Papers by Annabelle Littoz-Monnet
Governing through Expertise, 2020
existing research points to the presence of philanthropists in global governance as funders of pr... more existing research points to the presence of philanthropists in global governance as funders of programmes and partners. through an in-depth exploration of global health governance, we highlight that philanthropic organizations now shape governance by acting as producers of knowledge. Practicing 'knowledge philanthropism' , they collect, produce and assemble the data, calculations and research which is used by international Organizations (iOs) to govern problems. in addition, philanthropies craft tools of interpretation, whether concepts, vocabularies, or concrete technological devices that embed these, which are being used for the treatment of the knowledge they themselves produce. While performing such activities, they reify their own role and enable their deeper entanglement in the knowledge machinery of global governance, fashioning data-centric activities as the solution to global health problems, and themselves as the necessary partners in this resource-intensive data collection effort. the epistemic power of philanthropists produces political effects, on health interventions and modes of governing, which deeply participate to the transformation of all matters into objects of investments for financial returns. We explore these processes in relation to global health governance, with a specific focus on medical hypertension, fashioned as a top global health priority and a necessary 'investment' by the World health Organization (WhO) and other sites of global governance.
International Political Sociology, 2022
Global mental health expertise favors biomedical explanations of mental disorders that conceive s... more Global mental health expertise favors biomedical explanations of mental disorders that conceive such disorders as stable entities, which can be diagnosed according to universal categories. Following this logic, universal and standardized solutions can also be applied throughout the world, regardless of context. Despite its assumptions and data being contested within the field of psychiatry itself, global mental health expertise has been highly stable. How is such expertise produced? Through what mechanisms are its products, such as reports, studies, or numbers, made and replicated? The article proposes a model of expertise production in global governance that discloses specific mechanisms of circularity and exclusivity in knowledge-making processes, which result in the circular and exclusive character of expertise itself. These include the circulation of profesionals and data across spheres and organizations, as well as the role played by several sites such as boundary expert groups, influential research clusters, and “policy-scientific” journals, which operate as powerful centers of knowledge production at the intersection of the policy, scientific or private spheres. Such sites not only act as loci where people's circulation operates at its best but also as autonomous mechanisms that produce, cement, and perpetuate the circularity and exclusivity of expertise beyond the role of specific individuals.
International Political Sociolgy, 2023
This article opens up the blackbox through which evidence is selected and assessed in the making ... more This article opens up the blackbox through which evidence is selected and assessed in the making of guidelines and recommendations in global governance, through an exploration of “methods regimes.” Methods regimes are a special kind of sociomaterial arrangement, which govern the production and validation of knowledge, by establishing a clear hierachy between alternative forms of research designs. When such regimes become inscribed in processes of global governance, they shape and control what knowledge is deemed valid and thus relevant for policy. We shed light that through a mode of operation that relies on a discourse of procedurality, a dispersed but powerful network of epistemic operators, and a dense web of infrastructures, methods regimes constitute and police the making of “policy-relevant knowledge” in global governance. Through an examination of the case of “GRADE” (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation), a standardized system that evaluates and grades the quality of evidence in global health, we show that its dominance has worked to the effect of empowering a new cast of methodologists, seen as more objective and portable across domains, sidelining certain forms of evidence that do not conform with its own methodological criteria of scientificity, and “clinicalizing” research in medicine and beyond.
International Political Sociolgy, 2022
Global mental health expertise favors biomedical explanations of mental disorders that conceive s... more Global mental health expertise favors biomedical explanations of mental disorders that conceive such disorders as stable entities, which can be diagnosed according to universal categories. Following this logic, universal and standardized solutions can also be applied throughout the world, regardless of context. Despite its assumptions and data being contested within the field of psychiatry itself, global mental health expertise has been highly stable. How is such expertise produced? Through what mechanisms are its products, such as reports, studies, or numbers, made and replicated? The article proposes a model of expertise production in global governance that discloses specific mechanisms of circularity and exclusivity in knowledge-making processes, which result in the circular and exclusive character of expertise itself. These include the circulation of profesionals and data across spheres and organizations, as well as the role played by several sites such as boundary expert groups, influential research clusters, and “policy-scientific” journals, which operate as powerful centers of knowledge production at the intersection of the policy, scientific or private spheres. Such sites not only act as loci where people's circulation operates at its best but also as autonomous mechanisms that produce, cement, and perpetuate the circularity and exclusivity of expertise beyond the role of specific individuals.
