Science and policy-making: an organizational approach

There is currently intense interest in understanding the role of scientific knowledge in public policy-making. Both among academics and practitioners, there is a growing awareness that the use and legitimacy of expert knowledge in policy-making not only depends on the quality of the expertise, science communication or features of policy-makers. It also depends on how the relationship between science and policy-making is organized. Yet, so far, we lack a solid understanding of exactly how organization matters for the role of expert knowledge in governance. The paper reviews existing work that touches upon organizational aspects of the relationship between expert knowledge and policy, either at the macro level (e.g. work on knowledge regimes and policy advisory systems) or at the meso level (i.e. studies of how the organization of expert knowledge within specific institutions conditions policy-making processes and policies). The paper then develops an organization theory approach for analyzing the science-policy nexus, which highlights how different organizational dimensions may affect the use of scientific knowledge in governance processes and public policy. Significantly, an organizational approach not only helps us better understand how organizational features condition the role of expertise in policy-making, it also has implications for how we design institutions at the science-policy interface (cf. Egeberg and Trondal 2018).