Epistemic community

Epistemic Community is a concept developed in political science.

Origin of the Concept

The concept is particularly associated with Peter M Haas, though confusingly, it is also used by Ernst Haas the Robson Professor of government at UC Berkeley. In fact as Ernst Haas has put it: 'Actually, my son invented the term'.

What is an epistemic community?

According to some advocates of the concept an epistemic community is a disinterested scientific community of expertise. Ernst Haas states:

Epistemic communities are associations of professional experts in a particular field who, because of the knowledge they have, have an unusual influence on politicians and bureaucrats, and are, therefore, able to penetrate government departments and make their ideas part of policy. That's an epistemic community. And, you know, they don't operate in all fields of policy. They only operate in fields of policy where science matters. In the field of human rights, forget it. There are no epistemic communities. Science is irrelevant to that field. In environmental politics, it matters a great deal.

Peter Haas has spent much of his career examining how environmental politics have related to questions of international organisation and the role of epistemic communities in such processes. Soroos notes that 'While Peter Haas is not the originator of the term epistemic community, his writings are largely responsible for its recent rise to prominence in the lexicon of theory and research on international organization.'

Criticisms

The notion of knowledge, though, is merely confined to scientific knowledge, which is perceived as rational, valid and therefore true. Moreover, as James Sebenius (1992: 324) notes in his critique on the epistemic communities approach, that knowledge and power are “treated as […] analytically separable, rather than inherently bound together”. The questions of why a certain epistemic community (and not another one) manages to gain influence in their respective nation-states and why a specific set of expert knowledge (and not another one) becomes influential in a policy field remains unclear. Focusing on scientific knowledge as the only authoritative knowledge not only obscures the existence of interpretative struggles but also the role of other forms of knowledge that might facilitate completely different policy solutions.

Reading

Epistemic communities

• Adler, Emanuel. “The Emergence of Cooperation: National Epistemic Communities and the International Evolution of the Idea of Nuclear Arms Control.” International Organization. Vol. 46, No. 1. The MIT Press Winter, 1992. pp. 101-145.
• Adler, Emanuel and Peter M. Haas. “Conclusion: Epistemic Communities, World Order, and the Creation of a Reflective Research Program.” International Organization. Vol. 46. No. 1. Winter. MIT Press, 1992. P. 367-390.
• Haas, E.B. (1990) When Knowledge is Power (Berkeley: University of California Press)
• Haas, Peter M. “Do Regimes Matter? Epistemic Communities and Mediterranean Pollution.” International Organization. Vol. 43. No. 3. The MIT Press Summer, 1989. pp. 377-403.
• Haas, Peter M. (1990) Saving the Mediterranean - the politics of international environmental co-operation (New York: Columbia University Press)
• Haas, Peter M. (1992a) ‘Introduction: epistemic communities and international policy co-ordination’ in International Organization 46 (1): 1-36
• Haas, Peter M. (1992b) ‘Obtaining International environmental protection through epistemic consensus’ in Rowlands I.H. and M. Greene (eds) Global Environmental change and international relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan)
• Haas, Peter M. (1992c) ‘Banning Chloroflurorcarbons: Epistemic Community efforts to protect stratospheric ozone’ in International Organization 46 (1): 187-224.
• Haas, Peter M., R.O. Keohane and M.A. Levy (eds) (1993) Institutions for the Earth (London: The MIT Press)
• Haas, Peter M. (ed) (1997) Knowledge, Power and International Policy Co-ordination (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press)
• Haas, Peter M. (1999) ‘Social Constructivism and the Evolution of Multilateral Governance’ in Hart, J. and Prakash, A. (eds) Globalization and Governance (London: Routledge)
• Haas, Peter. M. and Haas, E. B. (1995) ‘Learning to Learn: improving international governance’ in Global Governance 1 (3): 255-284.
• Kolodziej, Edward A. “Epistemic Communities Searching for Regional Cooperation.” Mershon International Studies Review. Vol. 41. No. 1 Blackwell Publishing May, 1997. pp. 93-98.
• John Gerard Ruggie,1 Peter J. Katzenstein,2 Robert O. Keohane,3 and Philippe C. Schmitter4 [author%3A+Schmitter&searchHistoryKey= TRANSFORMATIONS IN WORLD POLITICS: The Intellectual Contributions of Ernst B. Haas]* Annual Review of Political Science Vol. 8: 271-296 (Volume publication date June 2005) (doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.8.082103.104843) First published online as a Review in Advance on Dec. 16, 2004.
• Sebenius, James K. “Challenging Conventional Explanations of International Cooperation: Negotiation Analysis and the Case of Epistemic Communities.” International Organization. Vol. 46, No. 1. The MIT Press Winter, 1992. pp. 323-365.
• Thomas, Craig W. “Public Management as Interagency Cooperation: Testing Epistemic Community Theory at the Domestic Level.” Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory. J-PART. Vol. 7. No. 2. Oxford University Press, Apr. 1997. p. 221-246.

Debating Epistemic communicties

• Claire Dunlop Epistemic Communities: A Reply to Toke Politics, Volume 20 Issue 3, Pages 137 - 144, Published Online: 5 Feb 2002 (Word version available here)
• Marvin S. Soroos 'Review: Saving the Mediterranean: The Politics of International Environmental Cooperation by Peter M. Haas' The American Political Science Review, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Dec., 1991), pp. 1494-1496