Boundary-making in the International Organization: Public Engagement Expertise at the OECD

Abstract

Science and Technology Studies (STS) have shown that the production of public expertise is central to understand the functioning of modern democracies. Since Bruno Latour argued that the modern constitution is based on the allocation of work between the representation of nature and the political representation, and a perpetual purification work to make this boundary hold (Latour 1993); many works have explored the role of expertise in the production of this dichotomy. Sheila Jasanoff's detailed analysis of the expertise institutions in the United States, for instance, has displayed how the construction of objective science within public agencies is a component of a constitutional ordering allocating powers and responsibilities, defining individual and collective identities, and stabilizing a shared imaginary of science as a way of dealing with the constrains of an adversarial regulatory system (Jasanoff 1987, 1990, 2005).