Our director, Annabelle Littoz-Monnet, has just received a 4 years grant from the Swiss National Science Fund to work on her new project ‘De-blackboxing the Production of Expert Knowledge in Global Governance’. With two doctoral students and a post-doctoral researcher, she will be exploring how expertise is produced and stabilized in global governance, with a specific focus on global health.

Expertise is ubiquitous in global governance. Global governance actors, in particular International Organisations, boast about the ‘evidence-based’ nature of their agendas and interventions, whether in health, climate, education or development aid. ‘Experts’, sitting in expert groups, academia, private institutes, advisory committees of all sorts, abound and produce a plethora of studies, databases and seminal papers that form the knowledge base of given issue domains. In global health, whether for assessing the efficacy of a drug, the toxicity of a substance, or what is called the ‘global burden’ of diseases, the making of global agendas relies on evidence, considered to be ‘expert’. But how is global governance expertise – the reports, studies and numbers that make the knowledge base of a field – produced and stabilized? In what sites and through what mechanisms is such expertise made? Through what processes and negotiations are certain forms of knowledge deemed expert and others dismissed?

In asking such questions, the project reveals the exchanges, iterations and concrete mechanisms that entangle politics and knowledge in the making of expert knowledge. Opening up the ‘black box’ of expertise in health governance also directly contributes to ongoing public debates, not only in refining often simplistic debates on ‘science mistrust’, but also in constructively pointing to novel avenues for more diverse and heterodox forms of knowledge to find their way into global health governance.