How Does Knowledge Travel in EU Policy-Making Processes? The Case of TTIP

Expertise is a source of power and legitimacy within the EU, and has been discussed as one explanation of the relative influence of EU institutions in policy-making. This is particularly true for the European Commission. That experts employed by the Commission go beyond an instrumental role and are also involved in pre-negotiation of policy and substantiating decisions already made by Commission, indicates that knowledge resources are wielded in different ways through the policy process. However, if expertise grants influence in EU policy-making – what does it consist of, and how is it transferred in the policy-making process? This paper investigates this by asking two questions: what type of knowledge prevails in EU policy-making processes? And how does this knowledge transfer take place? While there is a growing body of studies on expertise and the Commission, very little has been written on the exchange of knowledge between the Commission and the European Parliament. Recent research has underlined the patterns of close cooperation between the Commission and the Parliament, where the former provides the latter with information. To what extent the Commission provides the premises for decisions taken in the Parliament is thus interesting from a democratic perspective, but can also be an indicator of how and when knowledge equals power. We conduct a qualitative content analysis on expert input to the TTIP negotiations, and trace expert arguments from these inputs through documents written by the European Parliament. The TTIP-process has raised a range of both technical and normative issues, which allows us to assess the type of knowledge that prevails. In addition, it has been subject to increasing politicisation and is a contested issue in the European Parliament itself, which can shed light on the conditions that influence when and how different types of knowledge is taken into account.