Civic Epistemologies: Constituting Knowledge and Order in Political Communities

© 2008 The AuthorJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Sociology Compass 2/6 (2008): 1896–1919, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00175.x

Civic Epistemologies: Constituting Knowledge and Order in Political Communities

Clark A. Miller*Arizona State University

AbstractHow do we know things? The question of epistemology – which drives both thesociology and philosophy of science – is also a crucial question for politicalsociology. Knowledge is essential to even the most basic and foundational ofpolitical processes and institutions. In 2000, for example, the transition of powerin the US presidential election hung for 36 days on uncertainty over a seeminglysimple question of fact: who won the most votes in Florida? A few years later,disputed factual claims about Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destructionunraveled, calling into question key justifications of the US decision to invadeIraq in 2003 and significantly weakening perceived US legitimacy. Yet, surprisingly,sociologists and political scientists know relatively little about how knowledgegets made in political communities, nor how the making of knowledge is tiedto other key aspects of political life, such as identity, authority, legitimacy,and accountability.

In this essay, I review the emerging literature on civic epistemologies (Miller2004b, 2005a; Jasanoff 2004b, 2005), arguing that this concept offers avaluable starting point for inquiry into the construction and constitutionof knowledge in political life. The concept of civic epistemology refersexplicitly to the social and institutional practices by which politicalcommunities construct, review, validate, and deliberate politically relevantknowledge. Civic epistemologies include the styles of reasoning, modesof argumentation, standards of evidence, and norms of expertise thatcharacterize public deliberation and political institutions. The conceptrefers, in this sense, both to formal knowledge systems, such as the census,by which states produce and use factual claims regarding society, theeconomy, or the environment in social and policy decision making, aswell as to more informal processes of knowledge making by which statesand their citizens arrive at collective settlements regarding the epistemicfoundations of public life.

I begin this essay with a brief discussion in part one of what I see as thecore intellectual foundations underlying the concept of civic epistemologies.I then turn in parts two and three to applications of the concept of civic

© 2008 The Author Sociology Compass 2/6 (2008): 1896–1919, 10.1111/j.1751-9020.2008.00175.xJournal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Civic epistemologies: knowledge and order 1897

epistemologies that illustrate its theoretical and pragmatic value. Part twoapplies the concept of civic epistemologies in several major areas of politicalanalysis, including political conflict and its resolution, political authorityand legitimacy, and the constitution and regulation of novel political entities.Part three, in turn, applies the concept of civic epistemologies to twocrucial problems in modern politics: globalization and sustainability.

Part One: Civic epistemologies: Conceptual foundations

The conceptual foundations of civic epistemologies are grounded in aparticular view of democracy, in which contests over policy-relevant ideasand facts are an essential element of democratic politics. Theories ofdeliberative democracy emphasize the centrality and importance of epistemicdebates and factual knowledge to the practices of legitimacy, accountability,transparency, and efficacy in democratic governance. Largely missing fromthese literatures, however, is a nuanced understanding of the epistemiccontests (Epstein 1996) that populate public life, as well as the complexarray of social and institutional processes within which these contests takeplace and policy-relevant facts and ideas are formed, validated, critiqued,disseminated, and discarded.

Literature in the tradition of civic epistemologies has provided an extensiveand growing treatment of knowledge making and epistemic debate withinwhat John Stuart Mill described as a ‘marketplace of ideas’ and JurgenHabermas, the public sphere. This space comprises a rich and complexarray of dynamic, interacting spaces within which knowledge is made anddeliberated: administrative and regulatory hearings and associated scientificadvisory processes (Brickman et al. 1985; Jasanoff 1986, 1990, 2005; Guston2000; Hilgartner 2000; Porter 1995; Wynne 1982); citizen and activistknowledges (Epstein 1996; Ellis and Waterton 2004; Iles 2004; Jasanoff2004b; Martello 2004; Nelkin 1984; Peterson 1984; Wynne 1995); legislativehearings, public inquiries, and legislative research (Bimber 1996; Gierynand Figert 1990; Lynch et al. 1996); legal proceedings (Cole 2001; Jasanoff1995b); electoral systems (Miller 2001b, 2004b); and international politics(Litfin 1994; Miller and Edwards 2001; Miller 2007).

Research on civic epistemologies offers one tool for trying to understandthis rich array of social and institutional spaces for debates about policy ideaswithin democratic societies. In particular, the concept of civic epistemologyseeks to capture the public knowledge ways or ways of knowing that operatewithin and across this multiplicity of spaces. Studies of civic epistemologiesdepart radically from the static notions of the public understanding ofscience, which seek merely to capture the factual content of publicknowledge ( Jasanoff 2005). Instead, building on the intellectual traditionsof the sociology of scientific knowledge and science and technology studies,research on civic epistemologies inquires into how knowledge is dynamicallyconstructed and applied in the search for meaning and design and

1898 Civic epistemologies: knowledge and order


implementation of policy in modern societies. In doing so, it adoptsseveral basic intellectual perspectives.

First, knowledge is comprised not of simple statements of truth or factbut rather of complex judgments regarding how to identify multiple formsof evidence, assess their credibility and meaning, and integrate them together,based on appropriate evidentiary standards and weighting (Shapin 1994,1996; Jasanoff 1995b). Tacit skills and values often shape these judgments(Collins 1974), as do distinct problem framings (Collins and Pinch 1982;Miller 2000) and styles of reasoning (Hacking 2002).

Second, these complex judgments involved in knowledge making areproducts of dynamic social processes in which competing knowledgeclaims are articulated, deliberated, negotiated, discarded, and valorized.The structure and dynamics of these social processes determine, in turn, whoseknowledge claims matter and how claims are constructed, evaluated, con-tested, and sanctioned as knowledge. Understanding knowledge, therefore,requires understanding knowledge-in-the-making (Epstein 1996; KnorrCetina 1999).

