Expert Knowledge and New Forms of Deliberative Knowledge Production: Rivals or Good Companions in Knowledge-Intensive Policy-Making? Experiences With Xenotransplantation

In the mid-1990s, European countries were faced with the need to develop regulation on xenotransplantation (XTP), a newly developing medical technology to transplant tissues or organs from one species to another. The technology came with the promise of resolving the shortage of implantable organs yet also implied risks of zoonotic infection. Policy-makers were in dire need of useable knowledge on the topic’s technical and ethical dimensions. This paper reports on the findings from a research project that studied in-depth how in eight European countries, the European Commission and Canada knowledge was produced and used in XTP-regulation. It observes a convergence in policy-making due to the 'travelling' of expert knowledge produced by transnational bodies such as the OECD. In addition, it observes a new ‘great divide’ in the field of knowledge utilization: even in those countries where forms of deliberative knowledge production were organized, expert knowledge dominated the policy-making process.