PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

102
(1992:3) comprehensive definition of the concept of epistemic communities, presented in
the 1992 special issue of International Organization, is worth quoting in full here:
An epistemic community is a network of professionals with recognized expertise and
competence in a particular domain and an authoritative claim to policy-relevant
knowledge within that domain or issue-area. Although an epistemic community may
consist of professionals from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds, they have (1) a
shared set of normative and principled beliefs, which provide a value-based rationale
for the social action of community members; (2) shared causal beliefs, which are
derived from their analysis of practices leading or contributing to a central set of
problems in their domain and which then serve as the basis for elucidating the
multiple linkages between possible policy actions and desired outcomes; (3) shared
notions of validity – that is, intersubjective, internally defined criteria for weighing
and validating knowledge in the domain of their expertise; and (4) a common policy
enterprise – that is, a set of common practices associated with a set of problems to
which their professional competence is directed, presumably out of the conviction that
human welfare will be enhanced as a consequences.
In developing the notion of discursive frameworks, however, I am in fact taking a
very different, almost opposite approach from Haas and his colleagues. Contrary to
political scientists who focus on tracing the influence of these so-called “epistemic
communities”, my framework analysis focuses on the structural rationales underlying
material decisions. Later chapters of my study then identify particular stakeholders (such
as the European Round Table of Industrialists) who have influenced Commission
thinking on infrastructure issues, yet these have done so not so much – as is expected
from epistemic communities – through consensual means or impeccable rational
argumentation but rather through concrete political and material forms of influence. I
also argue that it is precisely the lack of a consistent policy approach which defines
Community policy-making in the area of transport. For example, the Directorate General
for Transport and Energy is most certainly home to somewhat different norms, causal