Resource restrictions and changes to the ways in which psychiatrists are managed threaten professional autonomy and motivation. With examples from English National Health Service practice, maintaining knowledge and expertise, involvement in education and training, supporting research delivery and developing active followership skills represent transferable and realistic strategies that can improve psychiatrists’ autonomy wherever they work.

Policymakers often consult university scientists as they design and administer policies to address issues facing contemporary democracies, including climate change and global pandemics. Subsequently, democratic theorists have become interested in how science advising generates both challenges and opportunities for democratic governance. As a work of applied political theory, this article contributes to current debates over the political implications of scientific expertise—and engages with Zeynep Pamuk’s writings, in particular—through a sustained focus on impending regulatory decisions surrounding novel gene editing technologies. I show how political decisions have created incentives for university scientists to commercialize research and develop partnerships with biotechnology corporations. In turn, the academic-industrial complex has both compromised the integrity of scientific research and also impaired scientists’ capacities to offer disinterested advice in the public interest. I conclude by recommending the development of a more robust and expansive regulatory environment that can restore public trust in scientific expertise.

This paper draws on two seemingly disparate moments – standing witness to protest in Guatemala and unpacking programme design in New York City – to explore the connections, linkages and methodological insights brought forward by front-line organisers. These individuals, though not typically recognised as policy experts, offer crucial knowledge that challenges dominant approaches to law and policy. Turning to their actions and framing, this paper argues that these organisers share a deep and urgent analysis of institutional and state violence. Their perspectives highlight the inadequacies of conventional institutional lenses, which often exclude or dismiss such grassroots expertise. The paper emphasises the importance of how these voices are heard and responded to, particularly given the historical and ongoing marginalisation of such knowledge holders. Drawing on multiple examples, it critiques institutional investments in spatial and bureaucratic schemes that deflect responsibility for violence, and that distance possibilities for accountability. This raises the question of what orientation or sensibility is necessary to engage with and to listen to these collective voices differently, especially from within administrative and bureaucratic systems. Grappling with the possibilities and limitations of what a category of ‘activist-scholar administrator’ could mean, this paper identifies three key lessons: the need for bureaucratic imagination, an iterative approach and expanded analytical frameworks. I argue that much more thinking and action are needed to navigate bureaucratic systems – whether in universities or state institutions – in ways that centre community knowledge and respond meaningfully to calls for broader accountability.

Goldman (2001) asks how novices can trust putative experts when background knowledge is scarce. We develop a reinforcement-learning model, adapted from Barrett, Skyrms, and Mohseni (2019), in which trust arises from experience rather than prior expertise labels. Agents incrementally weight peers who outperform them. Using a large dataset of human probability judgments as inputs, we simulate communities that learn whom to defer to. Both a strictly individual-learning variant and a reputation-sharing variant yield performance-sensitive deference, the latter accelerating convergence. Our results offer an empirically grounded account of how communities identify and trust experts without blind deference.

The number of global environmental institutions has increased dramatically over the past decade. Yet environmental governance is widely seen as failing. Focusing on biodiversity politics, we argue that many key governance institutions, particularly those advancing market solutions, are themselves deeply implicated in this persistent failure. Drawing on the sociology of expertise, we show how two recently established institutions – the European Business and Nature Platform and the Network for Greening the Financial System – attempt to address the uncomfortable reality of biodiversity governance failures and the risks of their own future failures by creating a series of diversions to deflect attention and by displacing the focus of biodiversity governance from core issues to their own efforts to develop metrics. These dynamics render these institutions both ‘failure-proof’ and inherently ‘failure-prone’, ultimately reinforcing rather than resolving the problems they aim to address.

I propose a novel account of epistemic reputation as the social standing of agents, groups, and institutions based on their epistemic profiles within a community. Using a functionalist approach, I argue that epistemic reputation is pervasive in our societies because it facilitates navigation within social epistemic networks. Consequently, it holds significant importance as second-order evidence in testimonial belief formation. This proposal integrates reputation research, which has traditionally been relegated to the periphery of social epistemology, into the core of epistemology of testimony. As a result, we gain a deeper understanding of the burden and epistemic responsibility associated with epistemic injustice. This approach also promises to illuminate the concept of humility for experts in a new light.

This article analyzes the interplay between medicine and politics in East Germany. It analyzes the meetings of the Politburo medical commissions (1958–60) to frame and define the habitus of a generation, the “Tenners” (born 1910–20), which included most of the experts in the Politburo meetings. This generation consisted of politically committed doctors who were also influential medical scholars, many with international reputations. The Politburo meetings revealed major quarrels between these experts and the Party. The communiqué (1960) issued by the Politburo showed a partial victory for the experts, because the Party acknowledged many of their claims, proving that “totalitarian” interpretations do not hold. However, this was not a victory of medicine over politics. The experts formulated their claims by combining medical and political arguments and defended the jurisdiction of their medical expertise over the Party, precisely because they believed it could more decisively contribute to achieving the goals of socialism.

In June 2024, the US Supreme Court released its judgment in Loper Bright, with a majority overruling the long-standing principle of Chevron deference to regulators on questions of statutory interpretation. Loper Bright ostensibly aligns the US approach with the general common law position. This paper reviews Loper Bright for a common law audience and argues that it represents an opportunity to reappraise the merits of those cases in Anglo-Commonwealth administrative law where excessive deference to regulators has been applied despite the basic rule that questions of law are for the courts to determine. In particular, it critically examines example cases of excessive regulatory deference from the United Kingdom and New Zealand, which now appear highly anomalous in light of Loper Bright. In doing so, the paper argues that to the extent that Anglo-Commonwealth administrative law retains scope to accommodate presumptive deference to regulators, this should be reformulated. It is for the judiciary to authoritatively determine questions of law, even where regulatory expertise or judgement is involved.

Expert institutions are increasingly expected not only to provide the best professional expertise but also to ensure equal presence of women. Yet while descriptive gender representation in bureaucracies and courts is extensively researched, we largely lack studies of women’s presence on expert advisory bodies. Drawing on large-n data on the composition of Norwegian expert advisory commissions, the paper investigates and evaluates how the share of women on these commissions has developed over the last half-century. It finds that while overall gender parity was achieved in recent decades, women remain strongly under-represented among commission chairs, particularly academic chairs, and among academic members from the powerful economics discipline. Normatively speaking, the developments toward parity are promising, and we find no empirical indication that proportional representation and competence requirements are in tension. On the contrary, persistent gender gaps among economists on commissions and academic chairs may endanger adequate provision of expertise into policy-making.