Building on her current research on global governance, the politics of knowledge and international bureaucracies, Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, Associate Professor of International Relations / Political Science at the Graduate Institute, convened an exploratory workshop on 21-22 May at Villa Barton.

Supported by a grant from the FNS and the Graduate Institute's Programme for the Study of International Governance, the workshop aimed at advancing knowledge on the production and uses of expertise by international bureaucracies, and offered a unique opportunity to selected scholars to contribute to the framing of a novel research agenda.

Given the complexity, technicality and apparent apolitical character of the issues dealt with in global governance arenas, ‘evidence-based’ policy-making has imposed itself as the best way of evaluating the risks and consequences of political action in global arenas.

International organisations have, in the absence of alternative, democratic, modes of legitimation, heartedly adopted this approach to policy-making.

The workshop gathered a group of renowned scholars from the US, Australia, Germany, the UK, France and Switzerland in order to critically examine this phenomenon. Some PhD students also had the opportunity to participate. The workshop looked at three sets of questions.

First, why do international bureaucrats deploy knowledge in policy-making? Does this vary depending on the type of issue, organisation or the nature of their intervention? Is knowledge used instrumentally to adjust policy outputs, symbolically to assert the organisations’ epistemic authority or strategically to justify their jurisdiction into new policy domains ? Or is it used to boost certain claims or as a means to depoliticise contentious policy issues?

Second, what forms of knowledge are used by international bureaucracies? Organisations such as the OECD, the European Commission, the World Bank and the WHO have rolled out new ways of observing, measuring and evaluating performance, through targets, indicators and bench-marking. What are the implications of the use of quantitative forms of knowledge by international bureaucrats?

Third, how is the knowledge used by international bureaucrats produced? By whom? In which arenas? How does knowledge travel from its locus of production towards international bureaucrats? If processes of knowledge production are diffuse, how can we best attempt to retrace pathways between the origins of certain ideas and their adoption by international administrations?

The workshop offered a unique opportunity to scholars working from different disciplinary, ontological and methodological perspectives to discuss these issues, exchange their views and conduct further interdisciplinary work together.

Professor Annabelle Littoz-Monnet has set up, together with two scholars from Edinburgh University, a new European Consortium for Political Research (ECPR Network) “Knowledge and Governance”.