Reframing EU Disability Policy: Expert Knowledge in the Shift from Employment to Human Rights Perspectives

At the moment of its institutionalization as a distinct category of EU policy intervention in 1996, disability policy was framed as an employment issue based on the argument that increasing employment rates would be the key to social inclusion and poverty. By the late 2000s, this strategy was more or less abandoned and replaced by a law based anti-discrimination approach. The paper will try to understand this shift by combining a sociological approach and an analysis of cognitive instruments to understand why the employment approach failed to gain institutional credibility and could be mainstreamed with little resistance into a broad anti-discrimination approach using very different types of knowledge, expertise and policy tools. The paper will closely examine the role of academic and non-academic experts and their knowledge tools in providing “evidence” for “evidence based policy making”. In the end, the economic and sociological knowledge mobilized in the employment approach, and the weak legitimacy of its proponents, failed to convince institutional gatekeepers on the potential of the contribution of disabled workers to reach Lisbon targets. Legal tools and antidiscrimination policy provided an attractive alternative as they provided powerful legitimizing symbols for EU institutions, encourage a form of political action where actual results are impossible to quantify and are therefore less constrained by the obligation to provide “evidence”.