Expert Authority and Regional Governance - a Comparative Analysis of the Arctic Council and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea

We combine international relations and meta-organization theory (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2008; Berkowitz et al., 2022) to explore expert authority as a key feature of global and regional governance actors (Barnett & Finnemore, 2004). We are particularly interested in how these actors maintain expert authority and how they sustain their influence on their organizational environment in the long term. We argue that expert authority is closely linked to the level of expertise, the way knowledge is produced, and the way it is disseminated in the respective organizational environment.

To put this research interest into practice, we compare two meta-organizations from the field of international ocean governance in terms of their respective levels of expert authority: the Arctic Council (AC) and the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES). Arguably, knowledge and expertise are vital to both meta-organizations, and both display expert authority in the governance system. At the same time, however, there are also differences. To name just two examples: ICES is responsible for producing scientific advice for its member states and other ‘clients’ on request, while the demand and political transfer of the scientific recommendations produced by the AC takes place directly within the organization. Or another example: While ICES’ knowledge production is based almost exclusively on the natural sciences, the AC’s scientific output is based not only on scientific findings, but also on indigenous knowledge contributed by indigenous groups within the organization. Our analysis draws on a wide range of empirical material - from secondary literature to published reports and interviews with the experts involved.