The lesson learned from COVID-19 and the climate crisis is not to let experts decide on policies: a response to Robert C. Schmidt

Abstract

This is a response to the commentary by Robert C. Schmidt in this journal, in which the author suggests that for specific problems such as climate change or the current pandemic, decisions on policies should be made by scientific experts rather than by politicians. We argue that such ideas, which were brought up in the late 1960s and reconsidered more recently, do not take sufficient account of the nature of science politics, and their interaction. Furthermore, problem structures and resulting challenges for science and politics are not similar, but essentially different between climate change and the pandemic. Therefore, different solutions to the problems are required. There is a need to improve politics’ reliable recourse to scientific evidence in many cases. Yet, giving scientific experts such a strong position in decision-making ignores that most decisions, even if based on the state of scientific evidence (if there is such an uncontroversial state of evidence), ultimately require genuinely political choices about trade-offs of interests and normative issues that neither can nor should be made by scientists. Therefore, putting Schmidt’s proposal into practice would not solve the existing problems but instead create new problems.

The Role of Scientific Expertise in COVID-19 Policy-making: Evidence from Four European Countries

“…In all four countries these advisory bodies were closely connected to governments, due to their funding and organizational position, although they seemed to be less autonomous from government in Germany and Italy than in the Netherlands and the UK. Advice from such experts’ panels has turned out to be an important precondition for effective COVID-policies, as politicians can less easily deviate from such authoritative advice (Toeller et al, 2021 ).…”