Epistemic Communities, Constructivism, and International Environmental Politics

Peter Haas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317511380
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Epistemic Communities, Constructivism and International Environmental Politics brings together 25 years of publications by Peter M. Haas. The book examines how the world has changed significantly over the last 100 years, discusses the need for new, constructivist scholarship to understand the dynamics of world politics, and highlights the role played by transnational networks of professional experts in global governance. Combining an intellectual history of epistemic communities with theoretical arguments and empirical studies of global environmental conferences, as well as international organizations and comparative studies of international environmental regimes, this book presents a broad picture of social learning on the global scale.

In addition to detailing the changes in the international system since the Industrial Revolution, Haas discusses the technical nature of global environmental threats. Providing a critical reading of discourses about environmental security, this book explores governance efforts to deal with global climate change, international pollution control, stratospheric ozone, and European acid rain. With a new general introduction and the addition of introductory pieces for each section, this collection offers a retrospective overview of the author's work and is essential reading for students and scholars of environmental politics, international relations and global politics.

1

INTRODUCTION

Reconstructing epistemic communities¹

Peter M. Haas

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones.

What used to be heresy is more and more read as orthodoxy.

John Maynard Keynes 1935, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money

1 Introduction

The study of epistemic communities (epicoms) forms part of the constructivist turn in International Relations (IR) and Political Science that has flourished since the 1980s. The study of epicoms has since become institutionalized in academic and policy circles. It explains sources of actors’ understandings of a complex and uncertain policy environment, and the actor’s attendant behaviors or practices under specified conditions.²

Epicoms play an important role under conditions of complexity, and the associated systemic uncertainty, in providing information to decision makers that helps them to articulate an understanding of the world and of their own policies and interests. As the world becomes more complex and interdependent (Perrow 1984; Beck 1986; Jervis 1997; Held, McGrew et al. 1999; Giddens 2000), decision makers encounter more novel interconnected issues about which they lack understanding and familiarity. Epicoms provide new causal arguments that enable indivdiual actors to make sense of the world, and contribute to collective (interactive) efforts to deal with shared problems. Epicoms and their ideas contribute to causal and constitutive mechanisms of social change, in particular social learning, which lead to more scientifically informed, and often comprehensive, approaches to policy making and dealing with issues. Analytically, their study provides a way to link the dialectic between micromotives and social facts (Schelling 1978; Tilly 1984; Ruggie 1998). Ideas priviledge some outcomes by virtue of their causal justification (because they are likely to obtain the desired ends) as well as through constitutive means of creating the policy environment to which their prefered policies are applied, and priviledging the representation of particular expert groups with their own understandings. In terms of methods, the study of epistemic communities seeks to find ways to explain the consequences of understanding by actors, and of the implications of new ideas and policy frames on collective outcomes through process tracing, focused comparisons and large n statistical analysis.

Epistemologically, their study provides a third way between the ominiscient analyst and a relativist world. In terms of social mechanisms they provide a third way between the operation of material forces and the untrammeled imagination (Adler 1997; Pouliot 2007; Adler 2013). Ultimately, the study of epistemic communities and expertise provides an opportunity for reflexive learning that better integrates academic researchers with the policy world they study to yield better IR theory and better broader practices by decision makers who heed the updated advice (Campbell 1993; Haas and Haas 2002).

The study of epistemic communities has become a progressive research program.³ Its hard core consists of ontological claims about complexity and actors, and epistemic claims about the indeterminacy of actor understandings and interests without a better understanding of how actors perceive and understand the context in which they operate (section 4). A broader auxiliary belt of refinements to the core argument developed during the 1990s and 2000s (section 6). Novel facts have emerged about the reciprocal influence of epistemic communities and international institutions, and the affect of ideas on patterns of governance. Confirmations of the theoretically derived claims have resulted through careful empirical studies (section 8).

The research program was subject to a variety of internal and external influences.

2 Internal intellectual history

My understanding of epistemic commuinities emerged while conducting dissertation field research around the Mediterranean in 1982–1983 (Haas 1990). I began work with a set of hypotheses heavily informed by Lateral Pressure Theory (Choucri and North 1975)—which were built primarily on historical materialist accounts of interests based on the net costs of treating national pollution problems—and expecting that national differences would be resolved through the exercise of power. I quickly discovered that the underlying assumptions were flawed. Through numerous interviews with responsible national policy makers I ascertained that no one really knew the extent or magnitude of their pollution problems, nor did they know the likely domestic interests groups that would be involved. In fact, they asked me if I could tell them. I was also lucky to have lengthy, extensive and multiple interviews with United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) staff that had helped deal with regional environmental pollution problems.⁴ They also shared their personal archival materials. They frankly described their strategy of mobilizing the region’s scientific community to address the region’s shared environmental problems: what I later dubbed an epistemic community because of the shared features which I identified through elite interviews with many of the members. Epistemic communities were the focus of the two publications from that research, in 1989 and 1990 (Haas 1989; Haas 1990).

