Experts or Advocates? The Role of Scientists in early European Environmental Policy

Scientific expertise is a constitutive element of modern environmental policy making, both as a source of knowledge and as a source of legitimacy. Such legitimacy is based on the myth of the independent expert, who judges by the rational standards of science alone. However, an increasingly politicized expertise has been crucial already in the establishment of environmentalism as a political concept in the late 1960s, when scientists called for political action on global ecological issues. This paper explores the role scientific experts played in the emergence of an environmental policy of the European Communities (EC) starting with the first environmental action programme of 1973. My core argument is that the development of an environmental policy went hand in hand with a politicization of expertise. When establishing the policy, it was indispensible for the Commission to get expert scientists on board, to deal with the extremely technical matters, such as creating common environmental terminologies and standards. Involving environmental experts in the EC also seemed useful from the perspective of a neofunctional logic, in order to gain allies for the new EC policy. As EC policy-making branched out towards more concrete and controversial issues, the Commission slowly came to realize that experts were frequently also advocates and hard to control. Drawing on cases of bird protection and nuclear power, the paper will discuss examples of the politics of expertise and the emergence of governance through expert committees.