The problem of epistemic jurisdiction in global governance: The case of sustainability standards for biofuels

Abstract

While there is ample scholarly work on regulatory science within the state, or single-sited global institutions, there is less on its operation within complex modes of global governance that are decentered, overlapping, multi-sectorial and multi-leveled. Using a co-productionist framework, this study identifies 'epistemic jurisdiction' - the power to produce or warrant technical knowledge for a given political community, topical arena or geographical territory - as a central problem for regulatory science in complex governance. We explore these dynamics in the arena of global sustainability standards for biofuels. We select three institutional fora as sites of inquiry: the European Union's Renewable Energy Directive, the Roundtable on Sustainable Biomaterials, and the International Organization for Standardization. These cases allow us to analyze how the co-production of sustainability science responds to problems of epistemic jurisdiction in the global regulatory order. First, different problems of epistemic jurisdiction beset different standard-setting bodies, and these problems shape both the content of regulatory science and the procedures designed to make it authoritative. Second, in order to produce global regulatory science, technical bodies must manage an array of conflicting imperatives - including scientific virtue, due process and the need to recruit adoptees to perpetuate the standard. At different levels of governance, standard drafters struggle to balance loyalties to country, to company or constituency and to the larger project of internationalization. Confronted with these sometimes conflicting pressures, actors across the standards system quite self-consciously maneuver to build or retain authority for their forum through a combination of scientific adjustment and political negotiation. Third, the evidentiary demands of regulatory science in global administrative spaces are deeply affected by 1) a market for standards, in which firms and states can choose the cheapest sustainability certification, and 2) the international trade regime, in which the long shadow of WTO law exerts a powerful disciplining function.

Factors Affecting the Perception of New Approach Methodologies (NAMs) in the Ecotoxicology Community

“…Arguably, academics are generally less prone to “trust the modeler” and will want to “see what's under the hood” (if they have the necessary knowledge) before endorsing a method or study. These dynamics mirror similar “operability versus scientific rigor” debates that occurred between attributional life cycle analysis and consequential life cycle analysis in biofuel standard‐setting discussions (Winickoff and Mondou 2017, p 23).…”

The IPCC and the new map of science and politics

“…Research into boundary work in different intellectual traditions has helped uncover how and why organizations operating at the science-policy interface able are to perform their scientific and political task while maintaining their epistemic and political authority (Edwards & Schneider, 2001;Elzinga, 1997;Guston, 2001;Hoppe, Driessen, & Leroy, 2010). Recently, there have been encouraging attempts to bring together these different approaches in IR and STS (such as Lidskog & Sundqvist, 2015) and to focus on the configuration of science in society and explore how science and politics are part of broader transformations of society, conceptualized for example in terms of regime analysis (Barben, 2007;Winickoff & Mondou, 2017). While research in different traditions-STS, IR, and sustainability science-has asked different questions of boundary work (Hughes & Paterson, 2017), a major conclusion of all this work is that, as societal and political contexts change, the organization, design, and strategies of institutions like the IPCC will need to adapt.…”

“…The tension between local and global scales of knowledge-making, and between different national regulatory science styles, has recently occupied the intersections of STS, human geography (Mahony, 2015;Mahony & Hulme, 2016), institutional theory and political ecology (Beck et al, 2016;Winickoff & Mondou, 2017). Leading IPCC representatives insist that demands for geopolitical balance have to be reconciled with scientific excellence and IPCC's scientific standards (Schiermeier & Tollefson, 2015).…”

Outsourcing Regulatory Decision-making: “International” Epistemic Communities, Transnational Firms, and Pesticide Residue Standards in India

“…Although epistemic communities have always competed to some degree for epistemic jurisdiction and the prestige and resources associated with it, we would expect these new legal norms established by the SPS and TBT Agreements to transform the nature of these competitive relationships (see Quark 2013, 135). These new norms create incentives for epistemic communities to reorient their boundary work to define their organization and their standards as “international” (see Winickoff and Mondou 2017). In doing so, they aim to position themselves to fill the new demand for “international standards” under WTO law.…”