By Caio Esteves, Managing Partner, N/LF

The colonial model now has a remastered version, and the Global South is the same audience as ever.

Nobody writes that sentence into a public tender, but you only have to look at who public authorities call in, from city halls to federal governments, to decide who each place is and the conclusion becomes hard to avoid.

The most comfortable explanation is that the money is concentrated in the Global North, commercial logic dictates it, as simple as that. But that explanation comes apart quickly: money buys reach, it buys media, and it guarantees distribution at scale. It should not buy the authority to say what a place is, and yet it does, with a regularity that ought to embarrass us more than it does.

When that explanation fails to convince, a more sophisticated one turns up: if the audience the strategy wants to win over is the investor in London, the tourist in New York, the talent in Helsinki, or a journalist who has never heard of the city, it makes sense to hire whoever speaks that language natively. To speak to the North, you hire the North. That logic holds only until somebody asks why, exactly, the North recognises validation only when it comes from inside itself, and that question has a name. A researcher from the South who publishes in an international journal, who cites the right authors, who follows the North's academic grammar to the letter, is still read as a supplier of local data, rarely as the author of a general theory. Research on one's own city becomes a case study illustrating a thesis formulated somewhere else, almost never the origin of a thesis that others in the North feel obliged to answer.

There is a line, and it does not separate those who write well from those who write badly. It separates those who are permitted to theorise from those permitted only to supply examples. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, a European author, calls the line that divides knowledge recognised as valid from knowledge made invisible or inferior ‘The Abyssal Line’.

I do not need to look elsewhere for the example; it happened to me. Every so often I am called in to collaborate when what they want is someone to represent Brazil, the Global South, the emerging case. Far less often am I called to talk about place branding or placemaking or the future of places, full stop, with no geographical qualifier in front of it, the way a colleague from the North is called without anyone blinking. The invitation arrives with the fence already drawn: you may theorise about your own backyard, not about the whole field. For years I took that fence as natural, as though it made sense that a Brazilian should have the authority to speak about Brazil and never about the method itself.

And this is where the two explanations turn out to be one. The target audience logic is, underneath, the abyssal line in its most finished form. The North does not validate only knowledge from the North by accident; it was trained to recognise authority only when it arrives with the right accent, the same training that leads a public administration in the South to conclude, with apparent rationality, that it needs a name from outside in order to be taken seriously by that same North. The commercial logic that looked neutral is the abyssal line working both sides at once, shaping who gets to validate and who needs validating.

One caveat before going on, because without it the argument becomes the shallow mirror image of what it denounces. Being from the Global South is not a credential of rootedness anywhere in particular. A Brazilian professional working in Johannesburg, without doing the work of situated discovery of that place, commits exactly the sin a consultancy from Stockholm would commit, only with a coat of legitimacy that makes the sin harder to challenge. The real advantage of coming from the South has less to do with belonging automatically to any other place that also happens to be South, and more to do with having stood on the receiving end of colonising thought, which teaches you to recognise the pattern faster when it comes back.

None of this means a consultancy from the North cannot work in the South. The arrangement in which an outside firm comes in alongside a local partner already exists. It is in fact the norm now, and that is precisely why it deserves a closer look: the local partner tends to bring fieldwork, translation, the meeting schedule, and the reading of context, while the thesis, the method, and the signature stay on the other side, which produces a configuration in which the professional from the South is inside the contract and outside the authorship.

The question, then, was never who takes part; it is who interprets. A consortium in which the reading of the place belongs to whoever operates situated there, with the outside firm coming in for the specific capacity that was missing, is a legitimate arrangement and probably better than either party alone. The reverse, which is the dominant format, simply outsources the fieldwork to whoever lives nearby and leaves intact the only thing that mattered.

Let us try a quick experiment.

Imagine the same consortium the other way round: a Brazilian consultancy hired to lead Copenhagen's identity strategy, with a Danish firm coming in as the local partner, responsible for gathering data, running the workshops with residents, and translating the context for the team that signs the report. If the logic really were about the target audience, it would work in both directions, because Copenhagen also wants investors, tourists, and talent, and nobody would argue that a Danish consultancy understands the global market any less than a Brazilian one understands its own. The asymmetry needs no research to be demonstrated. It is enough to state it out loud and watch how long it takes for somebody to explain why, in that case, things would be different.

If all of this holds, the original question changes shape. It no longer matters whether consultancies from the North are hired because local talent is thought to be missing; what matters is what, exactly, people believe they are buying when they pay for a name from outside. What is missing is the permission to cross a line we would not cross on our own. What gets hired, in practice, is an epistemological passport, someone who can say about us what we already say ourselves, but which, said by them, finally counts as truth.

That permission is expensive. Presence can be bought. Any large consultancy can send a team to live somewhere for a month, call it immersion and illustrate the final report with street photography. What cannot be bought is something else: the capacity to solve a problem with few resources because you have had to do it your whole life, the empathy that comes only from having felt in your own skin what instability means, not from having read about it in a context briefing. Volatility, for much of the Global South, is everyday experience long before it becomes a planning scenario, and there is a fluency you only learn by living inside it for years, never by visiting it for weeks.

A consultancy formed in a stable context with abundant resources may be carrying tools calibrated for a world that is not the world it is trying to serve, and however many months it spends lodged in the place will not resolve that on its own. Presence changes. The colonising logic can stay intact.

Every place that commissions work this way ends up buying a good deal more than a strategy: it confirms, with public money, that the line is real and pays twice for the same mistake. It funds the next generation to accept the fence and goes on treating as external validation what is often no more than the repetition in a different accent of knowledge that already existed inside the place itself.

The question that ought to govern any public tender is not where the bidder comes from, but where the lenses come from that the bidder intends to read that place with, who took part in building those lenses, and what knowledge will be recognised as valid in the process.

Perhaps that is the efficiency of the remastered version of the old colonial model. It no longer needs to arrive and tell the South who it is. It only needs to convince the South that, in order to tell the world who it is, it still has to hire someone authorised by the North to sign underneath.