Neoliberal Knowledge: The Decline of Technocracy and the Weakening of the Montreal Protocol

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. Copyright (c) 2008 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.