Third, knowledge both shapes and is shaped by social processes.Knowledge is thus neither an independent, autonomous variable capableof explaining social decisions or outcomes nor simply an epiphenomenonof deeper social and political processes. Instead, knowledge and socialorder are co-produced through practices that simultaneously give rise tospecific epistemic frameworks as well as social and political arrangementsthat produce and apply those understandings ( Jasanoff 2004b; Shapin andSchaffer 1985). Together, I define this combination of epistemic frameworksand their associated social arrangements for knowledge production andapplication as knowledge-orders.

The concept of knowledge-orders can be differentiated along a spectrumthat ranges on one end, from more highly specialized and tightly organizedknowledge systems – for example, a computational model that is used by asingle agency to make permitting decisions – to much broader constella-tions of multiple, heterogeneous knowledge systems. The concept of civicepistemologies has been developed primarily at this broader end of thespectrum and is applied to help understand the broader patterns of coupledsocial and epistemic arrangements that can emerge and come to characterizepublic life in political communities. Civic epistemologies are, thus, waysof knowing and reasoning about policy problems intertwined with waysof organizing political order. These knowledge orders are reasonably stable,in that they persist over relatively long periods of time, often embeddedin institutionalized epistemic, social, and political practices. But, they arealso dynamic: open to change through novel processes of co-productionthat link epistemic, social, and political contestation and innovation. Thisdynamism may mean, over short periods of time, that epistemic and socialprocesses may diverge, until divergence becomes sufficiently recognizedand significant to force reintegration. Such reintegration may happen through



peaceful processes of change or violent conflict and may take placethrough changes in epistemic frameworks, social arrangements, or both.

Democratic polities, and especially pluralist democracies, are almostinevitably characterized by a diversity of knowledge systems operatingwithin broader civic epistemologies. In the United States, for example, adiversity of distinct knowledge systems characterize distinct institutionalcontexts. The US legal system operates under strict rules of evidence,interpreted by judges in the administration of specific cases, and establishedby a combination of legislation and legal precedent (Jasanoff 1995b). Manyadministrative agencies in the US federal government produce extensivestatistical knowledge relevant to their missions: agriculture, demographics,labor, economics, inflation, crime, etc. (see, e.g., Bandhauer et al. 2005;Miller 2005b; Porter 1995). These statistics are prepared in accordance withprofessional standards in relevant fields, administrative decisions regardingthe need and structure of data collected, and a wide range of federallegislation regarding data quality, government performance, administrativeprocedures, and other relevant facets. Many US regulatory decisions mustprovide statements in the public record that provide a scientific justificationfor the decision in question ( Jasanoff 1990). These statements depend onresearch conducted by regulatory agencies as well as university, industry,and non-governmental organization scientists, syntheses of that researchproduced in consultation with legislatively mandated scientific advisorycommittees, as well as the judgments of agency scientists, legal staff, andregulatory officials.

While these knowledge systems are distinct, they also interact, throughdynamic political processes. Regulatory decisions based on agency statisticsmay be challenged in court. Administrative and regulatory knowledgesmay stimulate legislation, while legislative acts like the Federal AdvisoryCommittee Act and Data Quality Act impact the production of adminis-trative, regulatory, and legal knowledges. When dynamic interactions arefrequent and robust, the upshot can be deeper patterns of knowledgemaking that stretch across multiple knowledge-orders. In the case ofthe United States, for example, the predominance of quantification andstatistical forms of knowledge can be seen across broad aspects ofadministrative, regulatory, and legal knowledge-orders ( Jasanoff 1991;Porter 1995).

The concept of civic epistemologies applies most aptly at this broaderlevel of political organization, with regard to collections of more or lessclosely intertwined knowledge systems. I do not mean to suggest here thatindividual knowledge systems do not, themselves, also contain withinthem heterogeneous elements. Rather, my argument is that the concept ofcivic epistemologies is particularly oriented toward the analysis of contextsin which multiple, highly diverse approaches to knowing and orderingexist in dynamic tension and interaction with one another in sufficientdepth that some degree of regularities and patterns begin to emerge.



Knowledge-making patterns within such collections are necessarily morecomplex than within distinct knowledge-orders, and it is necessary toadopt sophisticated, inductive methods to study them. One approachthat has been highly successfully used to study civic epistemologies isthe comparative approach ( Jasanoff 1995a, 2005). Research on civicepistemologies has found that evidentiary standards, norms of expertise,processes of scientific review and forms of advisory committees, framingsof policy problems, styles of policy reasoning and many other aspects ofthe linkage between knowledge and political authority vary systematicallyacross political cultures (Bandhauer et al. 2005; Brickman et al. 1985;Daemmrich 2004; Daemmrich and Krucken 2000; Jasanoff 1986, 1991,1993, 1995a; Parthasarathy 2004, 2007; Rayner 1991).

These variations are a consequence of distinct civic epistemologies –distinct constellations of knowledge and order that have evolved in distinctsocietal contexts – a point made also by historical sociological research.Yaron Ezrahi observed, ‘the socio-cultural “repertoire” of any political world– the range of norms, institutions, or behaviors upon which it can draw –is determined in each case by the available cultural materials, that is, sociallyestablished traditions, beliefs, and practices’ (Ezrahi 1990). Building on suchdistinct ‘traditions, beliefs, and practices,’ states began in the late 19th and early20th centuries to respond to a range of novel policy problems, constructingthe beginnings of the administrative, welfare state. Both the state and theuniversity – a key non-state institution involved in both knowledge productionand the training of professionals who would produce and use knowledgein administrative agencies – changed radically, taking new forms that weredeeply intertwined by the mid-20th century (Wittrock and Wagner 1996).Yet, the precise form of these institutions and their relationships varied,giving rise, across both Europe and North America, to knowledge-basedstates, but states with quite distinct forms of coupled epistemologicaland political order (Rueschemeyer and Skocpol 1996).

