International organisations (IOs), as well as other sites of global governance, make claims to the ‘evidence-based’ or ‘expert-based’ nature of their agendas and policy interventions, whether in health, climate, education, or development aid.Footnote ¹ Global policies and programmes are largely legitimised by reference to their reliance on ‘evidence’, presented as reliable, scientific, and ‘expert’. ‘Experts’ – sitting in IOs, expert groups, academia, high level commissions, or advisory committees of all sorts – indeed abound in global governance forums and produce a plethora of studies, databases, and seminal papers that form the knowledge base in given issue domains. This self-proclaimed rationalisation of the work of IOs largely goes unchallenged in academia.Footnote ² Existing scholarship in International Relations (IR) and International Law (IL) often rehearses a narrative where IOs are seen as relying on scientific expertise to solve global problems. This view is based on two assumptions. First, the expertise of IOs is perceived to be strongly associated with science, and science itself is understood as developed independently of the circumstances of time, place, and social conditions. Second, global ‘problems’ are largely seen as given, existing out there for policymakers, or scholars, to address and solve them with the best knowledge and tools that they have.

Yet, the making of expertise involves decisions regarding what forms of knowledge to include and exclude. It also involves processes of assembling, which give shape to dispersed facts and knowledge and profoundly delineate what emerges as ‘expertise’. Such processes are deeply political; not only are they shaped by and through epistemic controversies and contests, where financial, epistemic, and social resources are all at play, but they are also embedded in time-specific macro-epistemic conditions, which shape the contours of what forms of knowledge count.

Acknowledging that the making of expertise involves political processes of inclusion, exclusion, and assembling also has implications for how we conceive global objects of governance, those ‘matters of concern’, or ‘problems’, that IOs govern. It brings to light that such problems are themselves defined through processes of sense-making, where expertise plays a central role. Objects of governance are, indeed, interpreted and made sense of through and with knowledge and tools seen as ‘expert’ and relevant. Acknowledging the subtle political processes at play in the delineation of objects of governance has implications for scholars in IR and IL, who study objects such as bioethics, the law of the sea, and biodiversity, amongst others. It makes it possible to see these not just as problems in need of solving through the mobilisation of evidence, statistics, or scientific studies, but as complex and ‘wicked’ matters of concern that ought to be made sense of in the first place.

It is, thus, necessary to open up the black-box of knowledge-making processes in global governance and engage with the processes through which IOs produce and stabilise expertise. How do certain forms of knowledge gain the status of expertise? What kinds of evidence come to be seen as valid and relevant for governance purposes? As we know, ‘[e]xpertise is authoritative knowledge at a given decision point’.Footnote ³ This does not imply that ‘anything goes’. Certainly, expertise also consists of substantive knowledge in a given domain.Footnote ⁴ But when a multitude of professional, scientific, or experiential knowledge forms co-exist and struggle for recognition, power dynamics and asymmetries also play out in the delineation of specific knowledge forms as expert. Thus, what is seen as expertise ‘conforms to no transcendent criteria of logic or method, but frequently incorporates popular conceptions (and misconceptions) of relevance and reliability, and all too commonly reflects differences in the social and material positions of disputing parties and decisionmakers’.Footnote ⁵

Thus, in this chapter, I propose some entry points to study the making and stabilisation of expertise in global governance. The approach goes beyond an exclusive focus on IOs, which are understood to be part of a broader machinery of knowledge production that involves a complex web of actors, sites, infrastructures, and power relationships. Taking the study of IOs away from international secretariats, member states, and formal negotiating structures makes it possible to examine how expert groups, think-tanks, professional organisations, large activist organisations, academic research clusters, and private actors, as well as their knowledge techniques and ‘ways of seeing’, participate in the production of ‘expertise’ in global governance.

In a first part, I outline ways in which expertise has been discussed in IR, as well as in Political Science, Sociology, and Science and Technology Studies (STS). In a second part, I shed light on specific and concrete paths through which the politics of expertise can be analysed. I argue that the power–knowledge nexus can be analysed by exploring sites and networks of knowledge production (i), infrastructures of knowledge production (ii), and relations between humans and/or things (iii). In a third part, I propose three potential methodological entry points to study the making of expertise.

