Why do national organisations proliferate in practically all areas of policymaking and organisational life, and why are they involved in supranational networks and organisations? The article approaches this mystery by exploring how organisations are built and used as authorities in domestic policymaking. The empirical focus is on the establishment of the institution of children's ombudsman and its uses in influencing Finnish child policy. The theory developed in the article suggests that organisations are accumulations of authority, here termed epistemic capital, which is the primary reason that they are established and sustained. Once these are institutionalised, various actors can use the authority of organisations to legitimate their policy objectives. The case of independent children's rights institutions shows how this mechanism operates in child policy. The Finnish office of the ombudsman for children has worked actively to become an established ontological and moral authority in child policy, and it has also attempted to utilise the mandate and authority of the United Nations and the Convention on the Rights of the Child to pressure the state into more childfriendly policy decisions.

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More than 60 countries have implemented a conditional cash transfer (CCT) program. The predominant CCT narrative begins from programs created in Mexico and Brazil in the mid-1990s. The literature concerned with CCTs tends to take this narrative as a given. In this article, we examine the role of international organizations (IOs) in the global governance of social policy by exploring the use of narratives as a strategy IOs employ to claim and generate legitimacy for global policy models. We investigate how the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the International Food Policy Research Institute have discursively constructed the CCT model in their policy documents and thus crafted the CCT narrative. Our analysis sheds light on 'ghost-writing' i.e., the IOs practice of concealing their central role in writing scripts for policy models. Thus, our case adds a novel aspect to the existing scholarship on the global proliferation of policies.

Nation states often end up adopting practices that are incongruent with their formal commitments to international efforts, such as mitigation of climate change. Although the necessity of a transfer towards carbon-neutral societies is widely understood, such decoupling is a challenge to transition. This study analyses the political discourse in the Finnish media from 2017 to 2018 around the European Union's Land Use, Land Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) Regulation. The discourse embodies a contradiction, as the Finnish government sought to justify its aim to log a record amount of forest while officially pledging to climate change mitigation. The forest industry and the government launched a major lobbying campaign to influence the regulation calculations to be adopted by the European Union. Several representatives of the scientific community rose to oppose the government's plan of action by distributing scientific knowledge on the negative climate effects caused by extensive forestry; a vigorous public debate around the correct ways to use this natural resource ensued. Our analysis identifies three prevailing narratives, each portraying and resolving the contradiction in a distinct way. We argue that narratives work as tools of epistemic governance and demonstrate how policy actors selectively weave scientific knowledge into such narratives.