Part Two: Knowledge in politics

The notion that humans inhabit knowledge societies and knowledge economieshas become commonplace, marking public recognition of the central roleof science and technology in the organization of human affairs at the endof the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. While no comparabledesignation has emerged for knowledge polities, it is nonetheless not surprisingthat social theorists have also begun to highlight and interrogate the roleof knowledge and science in the constitution of contemporary forms ofpolitical order. The result has been an important shift in our understandingof the place of knowledge in the shaping of politics in contemporarysocieties, including imagination, identity, and citizenship; legitimacy,authority, and accountability; conflict; and regulation (Miller 2004a, 2007;Ezrahi 1990, 2004; Jasanoff 2004b, 2005; Scott 1998).



Imagination, identity, and citizenship

If knowledge is understood, at its foundation, as the codification of beliefand the establishment of claims to truth and objectivity, then it can hardlybe surprising that knowledge plays a crucial role in the formation ofpolitical imagination and identity. Nowhere has this subject been moreinnovatively explored than in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities(1991). Taking a novel approach to the study of political ideology, Andersonobserved that it is not just ideas but the systematic production and receptionof particular forms of ideas that contributed from the 17th through the 19thcentury to new forms of political identity that took the shape of nationalism.To understand the rise of nationalism, Anderson argued, demanded morethan just a history of ideas; it required understanding the production,dissemination, and reception of those ideas among mass publics. For this,it was essential to understand the array of institutions that produced relevantideas – newspapers, museums, censuses – and the day-to-day reception ofthose ideas by citizens in terms of their own political identity.

Although Anderson does not attend closely to the matter, it is interestingto note that the crucial ideas in his account take the form of claims tofactual knowledges: daily news stories, archaeological sciences, demographicstatistics, and geographic maps. Indeed, Anderson goes to considerablelengths to demonstrate that these ideas are not objective factual claims,showing how the political ontology created by each is shaped by a rangeof political ideologies. Yet, the acceptance of these ideas by citizens asfactual descriptions forms an essential component of their influence onpolitical imaginaries. It is crucial that the narrative fiction of newspaperstories – that world events can be understood as parallel histories ofdistinct nations – be understood not as narrative fiction but as politicalreality if it is to shape citizens’ identity as belonging to one and not othersof these nations.

If Anderson is concerned primarily with how citizens imagine theiridentities in relation to the institutional production of factual knowledgein the public sphere, Sheila Jasanoff and her colleagues have taken adifferent approach, focusing on what Jasanoff terms epistemic citizenship: theroles and rights of citizens vis-à-vis the production of public knowledge( Jasanoff 2004a). Concerned primarily with citizens as knowledge holders,these authors have been concerned to demonstrate that citizens in modernsocieties both produce and meaningfully contribute knowledges to publicdeliberation and policy reasoning. Where other political theories see cit-izens as often uninformed recipients of state and media-generated mes-sages, at best interpreting them in terms of preformed opinions, this workhas collectively demonstrated the much more dynamic and constitutiverole played by citizens in shaping the public sphere.

Work in this tradition has focused on lay communities of expertise, forexample, in the creation of knowledge about biological diversity (Ellis and



Waterton 2004) and farming (Wynne 1995), indigenous knowledges ininternational negotiations (Martello 2001, 2004), and the knowledges ofactivist groups and non-governmental organizations (Iles 2004; Krimskiand Plough 1988; Miller 2003a). In the most extensively researched caseto date, Stephen Epstein has shown how AIDS patients and AIDS activistsworked together to successfully critique and undermine the standardepistemological practices of drug testing in the 1990s (Epstein 1996).Opposing testing practices that left many patients without access to drugtrials, the AIDS community conducted street protests at scientific meetingsand at the same time pursued its own community-based trials on the basisof smuggled drugs. This dual strategy – including, later, close engagementwith biostatisticians – ultimately forced scientists to revise the experimentalpractices, evidentiary standards, and epistemological framework used inUS drug regulation.

Political conflict and its resolution

The epistemic politics present in the case of AIDS research is illustrativeof the fundamental role of knowledge in political conflict, especially inpluralist societies. In such conflicts, it can often seem that each side in thedispute will mobilize its own claims to knowledge, including both com-peting interpretations of available evidence and the pursuit of independentresearch projects aimed at supporting particular political positions (Nelkin1984). Careful analysis suggests slightly more complex dynamics, however.Epistemic conflict and the mobilization of counter claims regardingknowledge need not necessarily prevent the co-production of newepistemic agreements and social arrangements that lead to conflict resolution(Jasanoff 1997). Civic epistemology research can highlight how the dynamicsof co-production operate in cases of political conflict over knowledge.

Consider, for example, the case of elections. Political conflict remainsone of the most complex and intransigent sources of violence in manycontemporary societies. One of the hallmarks of successful transitions todemocracy, therefore, is the ability to eliminate violent conflict associatedwith elections and the transition of power and leadership in society. Thisis rightly recognized as a fundamentally political problem, involvingtransitions to new norms and practices of governance, the creation ofappropriate balances of power and minority rights, and the creation of trustedand trustworthy governance institutions. However, studies of electoralknowledge systems have also illuminated that, within well functioningelectoral processes, knowledge claims play a foundational role in securing thelegitimacy of electoral outcomes and knowledge conflicts can significantlyundermine that legitimacy (Lynch 2001a; Miller 2001a, 2004b).

