The Place of Knowledge in Legitimising Global Governance: Responsible Cosmopolitan States and the Metacoordination View

Epistemic authority based on expert or scientific knowledge has been said to constitute a crucial pillar of political legitimacy on the global level, or of the “liberal world order” itself (Sending 2016; Zürn 2018, Haas 2023). From the point of view of political theory, this is a blessing and a curse at once. On the one hand, to the extent that this claim is factually correct, it opens up an interesting site for the study of the conceptual dynamic of legitimacy, such as the relationship between sociological and normative legitimacy, between its voluntarist and epistemic grounds (Peter 2023), or the applicability of the metacoordination conception of legitimacy (given its sensitiveness to context and the availability of reasons, eg Buchanan 2013, 2018; Maffettone and Ulaş 2019; Scherz 2021). Not least, the site is politically pertinent insofar as the contours of (the possibility of) global governance (GG) with a cosmopolitan bent are ever-shifting. On the other hand, it is easy to ignore certain issues affecting the relationship between epistemic and political authority which have been discussed in detail with respect to the nation-state (eg. Moore 2017; Pamuk 2022). In this paper, we address two such concerns and show what kind of theoretical approach might help mitigate them. First, in order to uphold the legitimising narrative, epistemic authority must operate on the assumption of certainty. However, the engine of scientific progress is fallibility, or foundational doubt about “what we know”. There is thus a self-undermining element which is constitutive of epistemic authority but which seems to be overlooked by GG scholars. Second, to the extent that we want global governance to remain within broadly democratic limits, there cannot not arise a tension between the democratic and expertise-based component of global governance. The solution on which scholars seem to overlap, namely public scrutiny, judgment, and contestation within a broadly deliberative setting, is presently impracticable on the global level. This is turn makes the relationship between the components unstable and tilted towards expertocratic rule. We suggest turning attention to the concept of a responsible cosmopolitan state (RCS) as an actor in global politics (Beardsworth, Shapcott and Brown 2019; Schmidt 2022). Interestingly, RCSs need reliable complex knowledge, including moral knowledge, to perform their role, and as such connect smoothly to the epistemically-based argument for political authority. To complement this theoretical move, we provide an illustrative case study of the space community, that is, a community of scholars, scientists, tech professionals and (current or former) policy-makers who explore the possibilities of the use of advanced technologies in space while pointing out its transformative cosmopolitan potential. Examples include planetary defence, space mining, orbital debris removal, or spacecraft propulsion (including the occasional uptake of these topics by real-world policy-makers). Also, the fallibility vs. infallibility problem of modern science can be addressed more effectively in a thusly delimited setting. Within this framework, we finally suggest that the metacoordination concept of political legitimacy can both accommodate the epistemic justification of global authority and remain flexible and context-sensitive.