Thomas Pfister

Reassessing expert knowledge and the politics of expertise

The social sciences have long acknowledged the vital role of (scientific) experts in governance and public policy. One perspective that has long been dominant and is still held by many describes the relationship between science and society in terms of “linear” or “deficit” models based on the idea that expertise is the privilege of an exclusive group who could or should guide policy by “speaking truth to power.” However, the role of scientific and technological experts in society in general and in public policy in particular has undergone several recontextualizations and reinterpretations of the relationship between science, policy, and society. Ulrike Felt, together with an illustrious group of coauthors, among others points to new levels where science is governed, new sites where knowledge is produced, and new agents claiming to be legitimate producers of systematic and publicly relevant knowledge (Felt et al. 2013; Irwin 2006). This brief introduction can only provide a rough sketch of some major directions within larger debates about the nature and the role of experts and their knowledge in contemporary globalized democratic societies. One critical analysis of the role of expertise in contemporary societies comes from sociologists of the risk society and reflexive modernization. According to Ulrich Beck, a society functioning based on risk (the “world risk society”) is nothing but “the product of more and better science” (Beck 2009, 115). Anthony Giddens very similarly views late modern societies as characterized by “manufactured risk ... created by the very impact of our developing knowledge upon the world” (Giddens 2000, 44). Looking for more detailed accounts of these general tensions, science and technology studies (STS) have paid most attention to the production of expert knowledge itself as well as the relationships between scientific expertise, policy, and society more generally. Regarding the functioning of science and the characteristics of its knowledge, different laboratory studies since the 1970s have highlighted the contingent, local, and culturally embedded nature of scientific work as well as the importance of material aspects for scientific knowledge production. The conditions in which scientific facts and knowledge claims emerge from the interaction between scientists, their labs, research objects, and communities have been described, for example, in terms of epistemic cultures (Knorr Cetina 1999), actor-networks (e.g., Latour 1987), or experimental systems creating epistemic things (Rheinberger 1997). A second main strand of STS research examines the relationships of science with society in general and with policy in particular. The role of experts and their expertise in political processes is a key issue in this area. To begin with, expertise is constructed in dialogical processes within expert communities and with their specific audiences of, for instance, bureaucrats, politicians, the media, or broader publics, who identify specific people as experts in a particular field, request policy advice, or fund research. Moreover, the boundaries and contents of expertise are prestructured by institutions. Among them Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 2014 Vol. 27, No. 4, 311–316, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13511610.2014.986436

Citizenship and capability? Amartya Sen's capabilities approach from a citizenship perspective

This article deals with the potential contribution of Amartya Sens capabilities approach (CA) for studying citizenship. Although the CA cannot be described as a genuine citizenship theory it has informed recent attempts to reformulate social citizenship. Moreover, it shares important aims and assumptions with radical citizenship approaches, which emphasise democracy, voice, and difference. Especially, Sens ideas can help formulate positive notions of equality. However, a fruitful dialogue between those perspectives has to lead over some controversial issues. In this context, this article suggests more substantive notions of agency and interaction as well as integrating rights and rights language.

Energy, society, and culture – transforming the order of energy (part I)