For 36 days in November and December 2000, for example, the peacefultransition of power in the United States was called into question over aseemingly simple question of fact: which Presidential candidate won the



most votes in the state of Florida. Vote tallies, of course, are inevitably aproduct of political calculus. The electoral practices that generate the castingof votes are deeply influenced by practices of candidate selection ( Jasanof2001a); a wide range of political advertising, sloganeering, mobilization,and manipulation of messages, people, voter registration, and voting dayactivities (Bowker and Star 2001); efforts to magnify or lessen the appearanceof uncertainty (Hilgartner 2001); rules, procedures, and practices of con-structing, handling, validating, and contesting electoral tallies (Lynch2001b); and media practices for displaying the spectacle of electoral contestsand electoral winners (Dennis 2001). In this case, as in all elections,irregularities occurred in election practice. Coupled to a close election inFlorida, these irregularities contributed to the emergence of widespreadpolitical and legal conflict over the electoral result.

If electoral outcomes are to authorize the electoral winner to hold thereigns of power, however, partisan and administrative politics must appearinvisible and irrelevant to the final outcome, allowing the final electoralselection to be based on apparent objective fact regarding who won (Carson2001). In normal elections, this is accomplished through rituals of closure,such as televised pronouncements of winners, acceptance and concessionspeeches, and so forth. In disputed cases, by contrast, the US electoralsystem allows for recounts but then quickly shifts disputes out of thepolitical arena and into the legal system, where claims can be adjudicatedin a more controlled and less immediately partisan manner (although theclaim of non-partisanship of the courts was, itself, strained close to breakingin this case), in an effort to reduce or avoid political conflict (see Miller2004b, for a much more detailed account of efforts to co-produce electoralclosure in this case). As the failure of Bush v. Gore to close debate in thiscase illustrates, however, when exercises of co-production fail, and electoraltallies come to appear to rest on little more than judicial judgment or adhoc political decisions, the result can give rise to significant skepticismregarding the legitimacy of the election. Only by understanding electoralprocesses in terms of civic epistemologies – that is as complex interactionsamong diverse knowledge systems – can we fully explain how successfuldemocracies achieve legitimate electoral outcomes and thus hope to constructand/or reform such systems (Miller 2004b).

Research on civic epistemologies can also open up inquiry with regardto other aspects of political conflict. Comparative research illustrates,for example, that distinct political cultures give rise to distinct forms ofcoupled epistemic and political conflict (Brickman et al. 1985). Political conflictdoes not merely happen; rather, its form and frequency are determinedby the form and organization of knowledge-orders across a society. Whilescience is often mobilized by competing parties in political disputes in theUnited States, for example, this occurs much less frequently in Europe.This has been constantly apparent in the debate about climate change,where European countries have been subjected to far fewer debates than



the United States over the scientific basis of climate change. Indeed, inGermany, when industry groups sought to reject the reality of climatechange, they were forced to import US critics of climate science, as noGerman scientist would become involved. It is interesting to note thatpublic conflicts over the tallying of votes also do not occur nearly soreadily in Europe as in the United States. In both electoral and regulatorypolitics, European knowledge-orders are structured in distinct ways thatdo not tend to give rise to epistemic debates with the frequency orregularity of comparable knowledge-orders in the United States.

Political legitimacy and authority

Mary Douglas and Michel Foucault both argued, from very differentperspectives, that social and political authority is deeply bound up withknowledge systems (Douglas 1966; Douglas and Wildavsky 1983; Foucault1973). For Foucault, the core question was how the state exercised powerand authority in society, and its control over the production and certificationof knowledge appeared crucial to answering that question. For Douglas,the question was subtly different: how to explain distinct forms of socialorganization and authority? In her theory, control over knowledge wascrucial to social and political authority, but distinct forms of knowledgesupported distinct forms of social authority. Both Foucault and Douglasleft open a crucial question, however. Could epistemic authority – and itsassociated social or political authority – be constituted democratically (orwas such authority inevitably illegitimate)?

Yaron Ezrahi has explored, perhaps more than any other individual, thecentrality of science and of knowledge making more generally to theproduction of democratic political authority and legitimacy (Ezrahi 1990,2004). Just as the construction of objective electoral facts, described above,is essential to the construction of legitimate electoral outcomes that authorizethe winners to assume power, so, too, Ezrahi has demonstrated that knowledgeis a crucial element of legitimacy and authority more broadly in democraticgovernance. For Ezrahi, the crucial question is how attentive democraticpublics, through deliberative practices, hold the exercise of power accountablein between elections, and science plays a crucial role in the answer.

Democracies are inevitably hostage to the discretion of elected orappointed officials. In response, democratic polities have sought means toreduce this discretion. One approach to this problem has been to insist thatthe exercise of power be accompanied by its justification. The justificationof power is largely meaningless without independent standards againstwhich to measure its validity, however, and democratic polities have oftenturned to science to fill this role. Scientific expertise thus became, duringthe Progressive politics of the early 20th century in the United States, a toolfor justifying that conservation policies pursued by the US governmentwould provide ‘the greatest good for the greatest number of people’ (Hays



1959). Later, during the New Deal, the US Congress began to insist onquantitative measures of cost-benefit analysis from administrative agenciesusing what Theodore Porter has described as a form of mechanical objectivityto ensure that agency decisions were neither ad hoc and arbitrary nor,worse, partisan choices (Porter 1995). By the 1960s and 1970s, nearly allregulatory decisions in the United States would be required by law toprovide scientific or expert justifications for their actions, with many suchlaws dictating not only the fact but the form of justification and potentiallyalso the kinds of knowledge required, forms of review and audit, etc.( Jasanoff 1990).

Theories of deliberative democracy have picked up this argument thatknowledge forms an essential component of the exercise of legitimatedemocratic authority.

