From the IPCC to the WHO, the work of international organisations (IOs) depends on expert knowledge. Even more so in turbulent times: from climate change to public health emergencies, from famine to violent conflict, specialist advice is essential for understanding global problems and for devising policies in response to them. This does not come uncontested. During the ongoing war in Ukraine, as much as throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, specialist advisors are publicly challenged; sometimes fiercely so. A pressing question for policy-makers and academics is therefore: how does the work of international experts in turbulent times affect the resilience and legitimacy of IOs? When “crisis talk” foregrounds technical problems with technical solutions, the longer-term global inequalities and historical trajectories that have shaped a particular crisis often recede into the background. Yet this is precisely what contestation from publics and governments tends to centre on. A conceptual shift helps change perspective: whereas the notion of crisis refers to bounded periods of exceptional levels of stress, turbulence accentuates longer-term contexts rather than draw a sharp distinction between crisis and stability. A turbulence lens allows us to examine the “singling out” of crises—representing them as exceptional in time, confined to a particular space, or limited to a particular issue/area—as an effect of expert governance. After all, experts are specialists who approach problems from a particular educational background and social position. What effects does this have for IO resilience in a turbulent, unequal global order.
Expertise enables but also restricts organisational responses. How turbulence gets translated into policy is, arguably, shaped by what kinds of experts are involved and at what stage—questions that are in turn affected by institutional politics.
More work is needed to develop our conceptual and empirical understanding of these relationships, past and present. To take this exciting and proliferating literature forward, this closed workshop will invite collective discussion, aimed at producing an edited collection, in order to examine how international engagements of expertise have been and are affected by turbulence; and conceptualise the role of expertise in turbulent times.
Participation in this workshop is by invitation only. The convenor is Dr Jan Eijking.
