The Politics of Expertise in International Organizations

How International Bureaucracies Produce and Mobilize Knowledge

Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, Annabelle Littoz-Monnet

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134879786
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This edited volume advances existing research on the production and use of expert knowledge by international bureaucracies. Given the complexity, technicality and apparent apolitical character of the issues dealt with in global governance arenas, 'evidence-based' policy-making has imposed itself as the best way to evaluate the risks and consequences of political action in global arenas. In the absence of alternative, democratic modes of legitimation, international organizations have adopted this approach to policy-making.

By treating international bureaucracies as strategic actors, this volume address novel questions: why and how do international bureaucrats deploy knowledge in policy-making? Where does the knowledge they use come from, and how can we retrace pathways between the origins of certain ideas and their adoption by international administrations? What kind of evidence do international bureaucrats resort to, and with what implications? Which types of knowledge are seen as authoritative, and why?

This volume makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the way global policy agendas are shaped and propagated. It will be of great interest to scholars, policy-makers and practitioners in the fields of public policy, international relations, global governance and international organizations.

1 Production and uses of expertise by international bureaucracies

Annabelle Littoz-Monnet

• Questions and contribution

• International bureaucracies as strategic actors within a given environment

• Modes of knowledge mobilization

• Processes of knowledge production

• Forms of Knowledge

This edited volume aims to advance existing research on the production and use of specialized knowledge by international bureaucracies.¹ Given the complexity, technicality and apparent apolitical character of the issues dealt with in global governance arenas, “evidence-based” policy-making has imposed itself as the best way of evaluating the risks and consequences of political action in global arenas. Although this turn has also taken place at the domestic level, international organizations have, in the absence of alternative, democratic, modes of legitimation, heartily adopted this approach to policy-making. International bureaucrats insist that their policies and programs are “evidence-based,” “rational,” and founded on neutral expertise. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) for instance spells out its “core values” on its web page and lists “objective” at the top of its inventory, boasting that its “analyses and recommendations are independent and evidence-based.”² For international bureaucrats, resorting to the use of expert knowledge can indeed represent an efficient means of orienting political action, while keeping the appearance of the rational, apolitical character of the policies they promote.

Since Weber, who argued, at the beginning of the last century, that bureaucratic administration means the “exercise of power by way of knowledge,”³ it has become commonplace for sociologists and political scientists alike to evoke the crucial role of expertise as an instrument of bureaucratic power and influence. Scholars of public policy, public administration and European Union (EU) politics have pointed to the multifold ways in which expert knowledge can be mobilized in policy-making processes, as “ammunition” for substantiating organizational preferences, a tool of legitimation, or a mechanism of symbolic authority.⁴ In the literature on international organizations however, little is said about how, why, and when international bureaucrats use expert knowledge and where that knowledge comes from. While the role of knowledge as a constitutive element of bureaucratic authority has been captured, we lack understanding of why and how it is produced and mobilized by international bureaucrats.

Specialized, or “expert” knowledge is understood here as “the forms of codified knowledge that are either produced by specialists (as indicated by qualifications or institutional affiliation); or which involve specialist or technical methods, equipment or accumulated knowledge that is generally assumed to require skills and experience not possessed by professional administrators” (Boswell’s definition, in this volume). Of course what constitutes expert knowledge is itself the object of negotiation amongst relevant stakeholders in a given issue domain. Policy-makers and knowledge actors themselves may vie and compete to assert their own conceptions of what constitutes valid knowledge and a good specialist. Thus, while acknowledging that the “expertization” of knowledge is itself political, the volume focuses on types of knowledge that are perceived, by international bureaucrats and the transnational actors which interact with them, as technical, specialized and as such, as a reliable foundation for policy action.

