Expertise Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Expe rtise comes f rom the Latin experiri, which means to experience something. An expert primarily referred to someone who acquired skills or knowledge through experience. However, the meaning gradually changed to designate a specialist in a specific area.

These specific skills or knowledge defining an expert are usually ratified by a diploma. The role of experts is to provide support for decision-makers (whether in policy, business, or court) by calling on their knowledge to elucidate the consequences of actions in complex areas; for instance, the case for technical matters such as energy policy, health, or scientific policy.

The word expertise appeared in western European countries in the 14th century, first designating people called in front of court in order to help judges to decide on certain matters when common knowledge was not sufficient. This practice has led to what is known today as expert witnesses.

Modern Decision Making

Modern expertise as practiced during most of the 20th century appeared during the 19th century as the ground for rationally governing emerging nationstates. Impersonal bureaucracies covering different fields of competences were built up in order to manage all the knowledge and skills required in each specific field. Experts working for these bureaucracies had to have a diploma or training recognized by the state, allowing an expansion of state authority by setting the official trainings as standard and ensuring that all expertise throughout the territory would be practiced on similar ground. It also led to closer bonds between the scientific community and civil servants in need of expertise. Modern experts supported decision-making through evaluating possible consequences of decisions through models or scenario analysis in order to reduce uncertainty. Based on this, officials would decide. In most cases, however, the way expert reports would be framed strongly influenced the decision-makers.

In the second half of the 20th century, especially after the 1970, the position of experts in decision-making procedure was more thoroughly put into question. Groups of citizen started to argue that experts were withholding some topics from democratic decision-making, giving thus the sense that one was living in a technocracy.

Environmental concerns played a very important role in questioning the use of expertise in decision-making. The growing awareness of harms caused to the environment by new technologies and scientific applications lead to a mistrust of the public toward experts because they were perceived as the ones who were implementing these technologies and applications in everyday life. This mistrust was reinforced by social critics’ considerations on how technocracy was dispossessing people from their own life. Another reason for this skepticism was the growing sense of failure of decision-making system relying exclusively on expert knowledge. By the end of the 20th century, in several areas that had strongly relied on expertise, policy outcomes were very different from what had been expected. One example for this was agricultural modernization, promoted by most governments and international organizations in the postwar era in industrialized as well as developing countries, which hoped to increase food production but led to soil pollution and impoverishment. Other factors included major environmental catastrophes in policy area dominated by or relying strongly on expertise, such as nuclear power production.

Along with the growing awareness of environmental problems there have been new challenges on expertise. On the one hand, experts have to respond to critics asking for more democratization, and on the other, they must cope with the increasing complexity and uncertainty when dealing with societies and ecosystems. Rather than suppressing expertise, these new challenges have contributed to a proliferation and diffusion of expertise. Questioning of expertise often happens after scrutiny of expert reports, revealing inconsistencies or errors, and comes along with founded alternative propositions. This generalized the practice of counter-expertise, which has become a standard in policy procedures. This does not denote a tendency toward obscurantism, but rather a diffusion of scientific knowledge in broader parts of society. This corresponds to what some authors have named a social distribution of expertise, which has been spreading since the end of the 20th century.

The complexity of some matters, such as ecosystem management, results in a rise of expertise because of the number of scientific disciplines involved in such projects. For instance, the restoration of wetland habitats requires the competences of civil engineers, botanists, or hydrobiologists, each of whom might provide very different insights on a same problem, thus opening room for democratic debates.

New practices of expertise also tend to go back to the former understanding of the word and rehabilitate experience. Accordingly, a greater place is given to lay knowledge (or indigenous knowledge, in the context of development aid) within decision making. Lay and indigenous knowledge are specific to particular contexts or practices. These inputs are increasingly integrated in expertise, either because they are considered as a part or as a counterpart of expertise. They enable covering aspects of a problem that are not tackled by scientific disciplines, such as the affective, religious, or symbolic value of a place affected by a project.

Bibliography:

Karin Backstrand “Civic Science for Sustainability: Reframing the Role of Experts, Policy-Makers and Citizens in Environmental Governance,” Global Environmental Politics 3(4) (Massachussets Institute of Technology, 2003);
Frank Fischer, Citizens, Experts, and the Environment: The Politics of Local Knowledge (Duke University Press, 2000).