You are cordially invited to the authors workshop Interrogating Expertise: Policy Experts, Policy Knowledge and the Emergence of Non-Traditional Knowledge Systems to be held September 5-6, 2022 and hosted by the College of Public Policy, Hamad Bin Khalifa University (HBKU), Education City, Doha, Qatar.

Call for Papers

The creation, generation and mobilization of knowledge and its relationship to power are key components of policy making and longtime subjects of interest in the field. There have been many criticisms that excessive technocratic perspectives and unfettered expert advice have overshadowed democratic participation, for example, while concerns about lack of evidence and evidence-informed policy-making are also common. The recent COVID-19 pandemic, for example, deepened the challenges of balancing experts and democracy. It sharpened even further the problems of compliance, populism, agnotology and a distrust of government and the health profession, on the one hand, and the many successful evidence-inspired and expert driven pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical interventions, on the other. Concepts such as ‘policy advisory systems’, epistemic communities, and ‘knowledge creep’, among others have been borrowed from other fields or developed in order to help capture the dynamics of knowledge and power in policy-making and clarify these relationships. However, some issues in the contemporary era also transcend these traditional issues with ‘old’ knowledge systems and presage new issues around policy-making processes ‘beyond expertise’ in which phenomena such as algorithmic decision-making compete with traditional professional communities in the prioritization, design, enactment, implementation and evaluation of policies. These trends and developments equally require analysis among and across policy sectors if the impacts of these developments are to inform both future scholarship and policy practice and papers on both traditional issues and new emerging challenges are the subject of this workshop.

Paper proposals addressing these themes should be sent to: djarvis@hbku.edu.qa

Timeline

·       Not less than 500 word paper outlines due – May 20, 2022

·       Paper Acceptances & Programme Development – May 31,2022

·       Final Papers due and Draft Programme Circulated – September 1, 2022

Publication Outcomes

Papers accepted to the workshop may be included in a themed issue of Policy and Society. All papers are subject to double blind-peer review. Further information about the journal can be found at https://academic.oup.com/policyandsociety.

Financial Support

Financial support (inclusive of return economy class airfares, accommodation and meals) is available for a limited number of participants.

Workshop Committee

Giliberto Capano, University of Bologna, Italy

Michael Howlett, Simon Fraser University, Canada

Darryl S.L. Jarvis, HBKU, Qatar

Leslie A. Pal, HBKU, Qatar

M. Ramesh, National University of Singapore

Subsequent GDN Workshops

Governing Policy Risk (2023), University of Bologna, Italy,

Governing Policy Design (2024), Vancouver, Canada