This edited volume aims to advance existing research on the production and use of specialized kno... more This edited volume aims to advance existing research on the production and use of specialized knowledge by international bureaucracies. 1 Given the complexity, technicality and apparent apolitical character of the issues dealt with in global governance arenas, "evidence-based" policy-making has imposed itself as the best way of evaluating the risks and consequences of political action in global arenas. Although this turn has also taken place at the domestic level, international organizations have, in the absence of alternative, democratic, modes of legitimation, heartedly adopted this approach to policy-making. International bureaucrats insist that their policies and programs are "evidence-based", "rational", and founded on neutral expertise. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) for instance spells out its "core values" on its web page and lists "objective" on top of its inventory, boasting that its "analyses and recommendations are independent and evidence-based." 2 For international bureaucrats, resorting to the use of expert knowledge can indeed represent an efficient means of orienting political action, while keeping the appearance of the rational, apolitical character of the policies they promote.
Cambridge University Press, 2020
The book provides a fresh analysis of the enmeshment of expert knowledge with politics in global ... more The book provides a fresh analysis of the enmeshment of expert knowledge with politics in global governance, through a unique investigation of bioethical expertise, an intriguing form of ‘expert knowledge’ which claims authority in the ethical analysis of issues that arise in relation to biomedicine, the life sciences and new fields of technological innovation. She makes the case that the mobilisation of ethics experts does not always arise from a motivation to rationalise governance. Instead, mobilising ethics experts - who are endowed with a unique double-edged authority, both ‘democratic’ and ‘epistemic’ - can help policy-makers manoeuvre policy conflicts on scientific and technological innovations and make their pro-science and innovation agendas possible. Bioethical expertise is indeed shaped in a political and iterative space between experts and those who do policy. The book reveals the mechanisms through which certain global governance narratives, as well as the types of expertise they rely on, remain stable even when they are contested.
Journal of European Public Policy, 2020
International bureaucracies can expand their activities into new domains, even when these are rem... more International bureaucracies can expand their activities into new domains, even when these are remote from their formal mandates. Asking how they do this, this article reveals that expansion often goes unnoticed, because international secretariats typically start new activities in a way which is informal, mundane and depoliticized. Through an examination of UNESCO’s and WHO’s expansion into the domain of bioethics, the article argues that international bureaucratic tactics revert to a three-fold strategy mixing technicalization, expertization and naturalization. This suggests that international bureaucracies’ autonomy does not depend on their fixed characteristics, as defined by their legal-institutional mandates, capacities, or level of expertise. Expansion takes place, rather, when such resources are efficiently activated, assembled, or developed, thus shedding light on the need to examine what international bureaucracies ‘do’, rather than what they ‘are’, in order to capture their influence in global governance.
International Studies Quarterly, 2017
This article asks how international secretariats can sometimes expand their authority in areas th... more This article asks how international secretariats can sometimes expand their authority in areas that relate neither to their mandate, nor to their sphere of expert authority. Existing explanations of mission creep assume that IOs act autonomously and expand in those areas which connect with their mandates, sense of organizational mission and sphere of expert authority. The claim, here, is that entrepreneurial bureaucrats can succeed in the absence of policy deadlock amongst states-in creating creep into unexpected issue domains through the mobilization of external expert knowledge. The article examines this dynamic in the domain of bioethical standards. It shows that UNESCO acted as a first mover in the field, despite having no relevant expertise, and bioethics being more closely connected to the mandate of other organizations. But bureaucratic entrepreneurs successfully mobilized external experts and made them part of the organization. This allowed them to prevent the politicization of debates in a potentially controversial issue domain, endow their organization with the capacity to act, and gave epistemic authority to their actions. In pointing to the strategic uses of expertise, the findings challenge the commonly held view that expert knowledge acts as a means of solving problems and rationalizing governance.
Governance, Jul 2015
This article challenges the assumption that ethics committees introduce democratic control in pol... more This article challenges the assumption that ethics committees introduce democratic control in policy areas where scientific expertise and ethical concerns collide. The claim is that politicians or bureaucrats are likely to resort to the use of ethical expertise when they face a specific type of dilemma: the impossibility, on the one hand, of yielding a consensus on controversial value-based issues via the democratic route and the need, on the other, to legitimize controversial policy choices in these areas. The article examines this dynamic with regard to the European Union's medical biotechnology policy, a contested policy domain where ethical specialists are awarded expert status. The article finds that establishing ethical experts as a new category of expertise alongside scientific experts actually bolsters the technocratic domain in areas where it is contested, thus reinforcing the authority of experts and bureaucrats in the policy process, rather than democratic control.
European Journal of Political Research, 2013
This article addresses debates on the formulation of public policy, building upon a body of liter... more This article addresses debates on the formulation of public policy, building upon a body of literature which has focused on the interconnectedness between the venues of policy action and the way issues are defined. It does so by focusing on the strategic role of policy actors in a policy subfield and their attempts at manipulating either frames or venues in order to shape policy. The novelty here consists in pointing to the involvement of regulators in such strategic action. An emerging body of research has indeed shown that the activity of formally independent regulators is not necessarily limited to the implementation of delegated regulatory competencies and that they are increasingly engaged in policy-making activities. Thus, by resorting to the agenda-setting and framing literature, the article sheds light on novel pathways through which regulators intervene in policy-making activities, making a claim that they have very good ‘tools’ at their disposal in order to shape policy. These dynamics are examined in the case of the last piece of the EU's pharmaceutical framework – the 2004 Directive on Traditional Herbal Medicines – which provoked intense debate among manufacturers of herbals, retailers, consumers, and both EU-level and domestic-level regulatory authorities.