This special issue assembles seven articles, which investigate current attempts to transform current energy systems into sustainable ones from social perspectives. Energy is so deeply embedded in modern societies that it is impossible to understand their historical emergence nor their present main characteristics if they would not have developed appropriate energy systems alongside markets, industries, democratic, and welfare institutions. Energy and energy systems are the sociotechnical backbones of contemporary societies. As infrastructures, they can be more or less invisible given that they are running smoothly. This can change rapidly, when energy systems become disrupted as during the oil crises of the 1970s or through large-scale nuclear accidents from Three Mile Island, to Chernobyl, to Fukushima. Today, the times of smoothly running invisible energy systems are definitely over –mainly but not only due to concerns about the finiteness of required resources, emissions, and risks (in particular of nuclear technologies). Some of the most crucial questions about sustainable development in industrialized countries as well as in the global south centre on the role of energy in modern culture. For example, the Fifth Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes the sector of electricity production as largest emitter of fossil fuel CO2 (Bruckner et al. 2014, 559). Similarly, the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) identified the decarbonization of global energy systems as one of three priority areas for the pursuit of sustainability (WBGU 2011). The WBGU also described the magnitude of the challenge as “transformation”, which means that moving a society or its energy system towards sustainability requires negotiating a new social contract involving new roles, institutions, and practices for the economy, the state, the global society, and even science. This does not mean that everybody is prepared, for example, to abandon suburban, car-based life-styles or to reduce their energy consumption. However, the ways how energy is produced, distributed, and used have become hotly contested, various alternative energy systems are sought and imagined, and alternative solutions are developed and tested across different scales in many societies. There is not blueprint and no tested strategy for governing a successful transformation of this kind and extent, though. What can be observed are numerous attempts to make energy systems more sustainable as well as to generate innovations, analyses, and conceptual repertoires for this purpose. The contributions to this issue explore different processes of this kind and aim to make sense of specific social aspects and dynamics within these contexts. While the papers adopt different theoretical perspectives, two empirical themes are discussed by several papers. On the one hand, the papers by Gailing, Islar, and Busch, Fuchs and Hinderer, and Venghaus and Hoffmann focus on the local/regional level as a scale that demands increasing attention in the context of expanding renewable energy production. On the other hand, the

The epistemic dimension of European integration

This paper departs from the assumption that European integration – in addition to the dimensions of political institutions, markets, and European Union (EU) law – also comprises an epistemic dimension. This dimension contains the concepts and meanings that tell us what an integrated Europe “is,” how it works, and how we could evaluate it. Against this background, the paper develops an account to discuss the role of EU studies in the broader process of European integration. Its particular focus is on how EU studies co-produce conceptual discourses and representations of the EU together with EU politics. Moreover, these concepts and representations inform institutions that link those academic communities to the EU and make the development of EU studies a partial dimension of European integration.

Editorial to the forum “International Relations of science and knowledge”

Science and technology are essential features of modern societies and seem to get more and more important. Therefore, a lot about the globalized world at the beginning of the third millennium can be learned by looking at science and technology and a lot would be lost if they are neglected. International Relations (IR), in particular, would benefit from a more thorough engagement with the institutions and products of science and their involvement in global governance. For example, the 2010 Annual Convention of the International Studies Association in New Orleans (USA) was held under the theme Theory vs. Policy? Connecting Scholars and Practitioners. Yes, the tasks and instruments for global governance are getting more complex requiring sound and sophisticated expert knowledge. However, the solution cannot simply be to provide policy-makers with more or more accurate “facts” for better policy or to provide scientific experts with opportunities to “speak truth to power.” Therefore, this forum reflects on the role of science in IR by bringing together different perspectives on this topic. Its authors assume that conventional assumptions of a strict divide between science, understood as a world of truth and theory, and politics, often labeled as a world of practice, need to be questioned. Agents in both fields science and politics not only produce analytical as well as normative concepts and discourses but they also become increasingly intertwined. Whereas science is, for example, heavily dependent on resources allocated by public donors, political practitioners are increasingly relying on scientific knowledge and expert networks in a multiplicity of ways. Consequently, the production and transfer of knowledge are both a central political activity as well as a core category for understanding politics and governance in the knowledge society. At the same time, however, despite the significant interdependence between the realms of politics and science, international politics and the respective academic disciplines, such as IR, remain different fields and continue to draw on different discourses and practices. This forum wants to stimulate a discussion about how best to understand the relationship and the boundary between the political sphere of IR and the academic sphere of science and why it would be fruitful that students of IR should pay attention to these issues. In particular, it shows that the boundary between science and politics is fuzzy and always subject to negotiations in a specific context. Moreover, the three contributions to this forum illuminate three themes where greater attention to science, its products, practices and agents would provide deeper understanding of global politics: (1) the exact workings of institutions and processes of global governance, where knowledge and power, science and politics are increasingly interwoven (see the contribution by Esguerra on the Forest Stewardship Council, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services); (2) the emergence of fundamental political entities, which are to a large extent constructed Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 2015 Vol. 28, No. 1, 1–2, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13511610.2014.967665

Towards studying energy systems as energy cultures.

