Epistemic governance: an approach to the politics of policy-making

AbstractThe aim of this paper is to make a meta-theoretical contribution to conceptions of how power and governance operate in contemporary policy-making. Most approaches to governance generally brush aside the actual mechanics of how influence is wielded and social change effected. To fill this gap we argue that society is managed increasingly through epistemic governance, which works on actors' perceptions of the world and its current challenges. Our point is that regardless of which actors we assume to be influential in affecting public policies, they operate by utilizing a limited number of strategies, in broad paradigmatic as well as in focused practical dimensions. The epistemic work actors are engaged in focuses on three aspects of the social world: (1) ontology of the environment, (2) actor identifications, and (3) norms and ideals, or constructions of what the world is, who we are, and what is good or desirable. As such, we suggest ways to move beyond more or less structuralist explanations of sources and forms of power to reveal the strategies of power at play in attempts to influence policy change in the contemporary world.Keywords: governancepowerepistemicpolicy-makingdomesticationglobal studiesgovernmentality AcknowledgementsThe authors are grateful for inputs from, and numerous discussions with, Risto Heiskala, Anne Kovalainen, Risto Kunelius, Seppo Poutanen, and George Thomas. We also gratefully acknowledge comments from scholars in the Tampere research group on Cultural and Political Sociology, whose empirical research this article is based on and cites.FundingResearch for this article was made possible by financial support from the Academy of Finland, whose assistance is appreciated.Notes1 A similar observation is made Fiss and Hirsch (Citation2005), who argue that success in changing the framing of an issue is based on actors' ability to utilize people's sensemaking, which they link to the structural contexts in which framing activities occur. We disagree that the larger context should be equated with 'objective' structural facts such as economic factors, but we do sympathize with the need to move ontologically beyond meaning contests.