Epistemic Community - Role in Environmental Governance

Role in Environmental Governance

The global environmental agenda is increasing in complexity and interconnectedness. Often environmental policymakers do not understand the technical aspects of the issues they are regulating. This affects their ability to define state interests and develop suitable solutions within cross-boundary environmental regulation.

As a result, conditions of uncertainty are produced which stimulate a demand for new information. Environmental crises play a significant role in exacerbating conditions of uncertainty for decision-makers. Political elites seek expert knowledge and advice to reduce this technical uncertainty, on issues including:

• the scale of environmental problems,

• cause-and-effect interrelations of ecological processes, and

• how (science-based) policy options will play out.

Therefore, epistemic communities can frame environmental problems as they see fit, and environmental decision-makers begin to make policy-shaping decisions based on these specific depictions.

The initial identification and bounding of environmental issues by epistemic community members is very influential. They can limit what would be preferable in terms of national interests, frame what issues are available for collective debate, and delimit the policy alternatives deemed possible. The political effects are not easily reversible. The epistemic community vision is institutionalised as a collective set of understandings reflected in any subsequent policy choices.

This is a key point of power. Policy actors are persuaded to conform to the community’s consensual, knowledge-driven ideas without the epistemic community requiring a more material form of power. Members of successful communities can become strong actors at the national and international level as decision-makers attach responsibility to their advice.

As a result, epistemic communities have a direct input on how international cooperation may develop in the long term. Transboundary environmental problems require a unified response rather than patchwork policy efforts, but this is problematic due to enduring differences of state interest and concerns over reciprocity. The transnational nature of epistemic communities means numerous states may absorb new patterns of logic and behaviour, leading to the adoption of concordant state policies. Therefore, the likelihood of convergent state behaviour and associated international coordination is increased.

International cooperation is further facilitated if powerful states are involved, as a quasi-structure is created containing the reasons, expectations and arguments for coordination. Also, if epistemic community members have developed authoritative bureaucratic reputations in various countries, they are likely to participate in the creation and running of national and international institutions that directly pursue international policy coordination, for example, a regulatory agency, think tank or governmental research body.

As a result, epistemic community members in a number of different countries can become connected through intergovernmental channels, as well as existing community channels, producing a transnational governance network, and facilitating the promotion of international policy coordination. An example of a scientific epistemic community in action is the 1975 collectively negotiated Mediterranean Action Plan (MAP), a marine pollution control regime for the Mediterranean Sea developed by the United Nations Environment Programme.