Legislative science advice in Chile: exploring twelve years of knowledge producers participation in environmental committee discussions

Abstract

ABSTRACT Exploring who participates in Congress committee hearings is key to assess how diverse and representative these spaces are. This article focuses on participation in Congress committees during the discussion of environmental bills in the last twelve years (2010-22) in Chile, specifically concentrating on the sub-group of knowledge producers – higher education, experts and think tanks – as committee hearings are a privileged access mechanism for science to reach the law-making process. Results show limited participation in addition to gender and geographical location biases in this sub-group of knowledge producers, raising concerns regarding the quantity and diversity of who provides evidence and research knowledge to Congress committees. These findings suggest further attention should be given to the way the participation of a more diverse group of knowledge producers to these privileged deliberative arenas can be improved.