Faith in Scientific Expertise and the Organizational Distribution of Knowledge: Climate Change Policy Networks in Germany and Japan

The complex phenomenon of climate change and the way climate change is tackled through effective policies raises complex epistemological and practical problems. Accordingly, faith in the power of expertise and knowledge is a crucial condition for progresses and effective solutions in climate change policy-making. Starting out from these initial assumptions, our paper empirically investigates how scientific knowledge is shared within an organizational ecology of policy actors, and how trust in expertise is constituted and retained in different social and political systems by comparing climate change policy networks in Germany and Japan. Externalization of expertise is a common trend in advanced democratic countries, but sometimes the multiplicity of knowledge causes conflicts and contradictions. These conflicts might have the consequence that trust in experts can be damaged. Political actors are influenced by their political affiliation and interest camp, and the question arises whether they can find other common knowledge bases apart from their own? These might depend on national contexts such as political culture, institutional differentiation within science systems, and discursive traditions by which science and politics interact. In our study, we trace and compare the historical development of the organizational ecology (including not only governmental scientific institutions but also private think tanks, business corporations/associations, and civil society organizations) that participates in knowledge production and distribution in both countries. Then we investigate how expertise is shared and how the information networks are structured. Our data are based on document analysis and expert interviews. The data for policy networks consist of face-to-face surveys with organizational experts collected between 2012 and 2013 in both countries. The findings show, that the German policy network consist of a far great variety of expert organizations which, nonetheless, succeed in finding common grounds and consensus because of specific historical and institutional conditions in its climate change policy development.