Knowledge Inclusion in Crisis Governance: Going Beyond Expert Knowledge Through a Power Perspective

As crises unfold, they are accompanied by a spread of uncertainty – constituted both by information asymmetry and equivocality, i.e., we do not only miss the relevant information, but the one that we have is hard to make sense of. In such situations, decision-makers have knowledge demands that they look to fulfill in order to design fitting solutions or policies. While multiple sources could match that knowledge demand, expert knowledge brought forward by professional figures in a certain policy area seems to be the go-to first choice. Behind this choice, there might be reasons related to the legitimization of the decision, blame-shifting and/or avoidance, or also a genuine attempt at policy-making based on mainstream accepted “objective knowledge”, or evidence-based policy-making. However, as expert knowledge from a certain discipline is included and employed to support decision-making, other disciplines or other knowledge types presented by different societal actors are excluded. On the one hand, this represents a somewhat obvious choice. Crises are characterized by time pressure, and including diverse knowledge types might hinder swift decision-making. On the other, citizens on the user-end side of this decision-making are left puzzled, discouraged, and unseen by crisis management measures that do not reflect their life experiences. Moved by these trends, this paper focuses on the power dynamics behind knowledge inclusion in crisis governance, and how this affects the configuration of epistemic infrastructures for our democracies. Based on semi-structured interviews conducted in Belgium and through discourse analysis, this research discusses the key themes related to decision-making during the COVID-19 crisis, and how this impacted which knowledge was perceived as legitimate at different points in time during the crisis, leading to different knowledge interface configurations for crisis management. For example, understanding the crisis as slow- vs fast-burning, or as a health vs a social crisis, is assumed to have consequences on the power dynamics of knowledge inclusion and exclusion that this paper wants to investigate. The analysis will be based on the critical discourse analysis framework by Fairclough (1995), considering the three levels of text, discursive practice, and sociocultural practice.