Public Management as Interagency Cooperation: Testing Epistemic Community Theory at the Domestic Level

Abstract

Interagency cooperation—like international cooperation—occurs infrequently. Peter Haas refined the concept of epistemic community to explain international cooperation. I import the concept from the international to the domestic level and test some hypotheses of epistemic influence using a case study of cooperation among resource management agencies in California. Epistemic communities are like-minded networks of professionals whose authoritative claim to consensual knowledge provides them with a unique source of power in decision-making processes. Ecologists make up an epistemic community distinct from those in other life sciences because they study systems of relationships in the natural world rather than analyze biotic parts in isolation from the whole. Since ecological systems transcend agency jurisdictions, ecologists view interagency relationships much differently than do other agency officials. Ecologists accept interdependence among public agencies, and even welcome it, while agency executives generally seek autonomy from one another in order to provide stability and certainty for their organizational units. Agency executives may, however, adopt an epistemic community's logic of interdependence and cooperation if it helps them cope with uncertainty in their organizational environments. Since contextual factors shape epistemic influence, the theory of international cooperation developed by Peter Haas needs to be modified when applied within the United States to account for the different context of public agencies, particularly the laws shaping agency behavior.