ABSTRACT
Many people think of expertise, as suggested by the contributions of this volume, as something that creates and maintains social order under conditions of complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. That is certainly also the case in transnational governance. Expertise is considered an important currency in the manifold attempts to create and implement rules and standards aimed at infl uencing the behavior of actors across national borders (Djelic & Sahlin-Andersson, 2006). Much public and scholarly effort has gone into demonstrating how expertise is used in these settings to underwrite claims for authority of ruling elites at the cost of countervailing demands for broader participation of those affected. It has been shown that expertise in transnational governance arrangements, as in international organizations, supports claims for authority not only through guiding the “defi nition of problems, classifi cation of social kinds, and the evaluation of social behaviors” (Miller, 2007, p. 331) but also through shaping the instruments and policies of governing (Voß & Freeman, 2016). Hence, expertise as a device to achieve legitimate ordering is often perceived as highly problematic from a democratic standpoint because it often tends to favor the materially powerful over the less powerful.
