Knowledge brokers in the gaps of globalization: the P-value politics of global health beyond the WHO

• In Event: 50266 - New Directions and Emerging Studies of Politics in Science and Technology: Changes in Governance, Political Economy, Labor, and Work (Co-sponsored by Section on Political Sociology)

Abstract

In light of ongoing threats to the World Health Organization, it is imperative for scholars to evaluate the other modes of global health governance that complement the WHO, clash with it, and may persist beyond it. I study a group of organizations called “knowledge brokers” that commission meta-analyses of global health interventions that they then use to advise philanthropies and other donors. In a content analysis of knowledge brokers’ published materials and interviews with their contracted researchers, I seek to understand how these actors imagine and enact their role as experts. I find that meta-analysts differ in how they see their goals but agree that their method has the potential to resolve the tensions between local and global knowledge. I also find that knowledge brokers’ statistical tools and protocols become modes of engagement through which affected parties, often those from the Global South, must wedge their concerns. I introduce the concept of P-value politics to theorize these findings and how knowledge brokers transmute democratic decisions into statistical ones, empowering experts to supplant elected officials in domains, like global health, where public institutions are weak.

Author

• Clay Davis, Northwestern University