Discourse Analysis and European Union Politics by Kennet Lynggaard

Author:Kennet Lynggaard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137393265
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK

Expertise in EU Policy-Making

It has long been claimed that expertise inform policy-making on the organisational, national and European level, particularly in decision-making environments characterised by uncertainty and complexity (Fischer 1990; Richardson 2006; Lynggaard 2008). A situation characterised by uncertainty and a lack of knowledge about, for instance, the problem-solving capacity of a particular policy instrument can pave the way for analytical ideas based on experiences predicating something about future developments and, as such, can serve to reduce complexity and uncertainty.

In a transnational EU context, policy coordination may take place in epistemic communities, which can be seen as particularly—though not exclusively—coining analytical ideas and thus expertise. Epistemic communities are networks of experts that supply ideas to the policy process (Hass 1992). Central to such networks are that the ideas supplied are based on shared causal beliefs among the network members, and that such causal beliefs are based on an analysis of practices as well as a shared conception of the processes through which ideas are validated and invalidated. Ideas coined among experts thus tend to be assessed in terms of their technical feasibility and capability of implementation as opposed to their political viability in a particular context (Richardson 2006: 7). Epistemic communities haves been identified in and shown to have an impact on such areas as the making of the EMU (Verdun 1999; Kaelberer 2004), European Security and Defence Policy (Howorth 2004), competition policy (van Waarden and Drahos 2002), environmental policy (Zito 2001), transport policy (Schot and Shipper 2011) and the regulation of biotechnology (Salter and Jones 2005) to mention a few. Yet, when broadening the view on expertise to mean the advancement of analytical ideas in policy-making, then expertise is potentially coined by a wide range of actors. That is, expertise may be exercised by various individual and collective agents (some of which are suggested above) at different points in time, and it may be exercised individually, simultaneously or successively (for a similar point, see Radaelli 1999: 768ff).

A prominent example of the production and usage of expertise within and around the Commission can be illustrated by developments in the CAP. Expertise has played a role ever since the early developments of the CAP (Germond 2014), but has possibly come to play an even more important role in the 1990s and early 2000s (Lynggaard 2006). In-house Commission expertise and outside inputs of expertise at least in part pushed for the MacSharry reform in the early 1990s. The failure of past policies including the limited success of two reform attempts in the 1980s (in 1984 and 1988) and developments in agricultural production data and CAP spending had, by the late 1980s/early 1990s, made problems of surplus production, budget pressure, and the uneven distribution of funds even more evident (Moyer and Josling 2002: 103ff; Patterson 1997: 154). Very aware of the high political salience of reforming the CAP, the Commissioner for Agriculture (Ray MacSharry) established a group in the early 1990s of high-ranking officials from the DG Agriculture, which elaborated a radical reform

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