Knowledge and Science Advice during and after COVID-19: Re-Imagining Notions of ‘Expertise’ for Postnormal Times

Abstract

As the world contents with a global pandemic, a consistent claim of national governments has been that they are simply ‘following the science’. Far from its apparent claim to neutrality, this is a deeply politicised phraseology underpinned by the problematic assumption that there is ‘one’ objective science to follow. In this paper, we do not only critique the assumed neutrality of ‘science’ as such, but we more closely look at where ‘science’ comes from. To do so, we consider the current structures of local and global expertise and ask to what extent they reproduce particular ideological and epistemic commitments that narrow the policy horizon for post-pandemic/crisis reconstruction. Through the analytical framework of wicked problems we problematise the monopoly of expertise and identify three lines of narrowness in knowledge production: disciplinary, geographic and ideological. The paper argues that this narrowness has wider consequences for addressing global challenges. In this context we assert that the COVID-19 pandemic as most immediate and urgent crisis is merely the most recent manifestation of historic, continuous and contiguous crises of modernity that are now becoming ever more extreme. This raises urgent challenges for questioning whose knowledge counts, who gets to speak, who is spoken for, and with what consequences, in the creation and implementation of expert-driven ‘evidence-based policy’.