One or more types of policy advice? Exploring the technical and political sides of expert advice through a typological approach

Almost thirty years ago P. Weingart registered the paradox underlying the contemporary usage of scientific knowledge in policymaking: "scientification […] produces its opposite, the politicisation of science" (1999: 158). The nature of the link between scientification of policy and politicisation of science remains a crucial topic in the research agenda on the usage of knowledge in the policy process. Previous research has shown that individuals and organisations swing between "technocratic and political modes of accountability" (Bandola-Gill 2021) to legitimise their role as experts in policy advice. The paper aims to further our understanding of the interaction between these two "modes" by broadening the scope of enquiry to the expert networks supporting policymaking. The concept of policy advisory systems (PAS) is particularly suitable for analysing how expert networks assume different configurations in the various policy subsystems and across geo-institutional boundaries (Craft & Halligan 2017). In the past decades, the research on PAS has identified two major development trajectories (Craft & Howlett 2013): the externalisation of policy advice, by which the supply of expert advice is extended well beyond the perimeter of public bodies and publicly funded research, and the politicisation of PAS, by which experts are increasingly aware of the "political use" (Daviter 2015) of the knowledge they supply to decision makers. As a result, PAS are becoming hybrid multistakeholder processes (Krick 2015), where different types of expertise (scientific, professional, experiential) are mixed up and where the boundary between policy advice and policy advocacy are blurred. To shed light on the otherwise vague concept of hybridity, we will develop a typology of PAS inspired by the typology of decision-making arenas proposed by W.T. Gormley Jr. (1986). We hypothesise that the complexity and the salience of the issue at stake are the variables which help explain the different mixes of technical and political considerations that characterise each typical PAS. We will test our model by applying it to the analysis of a case study of the PAS that supported the definition of the EU Green Taxonomy, i.e. the classification of economic activities that underpins the new EU regulation of public and private sustainable investments. An expert advisory board, the Platform on Sustainable Finance (PSF), was formed by the European Commission (EC) in 2020, bringing together participants from public financial institutions, private financial and non-financial sectors, lobbying groups, NGOs, and research centres. The Taxonomy gained some notoriety in 2021 when the EC – refusing to act on the advice of the PSF – decided to include gas and nuclear energy among the sustainable investments in its Complementary Climate Delegated Act. To legitimise its decision, the EC relied on the advice of its in-house research group, the Joint Research Centre, which starkly opposed the conclusions reached by the PSF. Analysing the case study through the lens of the typology of PAS will help explain the diachronic evolution of this expert network from a technical, low-conflict advisory system to an environment dominated by polarised expertise and the concern for the political implications of policy advice.