IR Scholarship and Expertise

In IR, IL, and Political Science, as well as in policy circles, ‘expertise’ is largely seen as ‘the real and substantive possession of groups of experts’.Footnote ⁶ Experts, thus, distinguish themselves from ‘non-experts’ by their possession of knowledge of facts, theories, methods, and techniques that pertain to a discipline or professional field. Such knowledge can be gained through training and legitimised through the traditional university degree and/or through long-term professional experience in a given domain. According to this view, expertise is also isolated from the social and the political; it is a form of knowledge produced through systematic techniques, which ensure that it is ‘valid’, ‘accurate’, and ‘objective’. This understanding of expertise relies on the assumption that the development of expertise is tied to that of science, and that scientific knowledge is itself developed in isolation from social and political conditions. The prevalence of this view is widely established in governmental spheres, as well as in IR and IL.Footnote ⁷

Thus, if science produces true and valid knowledge, using such knowledge will also produce the right political decisions.Footnote ⁸ This ‘rationality project’ emerged in debates amongst political scientists in the 1950s, when a group of scholars developed hopes that policymakers would advance better policy agendas and programmes if they used sound evidence in the formulation of their decisions.Footnote ⁹ From this perspective, the development of scientific knowledge is driven by the logic of science, which is independent from the circumstances of time, place, and social conditions. If it is possible to understand reality by ‘getting down to the facts’, the application of science-based knowledge would seem, indeed, to be the best way to help solving policy problems. As a result, existing work on expertise is predominantly concerned with the way experts influence or shape policy, based on the assumption that the scientific and the policy spheres are neatly separated and driven by different logics.

The focus on the impacts of expert knowledge in policymaking also prevails in IR. Scholars in the field have argued that, because they deal with highly complex and technical issues, international decision-makers depend on science and technology for determining the risks and consequences associated with political action. As decision-makers seek information to make choices, this enables epistemic communities to provide information that favours or excludes different alternatives.Footnote ¹⁰ This approach has stimulated a research programme that seeks to identify the scope conditions of the influence of research on policy, as well as the obstacles to a better flow of scientific research to policymaking.Footnote ¹¹ Not only does this perspective assume that knowledge and policy are distinct but also that they should be. In the hopes that policymakers advance better policy agendas and programmes, the focus was on enhancing the use of sound evidence in the formulation of their decisions.

Other accounts in Political Science and IR have focused on the mobilisation of knowledge for political purposes. Such perspectives no longer assume that knowledge is valued only as a way of rationalising decisions, but acknowledge its symbolic and legitimising role.Footnote ¹² Existing insights have revealed the way policymakers use expert knowledge selectively, and sometimes misleadingly, in order to back their agendas and programmes, frame issues in a way that pushes the policy solutions they prefer, gain legitimacy, or yet expand their competences.Footnote ¹³ In their work on international bureaucracies, Barnett and Finnemore have revealed that expertise is central to the assertion of IOs’ authority. When ‘emphasising the “objective” nature of their knowledge, staff of IOs are able to present themselves as technocrats whose advice is unaffected by partisan squabbles’.Footnote ¹⁴ While these contributions have pointed to the crucial role(s) of knowledge in politics, they assume either that expertise is externally produced and subsequently enters the political domain, or that policymakers use knowledge to pursue specific interests. Such accounts, which bracket the production of knowledge, do not point to the different forms of enmeshment between knowledge and politics in processes of knowledge-making.

‘De-Blackboxing’ the Making of Expertise

Sociologists of science, scholars in the field of STS, and critical scholars more broadly have problematised the view that expertise is ‘objective’ and ‘neutral’ for decades. The French sociologist Bruno Latour has pointed out that scientific knowledge enjoys no independence or claim to authority beyond the political and economic interests that helped develop the scientific claims.Footnote ¹⁵ From that perspective, science embeds and is embedded in the social and the political. As put by sociologist of science Sheila Jasanoff, ‘[w]hat counts as expertise … frequently incorporates popular conceptions (and misconceptions) of relevance and reliability, and all too commonly reflects differences in the social and material positions of disputing parties and decisionmakers’.Footnote ¹⁶ What counts as expert knowledge can and does change. It is embedded in time and place-specific political circumstances, power dynamics, and conceptions of what is worthwhile, valid, and relevant. The power–knowledge nexus has, of course, consequences for the way governance objects, whether human rights, biodiversity, food, or trade, are seen, governed, and regulated through the norms and practices of IL. Yet, this is often overlooked by scholars who study such issues as unproblematic problems in need of solving.

