Epistemic Community

An epistemic community is a network of professionals with recognized knowledge and skill in a particular issue-area. They share a set of beliefs, which provide a value-based foundation for the actions of members. Members of an also share causal beliefs, which result from their analysis of practices that contribute to set of problems in their issue-area that then allow them to see the multiple links between policy and outcomes (doctrine?). Third, they share notions of validity, or internationally defined criteria for validating knowledge in their area of know-how. However, the members are from all different professions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemic_community (cf Shared Understanding, Scenes, Collaborations, Inventions, And Progress)

In philosophy of science and systems science (systems thinking) the process of forming a self-maintaining epistemic community is sometimes called a mindset. In politics, a tendency or faction is usually described in very similar terms.

Epistemic communities came to be because of the rapid professionalization of government agencies.

decision makers began turning to experts to help them understand issues because there were more issues and all were more complicated

Growing professionalization of bureaucracies caused more respect towards experts, especially scientists. The first achievement by epistemic communities was the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty between the United States and Russia.

The strength of cooperative agreements depends on the power that the epistemic community has gathered within agencies and governments

Role in international policy coordination

Epistemic communities usually aid in issues concerning a technical nature. Normally, they guide decision makers towards the appropriate norms and institutions by framing and institutionalizing the issue-area.

Policy evolution occurs in four steps: policy innovation, diffusion, selection, and persistence

Through framing the range of political controversy surrounding an issue, defining state interests, and setting standards epistemic communities can define the best solution to a problem

There are a myriad of examples of the impact that epistemic communities have had on public policy

Arms control ideas are reflected in the ABM Treaty and agreements following it during Cold War.

Epistemic communities brought attention to chlorofluorocarbons and their polluting consequences.

An epistemic community helped identify issues and direct the parameters that provided outline for GATT and some free trade agreements.

They have also helped in telecommunications agreements and economy issues around the world. In telecommunications, “without the influence of an epistemic community of engineers concerned about design and international coordination of telecommunications equipment and standards, the regime would not have moved in the direction of multilateral agreements,”

Epistemic communities were directly involved in the creation of the Board of Plant Genetic Resources

The global environmental agenda is increasing in complexity and interconnectedness. Often environmental policymakers do not understand the technical aspects of the issues they are regulating

As a result, conditions of uncertainty are produced which stimulate a demand for new information

Environmental crises play a significant role in exacerbating conditions of uncertainty for decision-makers. (climate change)

The initial identification and bounding of environmental issues by epistemic community members is very influential. They can limit what would be preferable in terms of national interests, frame what issues are available for collective debate, and delimit the policy alternatives deemed possible. The political effects are not easily reversible.

epistemic communities have a direct input on how international cooperation may develop in the long term. Transboundary environmental problems require a unified response rather than patchwork policy efforts, but this is problematic due to enduring differences of state interest and concerns over reciprocity

if epistemic community members have developed authoritative bureaucratic reputations in various countries, they are likely to participate in the creation and running of national and international institutions

epistemic community members in a number of different countries can become connected through intergovernmental channels, as well as existing community channels, producing a transnational governance network, and facilitating the promotion of international policy coordination.

An example of a scientific epistemic community in action is the 1975 collectively negotiated Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP), a marine pollution control regime for the Mediterranean Sea developed by the United Nations Environment Programme.

Some refutations have been formulated about epistemic communities

Firstly, one should be cautious about the risk of retrospective thinking when conceptualizing epistemic communities. Indeed, the solutions proposed by expert groups which are eventually adopted by policy makers are one but many that have been formulated by the scientific community

Secondly, it is difficult to assess the limits of the term "experts".

For instance, the G7 "experts" would in fact be civil servants from the member-states of the organization, who therefore cannot claim the scientific legitimacy of researchers

Finally, this hypothesis does not take into consideration the influence of national contexts in the agenda-setting of epistemic communities. The experts are restricted to the limit of the tolerable in their own national context.