Over the course of the previous two decades, political scientists have become increasingly interested in the relationship between international politics and global trade. Much of the literature on this topic centers on the effects of a hegemonic distribution of power on commerce. Hegemonic stability theorists argue that hegemony is a necessary condition for the existence of a liberal economic order and that in the absence of a hegemon, a liberal international economy is particularly difficult to establish and maintain. However, a growing number of theoretical and empirical critiques have been leveled against the gemonic stability theory, and the issue of whether hegemony helps shape patterns of global trade continues to be the topic of heated debate.

The principles and norms adopted by the regime governing food aid in the 1950s have changed substantially during the subsequent three decades. Explaining the changes necessarily includes analyzing the efforts of an international epistemic community consisting of economic development specialists, agricultural economists, and administrators of food aid. According to the initial regime principles, food aid should be provided from donors' own surplus stocks, should supplement the usual commercial food imports in recipient countries, should be given under short-term commitments sensitive to the political and economic goals of donors, and should directly feed hungry people. As a result of following these principles, the epistemic community and other critics argued, food aid often had the adverse effects of reducing local production of food in recipient countries and exacerbating rather than alleviating hunger. The epistemic community (1) developed and proposed ideas for more efficiently supplying food aid and avoiding “disincentive” effects and (2) pushed for reforms to make food aid serve as the basis for the recipients' economic development and to target it at addressing long-term food security problems. The ideas of the international epistemic community have increasingly received support from international organizations and the governments of donor and recipient nations. Most recently, they have led to revisions of the U.S. food aid program passed by Congress in October 1990 and signed into law two months later. As the analysis of food aid reform demonstrates, changes in the international regime have been incremental, rather than radical. Moreover, the locus for the change has shifted from an American-centered one in the 1950s to a more international one in recent decades.

In the early 1980s, when the debt crisis threatened to disrupt the pattern of trade and investment flows that had evolved since the end of World War II, central bankers faced the challenge of maintaining public confidence in the commercial banks that were at the heart of the international payments system. Although the central bankers agreed that a run on one international bank could lead to a global catastrophe requiring massive government intervention, they did not initially agree on a policy project to strengthen the international payments system. In analyzing central bank cooperation and the processes leading to the adoption of a single international capital adequacy standard, this article argues that agreement on a uniform standard was due to a combination of political power and shared purpose on the part of the United States and Britain. While the article does not argue that the central bankers were an epistemic community as defined in this issue, it further explores the conditions under which epistemic communities are likely to arise.

Although British and U.S. officials held markedly different views during the initial negotiations for a postwar economic order, they were able to reach watershed trade and monetary agreements that set the terms for the reestablishment of an open world economy. How does one explain this Anglo-American settlement reached at Bretton Woods in 1944? Structural explanations, based on underlying configurations of power and interests, are helpful but leave important issues unresolved. Given the range of postwar economic “orders” that were possible and potentially consistent with underlying structures and also given the divergent and conflicting views both within and between the two governments, why did the economic order take the particular shape it took? This article argues that agreement was fostered by a community of British and American economists and policy specialists who embraced a set of policy ideas inspired by Keynesianism and who played a critical role in defining government conceptions of postwar interests, shaping the negotiating agenda (for example, shifting the focus of negotiations from trade issues, which were highly contentious, to monetary issues, about which there was an emerging “middle ground” created by Keynesian ideas), and building coalitions in support of the postwar settlement.

Analyses of international policy cooperation are often marked by analytic and empirical confusion. First, by largely treating cooperation as a binary phenomenon (typically, as cooperation versus defection), they direct attention away from crucial issues of distribution, the possibility of suboptimal cooperation, and the degree of unrealized joint gains. Second, even when simple matrix games with known payoffs capture distributional conflict and Pareto-inferiority, they typically do so by suppressing the inherent uncertainty and the need to learn, especially with respect to payoffs and values. And, third, even when they take both power and knowledge-dependent joint gains into account, they often treat the two as competing alternatives or as analytically separable, rather than as inherently bound together in the bargaining process. This article describes the emerging negotiation-analytic approach and argues that it provides a useful framework within which these conceptual problems can be avoided and explanatory power can be enhanced. From a negotiation-analytic perspective, it argues, epistemic communities can be viewed as distinctive de facto natural coalitions of “believers” whose main interest lies not in meeting material objectives but, rather, in expanding to become winning coalitions capable of ensuring the adoption of specific policy projects. An epistemic community's actions can thus be understood as changing the perceived zone of possible agreement through well-understood ways that are favorable to its objectives. Although ultimately a community's influence is exercised through bargaining, there is practically no theory of bargaining elaborated in the epistemic communities approach. Despite this and other drawbacks, the approach helps account for players' interests and usefully insists on the importance of perceptions and learning in negotiation. The article concludes that the effects of shared beliefs and of policy conflict can be readily incorporated into the negotiation-analytic model of bargaining, thereby giving rise to more precisely drawn observations about the conditions under which “believers” will have the strongest impact on negotiated outcomes. This will in turn make it possible to improve policy prescriptions in the actual or potential presence of epistemic communities.

Studies in this issue show that the epistemic communities approach amounts to a progressive research program with which students of world politics can empirically study the role of reason and ideas in international relations. By focusing on epistemic communities, analysts may better understand how states come to recognize interests under conditions of uncertainty. According to this research program, international relations can be seen as an evolutionary process in which epistemic communities play meaningful roles as sources of policy innovation, channels by which these innovations diffuse internationally, and catalysts in the political and institutional processes leading to the selection of their shared goals. The influence of epistemic communities persists mainly through the institutions that they help create and inform with their preferred world vision. By elucidating the cause-and-effect understandings in the particular issue-area and familiarizing policymakers with the reasoning processes by which decisions are made elsewhere, epistemic communities contribute to the transparency of action and the development of common inferences and expectations and thereby contribute to policy coordination. International cooperation and, indeed, the development of new world orders based on common meanings and understandings may thus depend on the extent to which nation-states apply their power on behalf of practices that epistemic communities may have helped create, diffuse, and perpetuate.