The role of epistemic communities and expert knowledge in the European Neighbourhood Policy

Abstract

This article fills a gap in the literature on the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) by examining the role that epistemic communities play in the policy. It follows an interdisciplinary approach for categorising their role in the ENP and the use of their knowledge by policymakers. Based on the examination of two key areas of the ENP, anti-corruption and rural development, the study challenges one-dimensional assumptions, which claim that expertise and knowledge improve the technicaleconomic efficiency of EU policies. The findings of this research suggest that the knowledge of epistemic communities takes three different forms for policymakers: political/symbolic, instrumental and conceptual.

Policy learning type shifts during creeping crises: A storyboard of COVID‐19 driven learning in Belgium

“…Public organizations and policymakers leverage these epistemic policy learning processes to enhance performance, meet objectives, and align priorities in response to changes in the policy‐making context. This can lead to two learning types coming to the fore: Instrumental learning where knowledge from epistemic communities is used to adjust and finetune policy instrument settings (e.g., Goyal & Howlett, 2020; Kourtelis, 2020), or social learning where expert communities are leveraged to enhance sensemaking and facilitate deeper understandings of policy issues leading to adjustments or transformations of policy goals (e.g., Haas, 2000; Stone, 2002). With our COVID‐19 case positioned within the broader policy learning literature, in the next section, we establish why shifts in policy learning types can be expected to occur.…”

The Mundane Face of Europeanization: Norm Implementation through Expert Interactions in Georgia 2012-2020

“…In addition, few studies within the Europeanization theoretical framework have devoted their attention to the work of experts (with the exception of Wolczuk, 2009 andKourtelis, 2021) so as to explain domestic change. However, while Wolczuk´s study is mainly concerned with showing how the enactment of the EU-Ukraine Action Plan has empowered the EU-oriented sections of the Ukrainian state apparatus, it does not take a broader look at which policy environment such bureaucrats navigate within, which this dissertation aims to do.…”

“…However, while Wolczuk´s study is mainly concerned with showing how the enactment of the EU-Ukraine Action Plan has empowered the EU-oriented sections of the Ukrainian state apparatus, it does not take a broader look at which policy environment such bureaucrats navigate within, which this dissertation aims to do. Furthermore, Kourtelis (2021) is more interested in explaining why the European Commission sought expert advice in different ENP partner countries, and how those uses varied from one context to another. Enlarging our scope to include experts appears to be particularly relevant, since they often are tasked with the implementation of (complex) pieces of European legislation.…”

“…Scholarly attention to experts in the field of European foreign and security policy has been rather limited, at the exception of Howorth (2004), Adler (2008), Faleg (2012) or Cross (2014Cross ( , 2015. This is particularly prominent as regards their role in the European Neighborhood Policy, on which it exists, to this day, only one study (Kourtelis, 2021). Studying the cases of anti-corruption measures in the Eastern Partnership countries and of rural development in the Arab Mediterranean countries (AMCs), Kourtelis shows that the European Commission sought expert knowledge in order to mitigate uncertainty.…”