Epistemic Communities

Epistemic communities are networks of knowledge-based communities with an authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge within their domain of expertise. Their members share knowledge about [Page 788]the causation of social or physical phenomena in an area for which they have a reputation for competence and a common set of normative beliefs about what actions will benefit human welfare in such a domain. In particular, they are a group of professionals, often from a number of different disciplines, who share the following set of characteristics:

• 1.
  Shared principled beliefs: Such beliefs provide a value-based rationale for social action of the members of the community.
• 2.
  Shared causal beliefs or professional judgment: Such beliefs provide analytic reasons and explanations of behavior, offering causal explanations for the multiple linkages between possible policy actions and desired outcomes.
• 3.
  Common notions of validity—intersubjective, internally defined criteria for validating knowledge: These allow community members to confidently differentiate between warranted and unwarranted claims about states of the world and policies to change those states.
• 4.
  A common policy enterprise: This entails tackling a set of practices associated with a central set of problems, presumably out of a conviction that human welfare will be enhanced as a consequence.

Epistemic communities is a concept invoked by constructivist scholars of international relations to focus analytic attention on the process by which states formulate interests and reconcile differences of interest. Epistemic communities are a principal channel by which consensual knowledge about causal understandings is applied to international policy coordination and by which states may learn through processes of international cooperation.

John Ruggie introduced the term episteme, borrowed in turn from Michel Foucault, to describe the overarching perspective through which political relationships are visualized and understood during historical eras. The 1992 winter issue of International Organization on “Knowledge, Power, and International Policy Coordination” focused on the actors responsible for articulating and aggregating knowledge-based understanding in areas of security, environment, and international political economy (IPE). It also developed the now standard four-element definition of an epistemic community provided above.

By analyzing epistemic communities, constructivist scholars gained leverage on understanding the processes of social construction and collective learning. If contemporary international relations is characterized as a setting of complexity and uncertainty, as argued by constructivist scholars—particularly under contemporary circumstances of complex interdependence, increasing globalization, and the emergence of new technical issues on the international agenda with which traditional decision makers are habitually unfamiliar—then state interests are often unknown or incompletely specified. International relations then becomes a matter of applying embedded and institutionalized beliefs about the nature of problems and the appropriate means of collective response rather than the process of resolving rationally formulated state preferences as argued by many current theorists of international relations. Changes in information processing are likely to follow well-publicized shocks or crises. Only at such times are decision makers likely to recognize major anomalies and pursue new policy patterns. During subsequent, less revolutionary periods, these new doctrines or orthodoxies assume the status of taken-for-granted assumptions or dogma, which persist until called into question again by external stimuli. Because of the disjointed equilibrium nature of policy change, an evolutionary focus on institutional learning and path dependence may provide an appropriate model by which to understand the international recognition and response to global change. Such a research program may provide a better understanding of factors that influence the introduction of new policy frames, collective understandings, or doctrines as well as illuminate mechanisms of lock-in and identify those factors that may influence the degree of irreversibility of national and collective actions.

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