Epistemic Community

The problem this solves is stated in the first sentence. Complex decisions need expertise, expertise means elitism of a kind and every previous attempt to institutionalize it has produced an oligarchy that cannot be removed. Marsh's answer separates knowledge from authority completely. An epistemic community is a knowledge resource only, never a governing power, and superior knowledge can only be made to work for the wellbeing of the user group if authority stays with that group and the community is forced to remain completely transparent. Three provisions hold the separation in place. Peer promotion from within the user group means standing comes from the people affected rather than from an external certifying body. Transparency and permeability mean the work and the promotions are visible and the circles are not sealed. And acceptance or rejection of any idea remains with the user group, which is what stops expertise converting into command. Shunning supplies the enforcement, since in an open system it can remove power instantly, which keeps the real power with the user group. The structural form is the concentric circle, with amplification increasing towards the centre and no control over anyone's actions attaching to it. Marsh compares the arrangement to the open software model, where lords of a fiefdom are at least replaceable, and suggests it improves on that where the community operates by consensus.

Epistemic community is an established term in international relations, coined in that sense by Peter Haas in 1992 for transnational networks of experts who shape policy through shared knowledge and causal beliefs, with the ozone regime as the founding case. Haas describes a phenomenon and asks how such networks acquire influence. Marsh uses the same words for a designed structure and asks the opposite question, how to obtain the benefit of expert networks while preventing exactly the influence Haas documents. The technocracy debate covers the same ground from the governance side, and open source governance supplies the practical model she draws on. The reversal is deliberate, since her problem is that Haas's networks work.