3 External intellectual history

The 1970s were rife with significant ontological transformations in IR and politics. There were profound glimmerings of significant changes in the nature of world politics, although many of these were not fully developed until later, or have not yet been fully understood. Key were the proliferation of new actors, groups of actors, and of shifts in the fundamental nature of world politics that made uncertainty the dominant characteristic for analysis. Keohane and Nye (Keohane, Joseph et al. 1971; Keohane and Nye 1977) early identified the role of non-state actors in world politics, as well as the emergence of new issue areas, along with John Burton (Burton 1972). The systemic conditions of uncertainty and complexity emerged, although a full understanding of them only developed later, and the literature on actors and on the structural systemic changes were never adequately unified. World historians have now documented the full ontology and salient historical moments behind constructivist analysis, dating to the Industrial Revolution, with additional break points in the early 20th century and post World War II (Ponting 1992; McNeill 2000; Manning 2003; McNeill and McNeill 2003; Osterhammel and Petersson 2005).

The 1970s and 1980s also saw numerous intellectual themes that laid the partial foundations (along with returns to prior philosophical roots) for contemporary constructivisms. Popular science laid the foundation for recognizing the social construction of an ambiguous world, as well as the social construction of knowledge (Capra 1975; Hofstadter 1979; Ferguson 1980). A confluence of similar insights about the vagaries of perception, and by extension the general social construction of reality, came from numerous locales.⁵ Thus, in the face of uncertainty there was no single accepted perspective or understanding. Yet actors’ and theorists’ understandings were not capricious or structurally uniform: they varied according to social and contextual factors. Consequently a universal and correspondence theory of truth that had provided the general epistemology for IR and political science was brought into question (Kuhn 1970; Feyeraband 1978). But social constructions of reality are not capricious or unique to individuals or circumstances. The challege was to apply such insights within a meaningful framework of understanding about how actors make sense of their world and negotiate political arrangements with one another. With hindsight many of these provocative insights were parts of ongoing disciplinary debates that led to more moderate resolutions—particularly in the area of sociology and philosophy of science—but they were very compelling at the time.

Epicoms analysis provided a delegation model in which decision makers construct their political realities based on the technical advice provided by experts. Intended effects by one set of actors (agents) lead to unintended effects by other actors (principals) with aggregate social benefits through the provision of international public goods from focused collective action. However the state principals act out of mitigating uncertainty and ignorance rather than through a strategic logic.

Philosophers and sociologists of science demonstrated that the world is not directly accessible, implying that our understanding of the world is mediated by pre-existing ideas about the world. While discussions in the 1970s offered the view that understanding lacked any correspondence to the world (Berger and Luckmann 1967; Holzner and Marx 1979; Mulkay 1979; Barnes and Edge 1982), views now have narrowed down to a belief that such understandings are indirectly connected to an independent material reality, with the boundaries resolved through consensus procedures within the scientific community (Gieryn 1999; Latour 2004). Social psychology recognized the role of frames and prior experience in shaping expectations (Boulding 1956; Jervis 1970; Jervis 1976; Stein and Tanter 1980). Decision sciences revealed that actors take cognitive short-cuts when making choices, and thus that purely rational models of political choice are incomplete and often irrelevant to describe the way decisions are actually made (Braybrooke and Lindblom 1963; Sen 1977; Simon 1978; March 1994). Subjective understanding, satisficing, discounting costs in prospect theory, framing and bounded rationality all play roles in making choices. Economics more recently has looked at the psychological factors that shape preference formation and making choices (Nelson 2005; Akerlof and Schiller 2009). The policy sciences literature complemented decision analysis by focusing on the role of distinctive sets of actors responsible for representing the world in which decision makers find themselves and thus the appropriate mode of decision making (Kingdon 1984; Stone 1989). Mannheim and Gramsican analysis also focused on networks of transnational intellectuals involved in educating the populace and instructing the state (Mannheim 1936; Gill 1993). Hayek had even recognized that economic actors needed assistance from experts in articulating the nature of the policy environment and their available options (Hayek 1945).

A diverse range of literatures complemented these constructivist insights. Biology introduced notions of autopoesis (Maturana and Varela 1987). Art history elaborated the ways in which visual understandings could be deliberately shaped by context (Arnheim 1969), reinforcing William James’ earlier observation that sensory perception is not objective. Education highlighted gendered differences in understanding and communication (Gilligan 1982; Belenky, McVicker et al. 1986). Historians, anthopologists, sociologists and science scholars documented the social influences over the creation and applicaton of ideas about time (Landes 1998) and statistics (Porter 1986; Hacking 1990).

4 Epistemic communities in IR

“Epistemic communities” is a concept applied by constructivist scholars of political science to focus analytic attention on the process by which states and other political actors formulate their interests and reconcile differences of interest. Epistemic communities are a principal channel by which consensual knowledge about causal understandings is applied to international policy coordination, and by which states may learn through processes of international cooperation.

John Ruggie introduced the term episteme, borrowed in turn from Foucault, to describe the overarching perspective through which political relationships are visualized and understood during historical eras (Ruggie 1975). The winter 1992 issue of International Organization on Knowledge, Power and International Policy Coordination introduced a focus on epistemic communities—the actors responsible for articulating and aggregating knowledge-based understanding in areas of security, environment, and international political economy. It also developed the now-standard four-element definition of an epistemic community. Publication in a high profile and prestigious journal helped legitimate constructivist work for a new generation of graduate students and junior faculty.

The introduction in this issue of International Organization (Haas 1992; Chapter 4 this volume) laid out the intellectual foundations for a constructivist research program on the origins and diffusion of ideas in politics. Epistemic communities serve as the originators and transmission mechani...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: reconstructing epistemic communities
• PART I Ontology and historical background
• PART II Regimes and governance patterns
• PART III Institutions and learning
• PART IV Effectiveness
• PART V Science policy
• PART VI Conclusion
• Index