I propose later that capturing the politics of the production of knowledge and expertise requires paying attention to where and by whom knowledge is produced (knowledge sites and networks), infrastructures of knowledge production (material artifacts), and relations. This approach makes it possible to analyse the way expertise is produced by and through a nucleus of sites, organisations, knowledge techniques, and material artifacts, which operate in a highly enmeshed and mutually reliant space.Footnote ¹⁷

Methodological Entry Points

A number of methodological approaches and techniques provide entry points into studying the making of expertise in global governance. Methods and sources may be eclectic; there is no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ when it comes to methodology. Engagement with sources can also be polymorphous. In addition, the same sources can be examined, analysed, and interpreted, with and through distinct methods.

Conclusion

Using these methodological entry points makes it possible to reveal the reasons why specific formations are in place and reintegrate power dynamics and hierarchies into the analysis of knowledge-making. Exploring global governance expertise through one of these avenues involves making a shift away from studying formal arenas, mechanisms, and actors of global governance, and instead zoom in on ways of doing politics ‘by other means’.Footnote ⁸¹ The processes of knowledge production discussed here point to the political nature of expertise, and the need to understand its making as a subtle way of governing that takes place beyond the traditional spheres of decision-making. Examining the processes, boundary sites, and infrastructures of knowledge production help us understand how the co-production of science and politics operates in practice. Such enmeshment can be observed in often tangible forms when one engages with the meso- or micro-level study of processes of knowledge production. This enmeshment produces circularity and exclusivity in the making and content of global governance expertise. It thus has exclusionary effects, which cannot be dissociated from those stemming from more structural hierarchies. In addition to financial or material resources, widely accepted norms of validity also structurally delineate what forms of knowledge are seen as valuable in global governance. Certain norms act as markers of what is scientific and what is not, with the effect that knowledge that does not match these criteria tends to be dismissed as anecdotal, inconclusive, biased, or ‘non-expert’. Thus, the concrete micro knowledge-making processes which embed expertise in the political can also intersect with and replicate macro-epistemic structures, both material and ideational, inscribing certain forms of expertise and the power of their protagonists in global governance. This of course has implications for the way global problems are understood and acted upon. Those knowledge forms which count as expert strongly shape how global issues are seen, governed, and regulated by IOs.

Introduction

According to Donna Harraway, ‘[t]here is no unmediated photograph or passive camera obscura in scientific accounts of bodies and machines; there are only highly specific visual possibilities, each with a wonderfully detailed, active, partial way of organizing worlds’.Footnote ¹ In April 2019, four ex-Presidents of the governing body of the International Criminal Court (ICC) machine, the Assembly of States Parties (ASP), published a joint opinion piece in Atlantic Council to mark the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Rome Statute. As leading figures in international criminal justice, they hoped to capture the ICC in full view, both its successes and, tentatively, its failures.Footnote ² On one account, the ICC had achieved much in its short lifespan: ‘put[ting] on notice’ would-be war criminals and bringing justice to victim communities around the globe, facilitating peacebuilding efforts in Colombia, modelling ‘accountability mechanisms for Syria and Myanmar’, and, ultimately, placing some individuals responsible for the world’s worst crimes behind bars.Footnote ³ With this ‘unmediated photograph’, the authors reaffirm their commitment to the ICC as an institution tasked with closing the impunity gap by prosecuting atrocity crimes and bringing justice to victims.

Yet this image also depicts problems and ‘deficiencies’ hampering the court’s quest for justice as the prompt for the ex-Presidents’ intervention. They highlight a gap between the court’s ‘unique vision’ and its ‘daily work’: cases collapsing due to inadequate case-building and witness protection, judges declining to authorise investigations out of fear for the organisation’s long-term stability, and various ‘management deficiencies prevent[ing] the court from living up to its full potential’.Footnote ⁴ Looking beyond the court’s own work, there is also the fragile political context in which it operates, especially dwindling ‘diplomatic support’ and the sanctions levelled against senior court figures by the first Trump administration.Footnote ⁵ Further afield (though omitted by the ex-Presidents) lie the protracted tensions between the ICC and African states parties over allegations of structural racism and bias, as well as serious resourcing issues resulting from successive zero-growth budgets.Footnote ⁶

