Mobilizing and Contesting Epistemic Authority: Evidence Cultures in European Parliament Environmental Policymaking (Committee Discourses in the 9th Legislature)

Recent years have been marked by a growing environmental backlash in EU politics, particularly visible in the highly politicised debates surrounding the implementation of the EU Green Deal, which began around the mid-term of the European Parliament’s (EP) ninth legislature (Bocquillon, 2024). In this context, this paper explores the epistemic dynamics underpinning such backlash, looking at whether and how policymakers (especially political groups and the EU Commission) articulated and contested different epistemic authorities - as well and their function - in their daily legislative work. To do so, I draw from, and adapt the concept of evidence culture (Bandola-Gill et al., 2024; Straßheim, 2024) in order to capture how EP’s political actors participate in stabilizing or destabilizing mainstream evidence-based narratives through their interventions. More specifically, the paper focuses on committee-level data and traces the evolution of epistemic authority claims and their perceived functions throughout discussions surrounding specific policy files. By doing so this research also seeks to examine whether, and in what ways, traditional epistemic authorities are challenged by specific political parties (Newman & Clarke, 2018; Ylä-Anttila, 2018), and how such challenges unfold alongside what has been described as an increasing expertisation—and even scientisation—of governance (T. Christensen & Lægreid, 2022).