This article builds on ignorance studies to revisit how we understand the role of expertise in international policymaking. A fundamental component of ignorance is concealing what you know. For experts, risk ignorance is a strategic resource when the policymaking process becomes a contested exchange. This article covers IMF lending programmes in Europe in 2008–13 with a special focus on Greece. Empirical data is drawn from policy documents. I find that risk ignorance at the IMF resulted from a joint process of ‘private alteration’ and ‘public obfuscation’: the alteration of normal scenarios of debt sustainability in private negotiations worked in tandem with the obfuscation of programme risks in the public stage. The empirical contribution of this article is to show that the ‘failure’ of the IMF programme for Greece can be reconceptualized as ‘success’. The immediate goal of the programme was to bailout Greece’s creditors and avoid the breakup of European monetary institutions. In this respect, the programme was successful. But success came at a huge cost for Greece. Analytically, this article suggests that knowledge procurement based on empirical fact‐gathering is not always the ultimate goal of international organizations and the communities of experts working within them.
This chapter attempts a broad analytical compass for surveying the main actors, institutions and instruments governing our world. Despite its seeming ubiquity, governance is a relatively new expression in this context suggestive both of new modes of exercising power, and an enhanced focus on ordering a world undergoing rapid change. Speaking generally governance may be understood as the exercise of power organized around multiple dispersed sites operating through transnational networks of actors, public as well as private, and national, regional as well as local. The turn to governance is often held to be coeval if not conjoined to profound changes in the meaning and nature of government associated with the ascendancy of 'neo-liberal' ideas and precepts. This has had significant implications for how governance tends to be understood. Critics associate it directly with the changing role of states in the economic and social sphere.
This descriptive chapter identifies the available narratives on the evolution of sovereign debt across the four historical clusters we have chosen to examine and show how this volume updates and complements existing research. Consistent with the diplomatic framework outlined in the introduction, we survey patterns of similarities and differences between clusters in terms of risk analysis, legal clauses, bargaining power, and conceptions of state responsibility. Our periodization will not surprise the reader inasmuch it broadly conforms to the conventional reading that the Great Depression and the collapse of the Bretton Woods system in 1971 were two critical junctures that deeply altered the form of creditor–debtor interactions in the sovereign sector. Yet, as we show below, this volume also makes substantial amendments to this conventional story. First, our focus on colonial history from the nineteenth-century building of empires to postcolonial transitions allows to diversify and identify discrepancies in the available narratives on each periods. Second, our attention to colonialism leads us to pay sustained attention to debt disputes arising during the postcolonial transitions of the 1960s–70s, a cluster of defaults which has not received sufficient scholarly attention. As explained below, our proposal to jointly analyse the historical threads of sovereign debt and colonialism allows for revisiting certain well-known cases of debt disputes and to examine previously unknown or little known events. The last section of this chapter presents the general organization of the volume as well as the list of selected case studies.
How do regulators regulate with metrics? This article offers a rhetorical approach to this question, using early U.S. securities regulation as a case in point, and reliance on credit ratings as empirical illustration. A rhetorical approach challenges economists’ claim that metrics are limited to providing technical guidance to policy formation: the fact is that the role of metrics in regulation can be appreciated only if technical and social aspects are considered together. A rhetorical perspective also fills an important gap in sociological studies of “co-production” that claim that procedural deliberation enhances the legitimacy of regulation but underemphasize the role of quantification when procedural rules are lacking. This article suggests that rhetoric is not suboptimal or irrational but a vital form of deliberation in contexts of uncertainty, when decision-making requires some amount of persuasion outside a procedural context. I observe that metrics can be a powerful vehicle of rhetorical change. Two components of rhetorical metrics are highlighted. First are cognitive clutches, or the capacity to shift prevailing models of attention. Second are actionable arguments, the capacity to embed cognitive deviance into a compelling argument for change. I conclude with reflections on the legacy of rhetorical decisions on current policy debates.
Experts have been increasingly targeted in public debate by accusations of fake science. These accusations suggest that experts may intentionally falsify their knowledge. Such accusations overemphasize lying compared to more subtle forms of producing questionable expertise under pressure. We show how accusations of fake science can be connected to ongoing debates in the sociology of expertise on "strategic ignorance". This research allows us to translate vernacular discourse on falsified expertise into a more rigorous analytic framework. Recent controversies surrounding economic austerity plans and the health risks of glyphosate are used as empirical illustrations.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.