Politique européenne, 2014
West European Politics, 2012
Over the last few years, EU institutions have taken on the task of promoting an ‘active European ... more Over the last few years, EU institutions have taken on the task of promoting an ‘active European remembrance’ of Europe's twentieth century totalitarian experiences. At stake in this process is the possibility of constructing an EU-wide historical narrative. However, EU-level debates on the remembrance of European history are permeated by struggles between policy actors who vie for control over the telling of Europe's past. Using insights from the agenda-setting and framing literatures, the article examines the conditions under which memory narratives are able to become prominent or, conversely, lose ground in the EU's overall discourse. It concludes that, although the constellation of actors in place was a key factor in explaining fluctuations in the EU's remembrance discourse, the weight of their arguments also depended on how well their discourse resonated with existing memory cultures at the domestic and the EU levels.
JCMS: Journal of Common Market Studies, 2013
ABSTRACT After the 2004 eastern enlargement, the European Union has become a terrain of competiti... more ABSTRACT After the 2004 eastern enlargement, the European Union has become a terrain of competition between different memory narratives. At the core of the debate is the status of the Holocaust and its role in the identity‐definition process of European societies. This article asks why similar memory debates have resulted in different policy outcomes when taking place in different institutional settings at the EU level. It finds, along with Schattschneider's analysis of policy conflicts, that the choice of the venue of the conflict determined what the conflict was about and how people were divided. Policy outcomes were determined by which of the different possible conflicts gained the dominant position and this, in turn, depended on ‘losers’ in the policy debate being able to choose the right venue for the defence of their concerns.
Journal of Common Market Studies, 2013
After the 2004 eastern enlargement, the European Union has become a terrain of competition betwee... more After the 2004 eastern enlargement, the European Union has become a terrain of competition between different memory narratives. At the core of the debate is the status of the Holocaust and its role in the identity-definition process of European societies. This article asks why similar memory debates have resulted in different policy outcomes when taking place in different institutional settings at the EU level. It finds, along with Schattschneider's analysis of policy conflicts, that the choice of the venue of the conflict determined what the conflict was about and how people were divided. Policy outcomes were determined by which of the different possible conflicts gained the dominant position and this, in turn, depended on ‘losers’ in the policy debate being able to choose the right venue for the defence of their concerns.
Journal of European Integration, 2012
A new discourse in which culture is increasingly integrated into a policy agenda dealing with inn... more A new discourse in which culture is increasingly integrated into a policy agenda dealing with innovation policy, and the fostering of growth and economic competitiveness more generally, is currently gaining ground at the EU level. Surprisingly, it is the Directorate-General for Culture, Youth and Education (DG Culture) of the European Commission that has initiated and promoted this policy agenda in an attempt to gain control over policy. The new agenda differs radically from the programmatic discourses formerly promoted by DG Culture, which laid the emphasis on the value of culture for its own sake. By identifying the factors that enabled a small, hardly influential DG to reframe culture as a key factor of economic competitiveness and to impose this programmatic solution both within the Commission and at the intergovernmental level, this article sheds light on the key dynamics of agenda-setting in the EU institutional context. It focuses, essentially, on the nature of the discourse itself, the specificities of conflict expansion strategies at the EU level and the characteristics of the EU political and institutional context.
This article aims to fill a gap in the theoretical literature on European integration by providin... more This article aims to fill a gap in the theoretical literature on European integration by providing a dynamic and multi-level explanatory framework of the dynamics of European integration -defined as the locus of governance shifts from the national to the European level. While with the development of governance approaches, the multi-actorness of the EU has been taken into account, the objective of understanding how interactions between different actors explain dynamics of integration has been abandoned. Thus, the article shows that by focusing on dynamic patterns of interaction between subnational, state and supranational actors, some core dynamics of the European integration process can be better captured. A dynamic and multi-level model of interaction, termed 'reversed intergovernmentalism', is proposed here. The model posits that governments' intervention at the EU level often takes place as a reaction to developments orchestrated by Community institutions, but that, through their reaction, states in turn foster both the process of integration and another form of EU intervention in such a way that the very nature of EU integration can also divert from initial EU agendas. Setting itself against existing theories of European integration, the argument shows that integration dynamics can only be fully understood within a process of interaction and reciprocal feedback between actors at different levels of governance.
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Papers by Annabelle Littoz-Monnet