Questions and contribution

The lack of research on international bureaucracies and expertise has to do, first and foremost, with the predominance of a state-centric perspective in International Relations (IR) until recently. Cox and Jacobson⁵ made an early attempt to introduce a framework for mapping inputs (influence) and outputs (policy) in international organizations (IOs). In doing so they provided us with a better understanding of IOs as international actors, but their conclusions, however, tend to reduce international bureaucratic behavior to the compulsions of powerful states, revealing much about political process and delegation while providing few insights regarding the mobilization of expertise within international secretariats. Disappointment with the performance of international organizations throughout the 1980s resulted in powerful states threatening to disengage—and much of the academic world did. The first significant attempt to resuscitate Cox and Jacobson’s agenda came at the end of the Cold War with Ernst B. Haas’ When Knowledge is Power. Haas shed light on how “invisible colleges” of like-minded professionals from different disciplines could, at times, influence international organizations, which however remain fundamentally habit driven.⁶ Ultimately, Haas offers a typology of IO change, not a theory that can account for the mobilization or production of expertise.

From the 1990s onwards, IR scholarship became more interested in the role of knowledge in international politics. Coined by Foucault⁷ and adapted by Holzner and Marx,⁸ the epistemic communities concept entered the mainstream of IR scholarship with the 1992 special edition of International Organization edited by Peter M. Haas. The approach shifts away from IO problem-solving to focus on more diffuse, transnational networks of knowledge production. Because they identify causal relationships on given policy problems, epistemic communities influence the policy process. The epistemic communities approach has stimulated a new and fruitful research program⁹ and more recent works have tried to identify the scope conditions for science to influence policy. Haas and Stevens¹⁰ have for instance analyzed more than 30 existing international environmental regimes that involve scientific bodies in order to determine what conditions enable scientific knowledge and epistemic communities to influence policy-making. The question addressed by this research program, has, essentially been that of whether experts are relevant actors in international decision-making and the circumstances under which science influences policy.¹¹

In Rules for the World, Michael Barnett and Martha Finnemore bring our focus back to IOs as international actors in their own right. To them, expertise constitutes bureaucratic authority.¹² Following Weber, Barnett and Finnemore argue that “rational-legal authority thus constitutes IOs in the sense that it gives them a specific form (bureaucracy) and empowers them to act in specific ways (general, impersonal rule-making).”¹³ The ability of international secretariats to present themselves as impersonal and neutral is, therefore, central to the assertion of their authority, and the use of expert knowledge plays a central role in this regard. More recently Reinalda and Verbeek have also argued that international bureaucracies are most influential when they monopolize expert knowledge.¹⁴ Jinnah, in her book Post-Treaty Politics provides an exploration of how international secretariats use expertise (both substantive expertise about environmental policy and also institutional expertise about how global governance operates) to manage and expand into the gray area that exists where international organizations’ jurisdictions or mandates overlap.¹⁵ But this research program is still emerging, and some questions remain. Building upon these insights, the volume sets to answer three sets of queries.

First, why and how do international bureaucrats deploy specialized knowledge in policy-making? While, as explained above, existing accounts have suggested that the use of expert knowledge is central to international bureaucracies’ assertion of their authority, a more specific conceptualization of their different ways of using knowledge is lacking. Is expert knowledge used instrumentally to adjust policy outputs; more symbolically to assert the organizations’ epistemic authority; strategically to justify their jurisdiction into new policy domains, build their capacity to act or boost certain claims; or as a means to depoliticize contentious policy issues? Does this vary depending on the type of issue, organization, or the nature of their intervention? While some of these different uses of expertise might overlap in practice, there is a need to at least analytically distinguish between different modes of knowledge mobilization.

Second, how is the expert knowledge used by international bureaucrats produced? By whom? In which arenas? How does knowledge travel from its locus of production towards international bureaucrats? IR scholarship has essentially looked at these questions through the lens of the epistemic communities approach,¹⁶ which assumes that under conditions of uncertainty, an epistemic community can generate a definition of interests by illuminating certain dimensions of an issue, from which actors deduce their preferences. From this perspective, expert knowledge feeds into policy by identifying and framing issues and ultimately the decisions of international policy-makers. But other dynamics might be in operation. International bureaucrats are capable of strategic behavior and may try to shape processes of knowledge production in order to meet their policy or institutional objectives. And ultimately processes of knowledge production and diffusion might simply be more diffuse and intractable. Given this, how can we best attempt to retrace and make sense of processes of knowledge production by international bureaucrats and the web of actors with which they interact?

