Expertise within democracy: the case of New Zealand’s climate change commission

ABSTRACT The Climate Change Commission (CCC) has a mandate to provide independent, expert advice to the New Zealand Government to enhance the clarity and stability of climate change policies. This institutional innovation has occasionally been rationalised as a form of expert rule, especially by analogy with central banks. In reality, however, the CCC only has advisory powers, so lacks the practical authority to enforce rules or operate policy instruments. How then might the CCC exert greater influence on the low-emissions transition? One option is to double-down on the model of expert rule – that is, to create exceptions to parliamentary sovereignty and to empower the CCC as a technocratic (or epistocratic) institution that has independence over the means (and ends) of climate change policy. Subsequently, the CCC would have a right not only to be believed, but obeyed. But this is politically improbable and also increases the CCC’s susceptibility to trends in political culture and mass media that erode the epistemic privilege of experts. Accordingly, this paper offers reasons for the CCC to deepen its entanglement with democracy, such that its epistemic authority might achieve greater practical authority by informing the ends of popular sovereignty.