Bargaining for Evidence in a Hybrid Forum? the Case of an Expert Group Chaired By the European Commission.

In the area of policymaking, we observe that decisions are increasingly base on knowledge/evidence gained through debates in hybrid advisory organisations. This knowledge is used to ideally fade risks and uncertainties by calculating the risks involved in the final decision and by this to legitimize political decisions by delivering hard-facts in the argumentation (e.g. as “evidence-based-policy-making“). A consequence of these decision-making processes is the authoritative implementation of knowledge and direct application into the context of everyday-life. Such a political-decision-context often is a very specific situation, in which traditional mono-disciplinary scientific knowledge commonly is not precise enough, because usually it is produced to be universally valid and bases on certain assumptions. What is needed in such a context of real life application is socially robust knowledge.

As a response to that demand, the mode of knowledge production is changing. Instead of linear-ordered knowledge-production, hybrid forums of heterogeneous actors are becoming important. These actors are debating and bargaining solutions to a problem and are co-constructing contextualized knowledge as decision-making-base for the specific context of application. This discursive process of knowledge production is not only affected by different forms of knowledge from heterogeneous actors, it is also influenced by heterogeneous world of relevancies of the actors (interests, targets, practices, experiences…).

This study assesses and analyses with a multiple triangulation how an Expert Group of the European Commission develops knowledge within a transdisciplinary- and transnational expert-discourse.
Based on multiple data sources my study is offering information on how evidence is produced in decision-making within such hybrid forums, e.g. important factors, processes and structures influencing political knowledge-systems.