And third, what forms of knowledge are used by international bureaucracies, and with what kinds of implications? Which types of knowledge are seen as authoritative, and why? International bureaucracies have rolled out new ways of observing, measuring and evaluating performance, through targets, indicators, league tables and benchmarking. Organizations such as the OECD, the European Commission, the World Bank, or the World Health Organization (WHO) have extensively resorted to such tools. Are quantitative forms of knowledge favored because they make claims to impartiality easier? Are indicators and new forms of benchmarking used deliberately in order to “technicalize” and depoliticize issues? Or should this turn be examined within a broader paradigmatic shift that has imported methods of policy-making and evaluation from the private sector?

In answering these questions, the volume makes a key contribution to our understanding of “evidence-policy-making,” international bureaucracies’ self-proclaimed core policy-making mode.

International bureaucracies as strategic actors within a given environment

The volume builds upon an existing body of work that has drawn attention to the authority of international bureaucracies.¹⁷ At the core of this research agenda is the assumption that international secretariats can act as autonomous and independent actors. Barnett and Finnemore¹⁸ see bureaucracies as distinct organizational forms, which have to be understood as the products of a rationalizing process of the exercise of power. The authority of international bureaucracies, in this light, derives from the perception of an apparent rational-legal process of administration. Building upon these insights, existing research has shown that the international secretariats of IOs, due to their bureaucratic nature, have a certain room for maneuver to act autonomously. Despite the fact that member states delineate their mandates and provide them with funding, international bureaucracies are able to find ways to expand their missions and promote what they see as good policy.¹⁹ A number of scholars have indeed shed light on the propensity of international bureaucrats to devise various sorts of strategies to maximize their autonomy. Recent research has painted a fresh portrait of international bureaucrats generously interpreting their mandates, buffering barriers to state monitoring,²⁰ shielding themselves from external pressures by increasing their independent revenue base, seeking out alliances with actors that support their agendas²¹ and even promoting the creation of new IOs with fewer possibilities of control for member states.²²

But international bureaucracies do not act in a vacuum. They are surrounded by their environment and this affects their activities. Traditional IR approaches conceive of the international environment as defined by states, either singularly powerful states, coalitions of states, or competing blocs and alliances.²³ Constructivist theories, for their part, treat international bureaucracies as constituted by their environment, demonstrating how shifts in regulatory, epistemic, and normative patterns shape their formal structure, goals, rules, and standards of appropriateness.²⁴ The focus is on the “socially constructed normative worlds in which organizations exist,” emphasizing the social rules, standards of appropriateness, and models of legitimacy.²⁵

The perspective adopted here conceives international bureaucracies as strategic actors which can be constrained by their environment, either materially or culturally. International bureaucracies act strategically and try to enhance or protect their autonomy, but they do so within a given environment—conceived as the web of actors which interact with international secretariats: states, but also transnational actors, such as firms, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), epistemic communities, and individual experts and scientists. These actors can relate to one another in more or less structured ways (networks, public-private partnerships, or more ad hoc forms of interactions) and constitute the milieu in which international bureaucracies evolve. They constrain and influence international bureaucratic action in two ways. First, they can affect the resources available to international bureaucracies. An obvious example is the ability of states to cut international secretariats’ budgets, but other constraints can consist of the need for international bureaucrats to rely on ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1. Production and uses of expertise by international bureaucracies
• 2. The role of expert knowledge in international organizations
• 3. International bureaucracies’ competence creep into bioethics: the use of ethics experts as a bureaucratic device
• 4. Coupling science to governance: straddling the sciencepolicy interface
• 5. Experts and the production of international policy knowledge: do epistemic communities do the job?
• 6. Partners to diplomacy: transnational experts and knowledge transfer among global policy programs
• 7. Connecting scholarly expertise to international policy practice at the United Nations
• 8. Modes of knowledge mobilization by/for international bureaucracies throughout international policy processes
• 9. Evaluation and simulation. producing evidence in the global politics of social cash transfers
• 10. The managerialism of neoliberal global governance: the case of the OECD
• 11. Doing comparison: producing authority in an international organization
• Index
• Routledge Global Institutions Series