A part of exercising legitimate democratic authority is the public act ofjustification to those over whom authoritative decisions are binding. In makingdemands on citizens, legislative bodies, administrative agencies, and appointedexperts must explain their reasons and demonstrate that their demands canreasonably be expected to serve the common interests of free and equal citizens.(King 2003, 24)

But this formulation raises sociological questions that have not yet beenadequately addressed by political theorists. What counts as adequate expla-nation or demonstration for the purposes of establishing the legitimacy ofauthority and the exercise of power in democratic societies? In legalproceedings, rules of evidence and argumentation are precisely demarcated,in order to assure that principles of justice are upheld. Do comparablerules of evidence and argumentation exist in political proceedings? Surely,for a theory of democracy, it is insufficient for governments simply toassume the validity of their own claims to explanation and demonstration.But, if so, how are the validity of claims made by those exercising powerand authority assessed, and who has the right to critique the validity ofsuch claims?

These questions go to the heart of what it means to investigate the civicepistemologies of modern societies. Their impact is not only to insist thatwe explore, within any given democratic society, the precise mechanismsof how policy-relevant knowledge is produced, but also the deeper questionof how societies ensure that the public construction of epistemic authorityitself conforms to accepted norms of democratic governance. Consider,for example, political manipulation of statistical knowledges, a problemthat has plagued the United Kingdom in recent years. In response, theUnited Kingdom has created the office of the National Statistician, anombudsman who heads the UK Statistical Authority and whose job is tooversee the production and use of official government statistics. This positioncombines epistemic and social authority by embodying that authority ina person of trust and repute, someone whose epistemic skill as a statistician



is combined with recognition as a trusted public servant, perhaps throughknighthood or other official recognition. In the United States, where thechallenges of political manipulation of statistics are equally well known,recourse to such an individual would be seen as wholly inappropriate.Instead, the United States has turned, consistent with its own civicepistemology, to procedural mechanisms designed to secure the accuracyof data, as in the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act and the 2003Data Quality Act. In each country, however, both threat and responsereflect carefully attuned, socially situated notions of what it means toconstitute epistemic and political authority democratically.

Part Three: The epistemic politics of globalization

While questions of knowledge of epistemology have a long history ofrelevance in domestic politics, similar questions have acquired importancein recent decades in international governance (see, e.g., Jasonoff and Wynne1998; Raynor and Malone 1998; Jasonoff and Martello 2004). Drivers ofthis transformation include the rise of explicitly global policy problems,the corresponding turn in international governance toward strengtheningthe authority of international institutions – many of which depend heavilyon forms of knowledge and expertise for their authority – and the deepeningimplications of global policy decisions for peoples’ day-to-day livelihoodsand lifestyles. Together, these changes are contributing to growing expec-tations that global policymaking conform to the norms and expectationsof domestic governance. Thus, for example, non-governmental organizationsand social protest movements called throughout the 1990s for greaterdemocratization in the decision making of institutions like the WorldBank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In what follows, I argue that it is crucial to expand research on civicepistemologies in international governance. First, it is important to improveunderstanding of why and how policy problems are increasingly framedin explicitly global terms, as well as what this shift in framing implies forpeoples’ expectations regarding the conduct of international governance.Second, it is important to analyze the rising influence of internationalorganizations – in response to emerging global policy problems – and thecontributions of knowledge and expertise to the construction of theirpower and authority. Finally, it is important to assess the epistemic dimensionsof the problem of democratizing international governance.

Framing global policy

A key facet of globalization, yet one that is often underestimated, is thereframing of policy problems in explicitly global terms. Globalization hastraditionally been understood as a rise in the material interconnectionsamong economies around the planet. This approach to the study of



globalization ignores an important epistemic dimension of globalization,however (Miller 2004c). Increasingly frequently, a range of policy problemsare being represented as capable of being conceptualized, analyzed, andmanaged on scales no smaller than the globe. Central to this problemframing is the description and analysis of natural and social processes,relationships, and networks said to be ontologically global: the Earth’sclimate system and ozone layer, financial markets, epidemic diseases, drugproduction, terrorism, etc.

This transformation reflects concerted efforts among a range of epistemiccommunities (Haas 1990) to construct global representations of issues suchas environmental degradation and economic markets. In almost all cases,these new global framings explicitly replaced earlier local or nationalproblem framings. Through the 1960s and 1970s, for example, the globalframing of climate change persisted alongside a more dominant local ornational framing that perceived local or regional climatic fluctuations asthe relevant end point for policy discussions and thus put carbon dioxideemissions alongside other, often more significant local and regional causesof climatic variability such as clearing of forests or urban heat islands.Only in the mid- to late 1980s did the global framing of climate changeemerge as the dominant framing, facilitated by a wide range of social andepistemic shifts: changing epistemic practices among climate scientists thatled to the rise of computational modeling and satellite data sets (Edwards2001), shifts in hierarchies among scientists that put computational modelingat the center of intellectual work in climate science (Shackley and Wynne1995), and the broader rise of global environmental imaginaries in USpolitics ( Jasanoff 2001b). This framing shift in turn helped foster thecreation of a new, global approach to policymaking, giving rise in 1988 to thecreation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and in 1992 tothe UN Framework Convention on Climate Change and a now two decadesrunning international negotiation process (for details, see Miller 2004a).

Similarly, during the 1980s, a small but influential group of conservationbiologists became dissatisfied with the species-by-species approach to natureconservation that dominated national policymaking (e.g., in the 1972 USEndangered Species Act and other comparable national laws), as well asthe Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. Seeing theformer as too piecemeal and the latter too narrowly focused on problemsof trade and smuggling but not the wide range of other threats to species,these scientists worked, first, to construct a new problem – biodiversityloss – with the explicit aim of shifting people’s cognitive map from theneed to protect individual endangered species to a concern about threatsto the whole of the Earth’s biological resources (Takacs 1996). Subsequently,these scientists engaged in substantial organizational efforts to raise theprofile of their new ideas among policymakers and public opinion leaders,to enroll key conservation organizations in their agenda, and to securefinancial backing from important US and European foundations for a



biodiversity conservation agenda. Their efforts were ultimately successful inmotivating the 1992 UN Convention on Biological Diversity. Strikingly,however, many developing countries have explicitly rejected the notionthat their forests and other natural areas constitute a ‘global heritage ofhumankind’, favoring instead to interpret them as national biologicalresources and opposing many of the policies sought by conservationbiologists (Miller 2003a).