After this diagnosis comes the cure: a course of international organisation (IO) reform, via ‘an independent assessment of the Court’s functioning by a small group of independent experts’.Footnote ⁷ This comes after two decades of ICC reform punctuated by recurring cycles of deficiency, improvement, and renewal, ranging from small-scale reorganisations of court organs to institutionalised working groups devoted to studying and streamlining court governance.Footnote ⁸ Yet despite their quiet optimism about past and future reform efforts, the ex-Presidents offer little sense of how reform works beyond self-evident assumptions about its functional effectiveness. In this regard, they join many ICC practitioners and commentators who frequently call for court reform but rarely consider its mechanics or wider distributional effects. This chapter problematises the ‘black box’ of reform to think about what it entails and how it is constructed, experienced, and effected within IOs like the ICC, taking its Independent Expert Review (IER) of 2019–2020 – the follow-up to the ex-Presidents’ proposal – as the expert production of a partial organisational world that entrenches existing arrangements of power among states parties.

At the heart of this discussion lies the notion of expert reform work. This notion seeks to reorient – theoretically and methodologically – the plane on which IOs and their legal landscapes are analysed. The phrase itself hints at its own recalibrations: expert because the experienced, trained professional turns out to be a more important site of institutional innovation than the IO itself or external structural forces; reform because experts’ seemingly mundane tweaking exercises have the power to reconstitute an IO’s contexts, problems, priorities, and future possibilities; and work because the effort of IO reform is an interpretive task performed by experts but is also the many other ideas and materials that craft an institutional reform process.

The notion of expert reform work, which is further fleshed out later, draws on Harraway’s idea of partial worlds, but also actor network theory (ANT) as a lens ‘that attempts to map and understand the relationship and interplay between physical or material objects and concepts’ as not only a semiotic but a ‘material-semiotic method’ concerning ‘the symbiotic relationship between people, things and ideas’.Footnote ⁹ The draw of actor network theory for this study of IOs derives from a ‘central tenet of ANT thinking’, namely that ‘such systems or material-semiotic states are not static or fixed but rather are in a perpetual state of forming and reforming’.Footnote ¹⁰ This chapter attempts to bring this underlying premise of ANT thinking, namely that states (or institutions) are always becoming and re-becoming, to the study of IO reform itself as an expert institutional exercise involving people, documents and sites. As such, the chapter’s focus on IO reform as expert work is an attempt to think through IO change as a perpetual, but no less political or pliable, process of institutional becoming.

Following the likes of Harraway and Bruno Latour, the chapter proposes that expert reform work is neither a rational science of perfectibility nor a ‘god trick’ that creates the organisation from nothing and nowhere.Footnote ¹¹ It is precisely these imaginaries of reform that have led to the predictable yet lacklustre reformism of the past two decades of ICC operations. Instead, reform work often means expertly encountering and mediating myriad textual and non-textual materials, ideas, and structures in ways that allow the expert to do their job to a standard that those with a stake in the outcome deem satisfactory. Studying these encounters allows us to capture the tectonic effects of the seemingly contingent and inconsequential framings that legal reformers bring to their task, as well as the push and pull effect other materials such as institutional documents and position papers have on the process of institutional becoming.

To grasp the mechanics of this expert reform work at the ICC, I begin by summarising key aspects of the IER before centring the expert as an important node in IO reform.Footnote ¹² This differs from other accounts of the expert as rational technician or handmaiden of power, situating them instead as and among a ‘network of relations’ between ideas and practices that rearrange the IO’s context, problems, priorities, and possibilities.Footnote ¹³ From here, the chapter then poses a set of reflections on the IER process to attend to the expert-led and situated institution-making process that is IO reform.

Conditions for Expert Work: The Independent Expert Review

The IER will be our aid throughout. Specifically, the central axis on which this chapter turns is an obscure, yet important concept introduced in the opening pages of the IER experts’ final report, published in September 2020. The concept in question is the ‘three-layered governance model’, a heuristic or interpretive device offered by the experts as a way to understand the ICC’s different functions and how they relate to one another, but also a crucial component in the experts’ re-imagination of the court.Footnote ¹⁴ Before discussing the model, it is necessary to go back several steps, to clarify who these experts are, and why and for whom they were conducting this analysis. In doing so, I begin to flesh out the notion of expert reform work.

