Edinburgh researcher recognised for outstanding paper on the legitimacy of experts in policy
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Dr Justyna Bandola-Gill has been awarded Evidence & Policy journal’s 2021 Carol Weiss Prize, which recognises outstanding early career contributors to the journal, for her research paper on the legitimacy of experts in policy.
The research by Dr Bandola-Gill, a Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Social and Political Science, looks at what makes experts legitimate in the eyes of policymakers.
Expert legitimacy – driven by contradictions
Dr Bandola-Gill explored the work of experts producing global poverty measures and offered a theorisation expertise as a navigation of technocracy and politics.
She pointed to challenges involved in working with policymakers as ‘expert legitimacy is driven by contradictions – experts have to be responsive to policymakers’ needs but, at the same time, they cannot be too close to politics.’
Her paper was commended by the awards panel for ‘the skilful way in which it applied social theory to high quality empirical data to provide conceptually-rich insights about the interplay between evidence and policy.’
Constant navigation between knowledge and politics
The paper - The legitimacy of experts in policy: navigating technocratic and political accountability in the case of global poverty governance - argues that we should treat this paradox of expertise as a legitimate and valuable object of research - rather than a problem - to help better understand the knowledge and policy relationship.
It shows how, by focusing only on the political value of their work, experts risk being seen by policymakers as too political to be legitimate. But, by focusing too much on their scientific knowledge or area of expertise, they risk being seen as too detached or ‘academic’ to be useful.
Read the research paper
As part of winning the prize, Dr Bandola-Gill’s paper has been made open access until March 2022.
A blog summary
You can learn more about this prize-winning research in a post from Dr Bandola-Gill's on the journal’s blog in April 2021:
Read – Walking the tightrope: expert legitimacy as a navigation between technocracy and politics
More about the Carol Weiss Prize
The prize was created in memory of Professor Carol Weiss, the first North American Editor of Evidence & Policy and a pioneer in the field, and it will be awarded every two years.