Navigating Epistemological Conflicts in Policy Processes: Mapping the Colliding Worlds of Sociology, Economics and Environmental Sciences in an Interdisciplinary Government Program.

In this article, we aim to further our understanding of policy conflict by understanding how civil servants navigate fundamental epistemological differences. We study this in the context of a major interdisciplinary government program in the Netherlands, in which several government agencies situated in different scientific traditions cooperate to come up with indicators for well-being. Current literature on policy conflict and epistemology heralds pragmatic attitudes and practical reason as solutions to overcoming epistemological conflicts. However, a parallel discourse speaks of a ‘post-truth society’ in which people live in ‘filter bubbles’. People find their own truths, this discourse suggests, and increasingly believe in the truthfulness of these truths. When they are confronted with counterevidence, they dismiss it as irrelevant or even fake. In other words; when we engage in public debate, we increasingly do so from different epistemological positions. This raises the question how we, if we indeed live in a post-truth society, can the kind of dialogues that conflict literature wants us to have. This project takes a look at the way in which people departing from fundamentally different epistemological positions navigate policy conflict. More specifically, it studies how civil servants working for different governmental scientific advisory agencies navigated their epistemological differences in a project in which they attempted to come up with a shared strategy to monitor citizens’ welfare in the broadest sense of the word. As the group of civil servants working on this project consists of economists, sociologists, biologists and environmental scientists, epistemological conflict is likely to occur. We take an interpretive approach, meaning we focus on civil servants’ lived experience and interpretation of the policy process.