In addressing the framing of global issues like biodiversity and climatechange, the study of civic epistemologies parallels other constructivistapproaches to these issues, such as media framing analyses (e.g., Hannigan2006; Mazur and Lee 1993). Where the study of civic epistemology differsfrom these accounts is in focusing careful attention on (1) the sociologicaltransformations that occur intertwined with these novel epistemic framings;(2) on how competing epistemic and ontological forms of reasoning andargumentation about global problems are frequently grounded in strongsocial and institutional arrangements for making and validating knowledgein local and national political communities; and (3) the central role ofknowledge institutions and networks in securing and opposing globalframings. Thus, studies of civic epistemology ask how transnational epistemiccommunities form and acquire power ( Jasanoff 1996) and why and underwhat circumstances do they choose to adopt global policy framings (Taylorand Buttel 1992)? Which global framings secure credibility and authorityin international governance processes, why, and against what kinds andsources of resistance? In converse, why does resistance arise to the globali-zation of policy framings, how is it framed, and under what conditions issuch resistance successful (see, e.g., Reardon 2005)? And what are thesociological implications of these epistemic contests (Jasanoff 1995a)? How,in other words, do processes of co-production work to create emergentepistemic and social orderings in global civic spaces?

Knowledge and global authority

The construction of global policy problems has led, in turn, to the creationand/or expansion of authority for new and existing international institutions(Miller 2004a). In the case of global environmental change, for example,four new major international treaty frameworks were established on thebasis of new, global epistemologies in the period between 1985 and 1994:ozone depletion, climate change, biodiversity loss, and desertification.In these cases, not only have 180+ nations joined each treaty, but non-governmental organizations, industrial trade organizations, and indigenousgroups also play increasingly central roles in shaping international negotiations(Miller 2003b). More generally, the successful epistemic construction ofnew global policy problems – for example, currency instabilities in globalfinancial markets, new threats of nuclear proliferation, and novel infectiousdiseases – contributed to a significant ratcheting up of the authority of



international institutions during the 1980s and 1990s. Major reformsgranted the IMF, International Atomic Energy Agency, and World HealthOrganization substantial new powers.

Recent growth in the power and authority of these internationalorganizations derives from three interrelated sources. On the one hand, asdescribed above, each of these organizations operates in a domain inwhich the dominant epistemic framework incorporates a global ontology:put simply, the policy problems facing the organization are perceived tobe global. At the same time, expert analyses portray the policy significanceof these problems as growing rapidly in significance. Avian influenza, themost recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change,and the rash of national currency crises in the 1990s all contributed to arising sense of the need for international governance. Finally, thesespecific organizations are expert institutions – what I have called, elsewhere,international knowledge institutions (Miller 2007) – which are seen has havingthe knowledge and capacity to respond effectively to global policy challenges.Interestingly, during this same period of time, the World Bank madesubstantial efforts to recreate itself as a ‘knowledge bank’ (Mehta 2001),while also seeing the scope of its own power and authority rise in responseto the development of novel epistemological resources that have simulta-neously enabled the greening of development policy and the expansionof the World Bank’s projects to a whole new realm of activities (Goldman2004, 2005).

The evolving relationship between knowledge and global authority alsoraises complex, as yet unexplored questions for future research. Why andunder what circumstances have international institutions acquired increasedpower and authority to manage global policy problems? Why have inter-national knowledge institutions, in particular, been the focus of bothhistorical and recent efforts to create authoritative international institutions?What role have claims to knowledge played in this authorization of inter-national institutions? Are we seeing a growing legitimating and authorizingrole for knowledge in the exercise of global power? In turn, is the risingimportance of global knowledges giving rise to enhanced scrutiny andcritique of how that knowledge is made, validated, and deployed injustifying international governance (Miller 2001b, 2007)?

Knowledge and democracy in international governance

The growing power and authority of international institutions – accompanyingthe ongoing exercise of global power by the United States – has begun toraise questions about legitimacy and democracy in international governance(Held 2004; King 2003; Verweij and Josling 2003). A key agenda for civicepistemologies research is to bring critical analysis to bear on both howknowledge production and validation are structured in internationalinstitutions (so as to better understand whose motives and interests are



being served through knowledge claims) as well as the dynamic processesin which knowledge claims are used, and by whom, to justify and critiquethe exercise of power in international governance. In the case of the IMF,for example, Joseph Stiglitz has argued that structural aspects of theorganization of knowledge production and validation made it impossiblefor outside experts to criticize overly narrow and biased IMF interpretationsof evidence (Stiglitz 2002). Had the IMF been forced to structure itsepistemic practices differently, in ways that fostered and made publiclegitimate epistemic debates, IMF’s failed policies during the 1990s mighthave been minimized or even avoided and the IMF might have greaterlegitimacy outside of the United States. Stiglitz leaves off where a civicepistemologies approach might continue, however, in beginning to assesshow structural reforms within knowledge production and validationpractices might contribute to altering the dynamics of power and authoritywithin international institutions.

In another example, in the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003,epistemic disputes erupted between the US government and the InternationalAtomic Energy Agency over evidence of Iraqi weapons of mass destructionand suspicious Iraqi behavior. These disputes were not merely diplomaticdisputes, however; they spilled over into diverse publics around the globe.In February 2003, Colin Powell’s speech to the UN Security Council laidout an array of evidence that the Bush Administration interpreted asindicating that Iraq had possession of chemical and biological weapons andlikely either did or soon would have possession of nuclear weapons. Bycontrast, in several speeches to the UN Security Council, both before andafter Powell’s speech, both IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradeiand Hans Blix, former IAEA Director General and head of UNMOVIC,the UN inspection team focusing on chemical and biological weapons, madeclear their view that the existing evidence from their inspections did notsupport the finding that Iraq possessed any weapons of mass destruction.

