When the utility of masks or vaccinations became politicized during the COVID-19 pandemic and lost its mooring in scientific evidence, an already-developing crisis of expertise was exacerbated. Those who believe in consensus science wondered: “How can ‘those people’ not see the truth?
This book shows that it is not a ‘scientific’ controversy, but an ideological dispute with ‘believers’ on both sides. If the advocates for consensus science acknowledge the uncertainties involved, rather than insisting on cold, hard facts, it is possible to open a pathway towards interaction and communication, even persuasion, between world views.
As the crisis of expertise continues to be a global issue, this will be an invaluable resource for readers concerned about polarized societies and the distrust of consensus science.
university, who now serve as top bureaucrats. We will refer to such politicians as academic politicians, to separate them from expert politicians who gain their expertise through their political work in dedicated fields. Such academic politicians may be rare, but we will show that one of the key players in the Norwegian pension reform was an example. He was an influential politician with a Master’s degree in economics, and he had an instrumental role in steering the process through the different phases. In what follows, we first outline the political and fiscal
In considering this work’s various suggestions of how policy analysis might change under the influence of a non-binary approach, a reader might legitimately fear that the approach would enhance the already great power of experts and unelected officials. The claim, for example, that the public servant need not accept the elected official’s normative views as givens can spark nervousness. We must thus address the problem of experts and expertise. In this discussion, I will define expertise broadly, as usable knowledge that requires time and effort to acquire. I
71 4 Charities, expertise and policy In his book In Search of Civil Society, Nicholas Deakin (2001: 205) states that while voluntary action has long been the state’s partner in a broadly dually beneficent relationship, as the 21st century progresses and this relationship changes, we must ask ‘on whose terms will this change be made?’ In this chapter, we will examine the relationship between charity and policy, and the role that charities’ symbolic power plays in helping or hindering their position as influencers, and their role as a set of bodies with
23 European Journal of Politics and Gender • vol 2 • no 1 • 23–40 © European Conference on Politics and Gender and Bristol University Press 2019 Print ISSN 2515 1088 • Online ISSN 2515 1096 https://doi.org/10.1332/251510819X15471289106112 Accepted for publication 21 November 2018 • First published online 28 January 2019 Special Issue: Gender Experts and Gender Expertise RESEARCH Gender expertise in global governance: contesting the boundaries of a field Rahel Kunz, Rahel.Kunz@unil.ch University of Lausanne, Switzerland Elisabeth Prügl, elisabeth
Introduction What does it mean to be an expert in your field? This is a question and struggle for many professionals who want to excel in their work. Presumably, anyone who has gained the required amount of knowledge in a field of study, and who has been tested and certified by a professional body, would be considered an expert in that field ( Ericsson, 2014 ). Why, then, do many professionals struggle to achieve feelings of expertise and professional legitimacy? Heiss et al ( 2018 : 123) suggest that ‘professional status reflects a precarious set of ongoing
165 EIGHT Issues and expertise In the previous chapter we saw how publics constituted by reference to particular identities may find it hard to secure space for public deliberation in the context of official participation discourses and policies that prioritise community as ‘place’. In this chapter we consider two examples of initiatives that have even less of a profile within contemporary democratic practice: initiatives that are based around campaigns and policy making in relation to specific issues. The fact that we only studied two such examples, one in each
Key messages The IMF’s impact on the first Greek loan was notable, but the European Commission ruled mostly on the content. IMF’s expertise wasn’t used to challenging austerity, even if the IMF had become more open to stimulus. Reasons were lack of fiscal space, EU constraints, growth pessimism and the gap between research and policy units. Fragmentation and autonomy explain the stability of economic paradigms in international organisations. Introduction 2 This article examines the resistance and sluggishness towards a change of economic ideas
123 EIGHT Beyond developmentalism: the role of experts and expertise in Turkey’s environmental policy disputes Gökhan Orhan Introduction The exact role of experts in policy analysis is an under-investigated area in Turkey, because there has been a limited use of policy analysis techniques in policy- making and implementation. Although experts do play a certain role in giving policy advice to policy-makers, it is rather challenging to generalise the patterns of policy advice in Turkey. The character of expert involvement varies according to the policy area
203 FOURTEEN Gender expertise and policy analysis Pauline Cullen Introduction Phillips (2007, p 505) defines policy capacity as ‘the ability to provide policy analysis and advice, participate effectively and exert influence in policy development’. Gendering policy analysis requires capacity to have sufficient expertise to apply gender as a variable in the different processes that combine to generate policy analysis, including research and knowledge production. Gender expertise features as a component of policy analysis at different levels of governance and
