Domesticating knowledge: epistemic politics in EU climate and energy governance

As EU competences widen and problems grow more wicked, policy-making increasingly occurs in contexts where technical complexity and strategic uncertainty clash with emerging distributive conflicts. While technocratic input has long been acknowledged as a critical resource for the European Commission to tame uncertainty and claim legitimacy, grasping how epistemic politics unfolds in the governance of wicked problems requires a more granular understanding of the processes of knowledge-making. Existing research on the governance of wicked problems emphasises the fact that these latter often happen to be unstructured or ill-structured. Domesticating problems, then, involves structuring them in such a way as to create room for partial solutions. Drawing on existing literature in critical policy studies, this paper conceives of the process of gathering, interpreting, and piecing together knowledge (and non-knowledge) as a critical battleground for policy actors to enact certain frames and epistemic orders. Rather than a tool to tame uncertainty and reduce complexity, the production of knowledge for policy becomes a terrain for boundary work on the science-policy interface. The paper, thus, focuses on the ‘epistemic dimension’ of EU energy and climate governance, shifting the attention from the process of domesticating problems to that of domesticating the knowledge that underlies policy-making. EU energy and climate governance, in this regard, offers a crucial test case to assess the tensions inherent to epistemic politics, given the complexity of the social-ecological systems in which such policies are designed and implemented. Furthermore, energy and climate policies raise multiple distributive conflicts, both in terms of member states’ sovereignty and economic and social costs, not to mention questions of environmental justice. The paper thus looks at the Commission’s ‘epistemic work’ through discourses and narratives about energy efficiency policies for buildings, in particular, the Energy Performance of Building Directive (EPBD) and its role in legitimising specific governance arrangements and infrastructures for knowledge-making about these policies. It adopts an epistemic governance approach to inquire into how narratives about energy efficiency for building become a terrain for the Commission to engage in epistemic politics, legitimising the crafting of specific structures and arrangements for knowledge-making.