Independent Experts in Public Mission: Role Distance and the Production of Political Knowledge

When experts from think tanks or academia are temporarily hired by government agencies for public missions, how do they negotiate their temporary role of the government-mandated expert with their lasting role of the proclaimed “independent” expert? I use Goffman's concept of role distance (where an actor takes on a role while signaling that he or she does not fully embrace it) to analyze 12 interviews with experts hired by the UN Security Council to produce public reports. It shows that they face conflictive role expectations and that they practice role distance in response at all steps of knowledge production, such as in the gathering of data and the formulation of outputs. The result is a negotiated knowledge that is not directly negotiated between experts and policy makers, but "within" the experts to balance conflictive role expectations. Purpose of this paper is to introduce an overlooked but useful concept to study the relation between experts and policy makers and show how it allows accounting for fluid arrangements between the two in a context where governments often outsource political knowledge production.