The presentations by Powell, Blix, and ElBaradei all reflected a crucialpoint: that factual evidence of Iraq’s possession of weapons of mass destructionwould significantly impact the legitimacy of any decision by the UnitedStates or the UN Security Council to authorize an invasion of Iraq. At thesame time, they reflected two very different ways of interpreting thatevidence. Powell’s – attuned to US civic epistemological norms andpractices (and televised in its entirety to substantial audiences in theUnited States) – was sufficient to achieve the Administration’s primarygoal: a short-term bump in public support in the United States for theinvasion that enabled the Administration to temporarily defuse its domesticcritics (even while further alienating publics in other parts of the world).At the IAEA, however, Blix and then ElBaradei had built a culture ofreasoning that insisted on a much more cautious approach to drawingconclusions from technical data, one which they felt did not allow them toconclude yet that Iraq possessed nuclear or biological munitions. Subsequent



events have tended to confirm this more cautious assessment (for greaterdetail, see Miller 2007).

This dispute highlights the centrality of knowledge and epistemologyto global conflicts over the exercise of power. IAEA opposition to USepistemic claims facilitated political opposition to US action in the UNSecurity Council and prevented the UN Security Council from backingthe US invasion. Subsequently, highly publicized failures by the US militaryand special nuclear inspections to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraqin the aftermath of the invasion, contributed to the declining legitimacyof the war among US and global publics. At the same time, building ona long history of epistemic conflict and failure in the context of development(Escobar 1995; Ferguson 1990; Scott 1998), as well as the problems of theIMF and World Bank discussed in earlier paragraphs, this dispute calls intoquestion the legitimacy of current efforts to co-produce knowledge andorder at global scales (see, also, Miller 2003a; Reardon 2005).

Yet, criticisms of international knowledge making arguably reflect apositive increase in the deliberative aspects of international relations. Thecriticisms of the IMF by both the anti-globalization movement andStiglitz have helped to open up global debates over the appropriateness ofIMF decision making and its epistemic foundations. Likewise, the 6 monthspreceding the US invasion of Iraq witnessed extensive public debates inthe UN Security Council over the legitimacy of military action by theUnited States, as the United States sought UN authorization for itsproposed activities. These debates, too, focused on questions of knowledgeand epistemology: what was known – and on the basis of what evidence– about Iraqi possession of weapons of mass destruction, and whoseinterpretations of that evidence held the greatest credibility?

A key driver of growing epistemic debate in international governanceis the diversity of national civic epistemologies. As described briefly above,styles of policy reasoning, evidentiary standards, and expectations regardingthe appropriate organization of scientific and expert advisory processes varyconsiderably, even across advanced industrial democracies such as theUnited States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and France (Brickmanet al. 1985; Jasanoff 2005). These differences stem from variances in processesfor warranting the credibility of policy-relevant knowledge, notions ofwhat counts as expertise and what kinds of expertise are most appropriatefor policy purposes, normative expectations regarding the delivery of expertadvice (e.g., standards of transparency, accountability, legitimacy, etc.), aswell as the constitutional frameworks and political institutions to whomknowledge and advice are being offered. While these expectations typicallyremain implicit in national affairs, they have given rise to explicit conflictin international politics. Diplomatic representatives steeped in distinctnational epistemologies have tended to agree in international forums forthe need for scientific support for policy decision making; they havefrequently disagreed over the epistemic, normative, and organizational



aspects of how to secure global science advice in the context of deeperdebates over global economic policy.

Consider US and European disputes over the application of the precautionaryprinciple to a wide range of international policies, from global environmentalchange to the risks of biotechnology. In European politics, the precautionaryprinciple, which is taken to mean that the explicit acknowledgement ofscientific uncertainty need not preclude the possibility of regulatory action,has become a prominent legal standard. In US politics, by contrast, theprecautionary principle has been rejected as an explicit standard of action.Thus, although some US environmental laws take precautionary stances,they do so on the basis of explicit value choices while rejecting the notionthat regulatory action could ever be justified by scientific uncertainty,per se ( Jasanoff 2000). As a result, even US scientists and policy officialswho support stronger international regulation of global risks reject theepistemic basis of the precautionary principle. These epistemologicaldifferences between the United States and EU have become integral to awide range of disputes, perhaps the most prominent of which has beentheir dispute at the World Trade Organization over the legitimacy ofrestrictions and regulations on trade in genetically modified organisms(Winickoff et al. 2005).

Put simply, these debates reflect disagreements over how best to con-struct the epistemic foundations of legitimacy in international governance,in a world that is deeply divided over questions of economy, environment,and security. Whose knowledge and ideas must be taken into account inthe construction of policy responses to global problems? What evidentiarystandards and forms of policy reasoning will be acceptable in justifyingglobal decision making? That these questions are being debated – if evenimplicitly – is, I believe, a positive sign that the growing epistemic authorityand justifications of powerful global actors is increasingly being challenged.Research on civic epistemologies would suggest, however, an emphasison two additional aspects of the relationship between knowledge andglobal power.

First, a more explicit and reflexive engagement with questions of knowledgeand power would bring considerable value. In too many facets of inter-national governance, the epistemological and organizational aspects of theconstruction of knowledge and expertise go essentially unexamined andtaken for granted. In one recent case, for example, scientific researchersseeking to implement a program of global DNA sampling from indigenouscommunities failed to recognize the deep controversy this research mightraise among research subjects, most of which feel marginalized and threatenedby existing arrangements of national and global governance. Oppositionfrom these groups and their representatives ultimately prevented the researchproject from being undertaken and left bitter relations between scientistsand indigenous activist groups that continues to the present (Reardon 2005).In many cases, like Stiglitz’s account of the IMF discussed above, or like



the World Intellectual Property Organization in Christopher May’s account,strong interests essentially engage in epistemic power plays, controllingknowledge systems in order to control policy (May 2007). By contrast, otherorganizations have designed the epistemic infrastructure of internationalgovernance along different lines. For example, the Millennium EcosystemAssessment not only systematically sought out participants from amongdeveloping countries’ researchers and indigenous groups but also grantedthem considerable epistemological flexibility in their contributions that fosteredthe ability of the Millennium Assessment to make visible epistemic pluralismat the global scale. The upshot: a very interesting experiment in episte-mological democracy in international governance (Miller and Erickson 2006).

