Neoliberal Knowledge: The Decline of Technocracy and the Weakening of the Montreal Protocol<sup>*</sup>
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective. The turn to participatory, stakeholder modes of governance has been accompanied by the legitimization of a new “particularist knowledge regime” emphasizing the knowledge claims made by private interests and local voices. It has also tended to de‐legitimize the ways of knowing that had characterized central state governance, namely, state expertise based on general welfare analytics such as cost‐benefit analysis. This turn away from state expertise, what we call the “anti‐technocratic consensus,” while stemming from democratic motivations, may actually make environmental governance less democratic. Method. We examine the problems that arise from the abandonment of general welfare economic analytics and technical expertise—the anti‐technocratic consensus—through a specific case study: the recent handling of “critical use exemptions” to the ban on methyl bromide under the Montreal Protocol, a treaty that mandates the elimination of methyl bromide in order to protect the ozone layer. We show that decisionmakers specifically rejected general welfare analytics as a basis of regulatory action in favor of a particularist form of analytics based on measuring market disruption. Results. This case illustrate how the de‐legitimization of technical expertise can weaken the effectiveness of an environmental agreement in meeting its regulatory mandate. Critics have often criticized technical expertise as supporting the economic status quo. However, in the case of methyl bromide and the Montreal Protocol, technical experts using general welfare analytics represented a challenge to U.S. regulatory officials who supported industrial interests and their request for significant exemptions to the ban. Conclusion. The legitimization of a particularist knowledge regime opens up policy making to domination by private interests playing the stakeholder game. Stakeholder input and particularist knowledges are important to democratic decision making. However, technical expertise, despite all its weaknesses, is a form of knowledge that remains necessary to the protection of the environment and public health.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it