This collection constitutes the second part of a special issue on the interwoven and co-constitutive nature of energy, society, and culture, the first part of which was published in volume 29, issue 3 of Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research. All papers collected in both issues demonstrate that the use production and distribution of energy are deeply social issues. Indeed, if one wants to understand how deeply and inseparably interwoven the physical, technological, and social aspects of energy systems are, it makes sense to analyse energy systems as energy cultures (Pfister and Schweighofer, forthcoming; see also Horta et al. 2014; Rüdiger 2008; Sarrica et al. 2016; Stephenson et al. 2015; Strauss, Rupp, and Love 2013). Hence, we will use this brief introduction to sketch out one way how this could be approached. Given the limited space of an editorial, this sketch must necessarily be brief and rather rough. Yet, rather than outlining a far-reaching theoretical framework shared by the ensuing contributions, our aim is much more modest as we only want to give some suggestions how the following research papers could be read and put in a broader context. Importantly, culture in this context should be neither understood as a certain part of society that contains arts, languages, religions, nor as an intervening variable that is mainly relevant with regard to understanding the “irrational” behaviour of people (in an energy context mostly consumers). Rather, culture, in this respect refers to a specific perspective on action and order. In particular, this perspective is dynamic and allows for understanding how the particular subjectivities, institutions, and infrastructures of an energy system emerge, develop, and what possibilities and limitations exist to influence these dynamics. There are different approaches to analysing energy systems as cultures. We suggest to grasp energy cultures as consisting of two co-constituted and interlinked layers: energy practices and collectively shared representations of the order of energy. On the one hand, there are numerous practices related to energy stretching across a wide continuum. On one end, a growing literature on energy consumption investigates how the latter is embedded in a dazzling array of mundane everyday practices shared by many such as showering or doing the laundry (e.g. Shove 2003). In addition, there are the everyday practices of highly skilled and specially trained engineers, regulators, business managers, and scientists involved in developing and operating plants and grids, but also energy markets and governance regimes. In this issue, Russ’ study on the stabilisation how the concept of energy was made in the first place, Gjefsen’s investigation of practices aimed at building an expert community around issues of carbon capture and storage (CCS) or Scotti and Minervini’s exploration how national and trans-national energy policies are put into practice in a specific local context, could be read with great benefit from an angle on practice. A final example are the many agents who engage in practices to influence existing energy cultures to make them more sustainable across the whole continuum, for example, by re-organising energy at the local level (Fuchs and Hinderer 2016; Islar and Busch 2016). A key strength of a perspective on practice is the deep

Science, knowledge, and international relations – a concluding comment

The final contribution does not intend to add another perspective on the interrelationship between science and international relations (IR). Instead, it reflects on the com‐ monalities and differences of the arguments so far in order to draw more general conclusions and to identify directions where future research and debate might be most productive. As indicated in the editorial, the authors point to three different areas where the interaction between science, politics, and publics is particularly relevant with a view to reflecting on and developing the theoretical repertoire of IR in particular. To begin with, Alejandro Esguerra makes a convincing point that a lot more is to be learned about the nature and the functioning of international institutions since many of them rely on producing knowledge that is not only scientifically valid but also socially robust as major prerequisite to foster desired and to constrain unwanted action. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), and the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) are perfect demonstrations of this trend toward hybrid spheres where scientific expertise and political governance are increasingly interwoven (for further examples, see Lidskog and Sundqvist 2002; Beck 2011; Miller 2007). However the importance of epistemic authority of institutions is certainly not limited to global environmental problems. It could, for example, also be studied with regard to social policy and welfare reforms in the EU (Pfister 2009) or the global financial system (Mackenzie 2006). Thomas Pfister’s paper builds on these insights about a social order where science and politics are not clearly separated entities but extends the scope of the observation to the constitution of the basic political entities of political and academic discourses. The heterogeneous construct of the EU and its features are crucially made visible through academic representations. Scientists might not have exclusive access to truth but are in the privileged situation to speak with the particular authority that has been accredited to science throughout the modern age. The paper highlights a performative dimension of scientific descriptions, which can gain ontological quality if adopted and reproduced by other agents. The power to make the world might be much greater for the natural sciences. However, the paper shows that the representations produced by the social sciences and humanities might be more easily taken up, translated, and contested by other agents. Moreover, the greater accessibility of these concepts can make it easier for social scientists to engage in shared