What these cases illustrate is missing in international governance areboth notions of good practice regarding knowledge production andvalidation that have been democratically legitimated, as well as politicalprocesses that can secure the accountability of global knowledge systems.A second, potentially valuable challenge for research in this field, therefore,would be critical analyses of and inputs into the design of good practicesfor international knowledge systems. As discussed above, the productionof policy-relevant knowledges is subject to careful regulation in a widerange of aspects of domestic governance, precisely because of their potentialconstitutional implications for the democratic exercise and legitimizationof power. In international governance, however, no comparable politicalor legal standards cover the global production of knowledge and expertise.This has hampered organizations like the Intergovernmental Panel onClimate Change, which has come under sustained criticism for itsepistemic practices (Edwards and Schneider 2001). By contrast, theSubsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice of the UNFramework Convention on Climate Change has taken a more formal approachto deliberating and setting standards for scientific advisory mechanismswithin the climate regime. The result has been the slow but steady evolutionof an internationally agreed upon set of scientific and technical advisoryprocesses that have contributed significantly to the resolution of politicalconflict among climate negotiators (Miller 2001b).

Conclusions

Research on civic epistemologies will only grow in importance in thenext decade. As the globalization of policy problems increasingly blurs theboundary between domestic and international politics, questions aboutknowledge and democracy will blur as well. International knowledgeinstitutions will increasingly gain relevance, even in domestic policy decisions,as we are currently seeing in relation to energy policy and climate change.Yet, conversely, this transition will increase conflict over the epistemicstandards of international institutions, challenging their ability to reconcileor transcend divergent national expectations regarding the production,



validation, and use of knowledge, science, and expertise. Can these institutionsevolve globally acceptable civic epistemologies? In the short term, knowledgefailures seem inevitable, either in inappropriately marginalizing relevantepistemic perspectives, losing credibility, or failing to accommodate diversenational civic epistemologies. Will these failures give rise, in turn, to renewedsocial protests, such as those carried out by the anti-globalization movement,that might stimulate global standard-setting, or will they lead to a renewedrejection of international knowledge making? On the other hand, willsuccesses by international knowledge institutions in capturing authorityover relevant knowledge in key policy domains challenge domestic scientificadvisory institutions and call into question their future relevance andcapacity? Will domestic and international knowledge institutions reinforceone another’s authority or come into growing conflict as national sovereigntyitself is challenged?

These theoretical questions demand much deeper investigation, analysis,and understanding of evolving civic epistemologies in the light of rapidglobalization. Of particular note is the need to expand the coverage ofgeographic regions and policy domains. There is a strong need for analysisof the civic epistemologies of states beyond the small number of liberalWestern democracies for which extensive research has been carried out:the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, France, and the Netherlands,in particular. Relatively little has been published, for example, on civicepistemologies in Asia or among developing states in Africa and LatinAmerica. As countries such as China and India become more central toglobal deliberations, how will their perspectives on knowledge and decisionmaking alter emerging transnational civic epistemologies. Research is alsoneeded on a much wider range of international institutions, extendingbeyond existing studies of the World Bank and international environmentalinstitutions.

Perhaps the biggest challenge to this expansion of research on civicepistemologies is disciplinary traditions. Within the sociology of scientificknowledge and science and technology studies, where most research oncivic epistemologies has originated, the tendency has been to assumethat knowledge production and validation occurs predominantly withinscientific laboratories and other sites of scientific research. This assumptionhas limited attention to the epistemological foundations of politicalinstitutions and processes as well as to alternative sites of knowledgeproduction and validation in civic life. At the same time, research ondemocratic theory, domestic political institutions, and international relationshas by and large failed to acknowledge epistemic politics. Even wherequestions of political knowledge, ideas, and ideology have taken centerstage, however, as in the study of epistemic communities, this research hasfocused more on the role of ideas in shaping politics, with little or noattention to processes of knowledge making. Effective research on civicepistemologies will require breaking down these disciplinary boundaries



to open up a wide ranging discussion between research among sociologistsand political scientists.

Short Biography

Clark A. Miller is an Associate Professor in the Consortium for Science,Policy & Outcomes and the Department of Political Science at ArizonaState University. His research focuses on the role of knowledge in inter-national governance and on the intersection of science and democracy incontemporary societies. His articles have appeared in Governance, SocialStudies of Science, Science and Public Policy, Science, Technology & HumanValues, and Environmental Values, as well as in Changing the Atmosphere:Expert Knowledge and Environmental Governance (MIT Press, 2001), a volumehe co-edited on climate science and policy. Prior to his appointment atASU, Miller was an Associate Professor in the Robert M. La FolletteSchool of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He hasalso held postdoctoral positions in the Department of Science & TechnologyStudies at Cornell University and the John F. Kennedy School ofGovernment at Harvard University. He holds a BA from the Universityof Illinois and a PhD from Cornell University and is a recipient of theprestigious National Science Foundation CAREER award.

Note

* Correspondence address: Consortium for Science, Policy & Outcomes, Arizona State Uni-versity, PO Box 874401 Tempe, AZ 85287, USA 85284. Email: [email protected].

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Documents

Civic Epistemologies: Constituting Knowledge and Order in Political Communities