Desk Top Consultancy
Policy and document work done at the desk: review, critique and redrafting with clearly stated options, including work that has supported the nationalisation of policy.
Ministries, agencies and NGOs whose policy has to survive external scrutiny.
What the work covers
- Policy review and critique against law and practice
- Drafting and redrafting of policy instruments
- Comparative and desk research
- Position papers and cabinet-style options briefs
- Guidelines, standard operating procedures and manuals
- Alignment of institutional documents with national frameworks
What you are left holding
- Critique report with findings referenced to source
- Redrafted instrument or new draft policy
- Options brief with costs and recommendation
- Validation record of decisions taken
The work in detail
Desk top consultancy is document work: reviewing, critiquing and redrafting policy and institutional instruments, including work that has fed into the nationalisation of policy. It suits questions that are answered by careful reading and drafting rather than by field work.
We fix the question the document has to answer and the audience that must act on it before any drafting begins. Then the sources are reviewed: statute, regulation, sector policy and comparable jurisdictions are cited, so every claim in the draft can be traced back. The critique names gaps, contradictions and unenforceable provisions explicitly rather than smoothing over them, because a policy that cannot be enforced creates more exposure than no policy at all.
Recommendations arrive as options, each with its cost, its legal exposure and its implementation burden stated, plus our recommendation and the reasoning behind it. A validation session with your team follows, and you receive a clean final draft that reflects the decisions taken in it.
Desk Top Consultancy
Scenarios, for reference
An HR manual older than the law
An institution’s HR manual predated the current Employment Act and contradicted it in several places, including on probation and termination. We produced a clause-by-clause critique referenced to the Act, then a redraft that closed the gaps without discarding the parts that worked.
A sector policy needing options, not opinions
A ministry department needed to put three defensible options to a decision-making meeting. We drafted an options brief with costs and legal implications for each, and a recommendation that named the trade-off being accepted.
Procedures that existed only in practice
An organisation ran well on institutional memory and had nothing written down. We documented the procedures as actually performed, then tightened them where they conflicted with policy, so the practice survived a change of staff.