Diversity, Disagreement, and Contestation in Expert International Organizations

• In Event: Experts in Politics: Status, Legitimacy, and the Public (Virtual Session)

Abstract

“Expert” international organizations (IOs) play key roles in modern international order, in fields as diverse as international criminal law, public health, and economic governance. In addition to the more-commonly considered roles of experts in advising policy-makers and legitimating policies ex post facto, experts act as decision-makers and governors in their own right, especially within expert IOs. Expert IOs are important not only because of their prevalence but also because of their outputs; the definitions, standards, policies, and decisions of such organizations have non-trivial and lasting implications for states, corporations, and international society. In other words, expert IOs do not merely perpetuate the status-quo, but change it, often in unexpected ways. How can we understand such change? How should we understand novel, unexpected, or unprecedented behaviour by IOs whose authority rests on claims of expertise?

I evaluate International Relations’ (IR’s) existing theoretical tools for understanding innovation and creativity within expert IOs and find them unsatisfying. Most extant approaches—notably including IR’s practice turn—suffer from a common weakness, in that they treat expert knowledge as essentially monolithic, uncontested, and universally shared within a given expert IO. I argue that this assumption does not reflect reality, and that expert communities and organizations should be regarded as inherently diverse and potentially conflictual. This is especially true of expert organizations with international membership. Empirical examples drawn from key expert IOs reveal that both the specific content of expert knowledge and the ways in which such knowledge can and ought to be deployed are contested within expert IOs. Conflicts over expertise, and the factors which contribute to and structure the resolution of such disputes, should be regarded as central to the process of innovation and decision-making in expert IOs. In other words, expert IOs are sites of political disputes and negotiation over expert knowledge. I propose a conceptual framework for examining diversity within expert organizations, and the disputes which can arise from such diversity. I then theorize several factors which may structure dispute-resolution and therefore shape outcomes within expert organizations.

The proposed framework highlights the importance of diversity and contestation in sparking creativity and structuring innovation in expert IOs. This framework re-conceptualizes two key practice turn concepts: background knowledge and communities of practice. I argue for a view of background knowledge as individual and contextual, rather than communal and universal, and for a view of communities of practice as inherently diverse and overlapping. I find support for this re-conceptualization by re-considering both IR’s practice turn, and key scholars whose work has been influential in shaping the practice turn, including Bourdieu, Scott, Wenger, and Adler. This framework allows me to seriously consider the diverse reality of expert communities and organizations, how such diversity influences the dynamics and outputs of global governance institutions. I illustrate the utility of the proposed framework with empirical examples drawn from key expert IOs.

Expert convergence around innovative “expert solutions” invites examination; such an examination requires us to re-conceptualize our understandings of expert communities and expert knowledge, and to foreground the role which diversity, contestation, and dispute-resolution play in expert global governance. I argue that cohesion and agreement within a group (or formal organization) of expert practitioners should be regarded as an achievement to be understood, rather than a pre-determined “fact” to be assumed. I then propose a set of conceptual tools for understanding such achievement.

Author

• Alexandra Stafford, University of Oxford