The politics of expertise in international organizations: how international bureaucracies produce and mobilize knowledge

Specialist knowledge, or expertise, is what makes contemporary international organizations politically influential and institutionally legitimate. Annabelle Littoz-Monnet's edited volume starts from this widely accepted premise to uncover how international organizations generate and deploy expertise in several domains of transnational policy-making. The book contributes to the literatures on knowledge production and use in global governance, the roles of international organizations and their embeddedness in transnational policy networks. One of its strengths is its combination of conceptual clarifications with empirical analysis or illustration, which yields fresh insights into how expertise matters to international organizations. All the contributors, more or less openly, opt for a constructivist meta-theoretical perspective that challenges instrumental views of international organization expertise as merely enhancing policy-making. Littoz-Monnet's book highlights additional political rationales behind international organizations' expertise-based claims to governance authority, including symbolic action to signal competence to key audiences and garnering audience support. The examination of such epistemic dynamics continues a notable trend of global governance research—from constructivist studies of international organizations to the rapidly growing literature on transnational communities, professions and networks.