Opening the Black-Box of Expert Advice in Global Governance

Nowadays, scientific advisory committees enjoy enormous importance in the governance of global issues. These bodies convened by International Organizations (IOs) provide advice on almost every policy-domain. Despite their centrality in global governance, they have been hardly scrutinized by Political Science and International Relations (IR). Existing research has tended to focus almost exclusively on the influence of science in policy. From that perspective, a scientific advice is seen as a neutral mediator that enters policy to free it from subjective bias. Experts themselves are seen as extra-political agents, whose task is to explain what science says about the likely consequences of policy choices. By focusing on how these expert bodies are sites of co-production of knowledge and policy, this paper challenges this commonly held view. Building on Science and Technology Studies (STS) concepts, this paper makes the argument that advisory work does not merely act as a neutral medium for policy. Instead, like the problems to which it supposedly provides solutions, advisory work is implicated in the reconfiguration and definition of global politics. By examining the work of experts within the World Health Organization (WHO) Expert Committee on Drug Dependence (ECDD), I focus on the contested politics through which expertise might emerge as seemingly technical, neutral and objective. I show that the expert advisory process contributes to the construction of political ordering as it reinforces general trends towards depoliticized and techno-managerial modes of governance. First, it encompasses apolitical visions of the world as it problematizes social problems as purely technical problems, worth of expert treatment. Second, it contributes to reorganizing relationships of authority by empowering the very actors and techniques that work to produce the recommendation. Finally, it reduces the scope for political contestation and debates, as the whole process of expert advice operates in a way that makes it appear as standing above politics.