Expert influence in highly politicised settings? The making of Bulgaria’s National Climate and Energy Plan 2021-2030

The emergence of “wicked problems” necessitates the inclusion of diverse sources of expertise at all stages of the policy process. Policy makers are increasingly expected to use the best available evidence (Head 2015) leading to a growing “professionalisation” of policy making (Christensen 2018). In this context, the role of knowledge in policy making has attracted particular scholarly interest. This research agenda has, however, largely been focused on Western countries. Its insights, although informative, cannot necessarily be generalised to other contexts as styles of expertise provision and even understanding about what constitutes acceptable evidence vary substantially across countries (Straßheim and Kettunen 2014). Furthermore, although the dynamics of knowledge provision have been studied extensively, the fundamental question about the relative influence of experts in an increasingly contested deliberative process has received less attention. Reorientating the research agenda would facilitate the incorporation of knowledge utilisation scholarship into broader debates about policy advice and allow for a more holistic understanding of the policy impact of knowledge and expertise (Christensen 2020). This paper aims to address both those gaps by examining the role of experts in the drafting of Bulgaria's National Energy and Climate Plan 2021-2030. Through a single-case study research design, the paper addresses the following research questions: - What type of expertise was used in the formulation of the Plan and how/ by whom was it provided? - What influence did experts have on policy formulation when compared to other advisory actors? - What factors accounted for the (lack) of influence of expert advice? We adopt an instrumental conceptualisation of influence (Amara et al. 2004) which focuses on experts’ impact on the content of the final policy product - namely the Plan adopted in 2020. This will be measured through a combination of process tracing and attributed influence approach, which are the most common and reliable ways to study influence (Christensen 2020). The paper will utilise document analysis and semi-structured interviews with stakeholders involved in policy formulation. The proposed study will represent a contribution to the section since it examines knowledge utilisation in a previously un(der)studied political setting, namely flawed democratic regimes. Moreover, the choice of case study presents an opportunity to study the role and influence of domestic experts as well as the international and European community. Although the increased interdependence between domestic and international knowledge communities has been recognised (Stone 2008), the phenomenon has scarcely been studied empirically. Furthermore, given the nature of the Plan, which dealt with highly politically sensitive topics related to energy security, potential coal phase out and aspects of the energy industry in Bulgaria where significant state capture and corruption risks exist, the case would provide an illustration of the ways in which knowledge use is impacted by politics and vested interests in highly sensitive policy subsystems. Finally, the explicit focus on the influence of experts and its determinants represents a contribution to the literature on knowledge utilisation as well as policy advice more generally where those topics have rarely been examined empirically.