Knowledge and Science Advice During and After COVID-19: Rethinking ‘Expertise’ in Post-Normal Times

Abstract

As the world contends with a global pandemic, a consistent claim of national governments has been that they are ‘following the science’. In this paper, I look more closely at where the ‘science’ comes from. To do so, I consider the current structures of science advice and the extent to which they reproduce particular ideological and epistemic commitments that narrow the policy horizon. This raises the inevitable question, central to this paper, of what and whose knowledge is or should be sought, which is being side-lined through the choice of particular framings and discourses, and with what consequences for the creation and implementation of ‘evidence-based policy’ during a pandemic and its aftermath. Through the analytical framework of Miranda Fricker’s epistemic injustice, I problematize the expertise that has guided the response to COVID-19 along two lines of narrowness: disciplinary/epistemic and social/experiential. Counteracting a monolithic culture of expertise requires tackling the structural inequalities in the systems of knowledge production to diversify the social and epistemological foundations of science. Drawing on post-normal science (PNS) theory, I suggest that the expertise needed to respond to the challenges of a post-COVID world is one that embraces greater pluralism, avoids groupthink, challenges the accepted orthodoxy and helps us revert old models and rigid path dependencies that so often neglect the lived realities and demands of those left behind. This can only be realized by overcoming epistemic injustice and cultivating the virtue of epistemic democracy in all of society’s institutions.