regime no longer governs through institutions; it governs through invoices. The result is a state watching passively as others design its trajectory, priorities, and identity from the outside.
A Vision Written Abroad, and Projects Run from Outside Without Memory or Soul
International reporting has made it clear that the so-called “Saudi vision” is not a local intellectual product. Vision 2030 was drafted largely by firms like McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group, which not only outlined its strategic pillars but were also involved in planning Donald Trump’s 2025 visit to Riyadh. What is marketed as a national renaissance is, in reality, a foreign-authored document rebranded as sovereign achievement.
The cultural sector tells an even darker story. Global consulting giants—and smaller firms such as Deloitte, Barker Langham, Consulum, and Brunswick Arts—now design museums, manage biennales, structure exhibitions, and define cultural programming down to the smallest detail. Museums meant to reflect the history of local communities are managed by foreign entities. Art events meant to express social imagination are designed in London or New York. Even AlUla, promoted as a national treasure, was conceptually shaped by consultants unfamiliar with the region’s villages, people, or living memory.
The outcome is predictable and devastating:
projects that look impressive but feel interchangeable,
initiatives without roots,
institutions without memory,
and a culture stripped of its owners.
This is identity without inhabitants. Culture without authors.
When Culture Becomes a Commodity and Art Is Reduced to Metrics
Saudi Arabia’s cultural and creative sectors are not governed by artists, curators, or intellectuals. They are governed by consulting logic—by firms that treat culture as a product line to be optimized, scaled, and monetized. The concepts guiding state cultural institutions are not inspiration or authenticity, but three cold corporate metrics: return on investment, scalability, and impact assessment.
These are tools designed for factories and financial markets, not for art, heritage, or collective memory. When applied to culture, they hollow it out. Exhibition halls are built, but artists do not develop. Festivals multiply, but communities do not engage. Budgets expand, but no cultural accumulation occurs.
One curator summarized it bluntly:
“They treat culture like an industrial sector, not a space where identity is formed.”
Because consultants arrive and depart on short-term contracts, no local expertise is built and no knowledge is transferred. Every project starts from zero and ends at zero. Those who design it do not belong to the place—and leave without consequence.
The Dark Side: Consulting Deals That Burn Billions Without Oversight or Accountability
What international media reveals about consultants is only half the story. The other half lies in opaque deals negotiated behind closed doors, facilitated by local intermediaries with deep political connections. These contracts are rarely subject to genuine oversight or transparency and are frequently awarded based on political proximity rather than professional merit.
Multiple accounts from within Saudi government institutions confirm that consulting contracts are sometimes used as vehicles for money diversion, patronage, or consolidating influence for favored advisors. Firms are repeatedly awarded new contracts despite previous failures, simply because the regime lacks either the capacity or the will to replace them.
The most dangerous element is the structure of these contracts themselves. Short-term engagements grant enormous influence without accountability. A firm designs a project, collects millions, exits, and leaves government bodies to face implementation failure. The response is never reform—it is another consulting contract, another invoice, another cycle of institutional erosion.
This dependency is not a sign of strength.
It is an implicit admission that the Saudi system does not trust itself to govern.
The state imports thinking from abroad while bleeding billions at home—without sustainability, without learning, and without consequence.
A Vision Without Owners, and a State Without Memory
A country that should be shaping its own future has handed it to consultants. They think, plan, design, and decide—while the regime signs checks. When vision, culture, and identity are outsourced, the state becomes merely an execution platform, not an author of its destiny.
Billions are spent on contracts without oversight, accountability, or lasting impact. The future is reduced to a PowerPoint file, delivered by McKinsey to a minister’s desk, polished for a presentation—and then forgotten once the consultants leave.
A system that depends on imported minds will never produce a genuine national project.
It will produce presentations that shine briefly, then disappear.
And a regime that governs by consultancy will never build a future—only a sequence of expensive illusions.