In Resolution 18/7 of December 2019, the ICC ASP commissioned a ‘State Party-driven review process’ – the IER – to ‘identify ways to strengthen the ICC and the Rome Statute system’ via ‘concrete, achievable and actionable recommendations aimed at enhancing the performance, efficiency and effectiveness of the Court’.Footnote ¹⁵ The ASP devised a preliminary document, the Terms of Reference to delimit the scope of the review. It also proposed that a group of nine independent experts be appointed to consider ‘complex technical issues’ under three clusters of ‘governance’, ‘judiciary’, and ‘investigations and prosecutions’.Footnote ¹⁶ The panel was formed of international lawyers such as Richard Goldstone (the panel chair), Mónica Pinto, and Mohamed Chande Othman. Once appointed, the panel of experts commenced a nine-month period of stakeholder consultations and analysis (conducted predominantly online due to the COVID-19 pandemic). The panel’s findings were published in a final report in September 2020, which became the panel’s definitive statement on the conditions, constraints, and prospects for the institution. It proposed 384 recommendations across the court’s organs, processes, and activities that were promptly taken up and evaluated by scholars and court officials including the ICC Prosecutor and the President of the court.Footnote ¹⁷ The ICC itself offered a detailed official response the following year.Footnote ¹⁸

Despite its widespread promotion at the time, IER commentary has been brief. With so many recommendations, it is not surprising that the panel’s findings on workplace bullying and harassment drew most attention, with many other proposals being quickly lumped together, quietly implemented, or forgotten.Footnote ¹⁹ Moreover, many scholars, including several normally critical voices, seemed indifferent to yet another effort to tinker around the edges of a system that, to them, required nothing less than structural transformation.Footnote ²⁰ Only one scholar hinted at the three-layered governance model proposed by the expert panel as ‘a new way of conceptualizing the ICC as a complex institution’.Footnote ²¹

Despite general disinterest, though, studying the conditions and effects of the panel’s work demonstrates why it may be important to take such reform exercises and interpretive devices seriously as recalibrations of institutional power and stakeholder interest. The experts were supposed to identify ways to ‘strengthen’ the ICC and the Rome Statute system, and to do so through proposals that would be ‘concrete, achievable and actionable’. Already in this description, what was deemed organisationally achievable became a key limiting factor for the kind of analysis and proposals the experts could offer to the ASP. Other factors included skill and time: all appointed experts were lawyers and institution-builders and Resolution 18/7 indicates that the experts would begin their work on 1 January 2020, submitting their final report by 30 September 2020. These legal experts had to account for what was ‘concrete, achievable and actionable’ within nine months as criteria directing and limiting their work.

Beyond these factors, the experts also operated in, and reaffirmed, a particular historical moment. As noted at the outset, the IER appears as the latest cycle in a long history of ICC reform efforts largely initiated and justified on grounds of efficiency, effectiveness, and improved performance.Footnote ²² Already during preparatory discussions on a permanent ICC in 1995, the United Kingdom asked whether it was ‘the best use of limited resources to undertake international investigations and prosecutions with all the difficulties and duplication of personnel that that involves’.Footnote ²³ While these kinds of questions did not stop the court from emerging, they set the tone for the infant body: when the ICC began operations in 2002, its first Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo, stated: ‘I have the chance to build the most efficient public office’ for tackling anti-impunity.Footnote ²⁴

Such managerial concerns are themselves not context-free but were baked in over time. At the ICC, as in other modern IOs, efficiency has been justified as necessary for securing ‘value for money’ for stakeholders, i.e. the court’s funders. Particularly in the wake of the 2008 global recession, western states as the main financial backers have become more vocal about ensuring the court’s cost-effectiveness for the sake of national (read European) taxpayers.Footnote ²⁵ This was soon translated by court leaders into the working practices and culture of the institution. In November 2012, then-ICC President, Sang-Hyun Song, reassured states parties that court officials had become ‘responsible managers of the funds which the States Parties have provided’.Footnote ²⁶ This growing connection between efficiency and the concerns of major donors is not an innate characteristic, then, but a condition that emerged out of the specific political-economic and discursive relations between court officials and states parties since the drafting of the Rome Statute. It is a particular meaning of efficiency that experts, including the IER panel, were inured to and fluent in.

These being some of the panel’s background conditions and ideas, they did not explicitly constrain or determine the panel’s conclusions. Within certain strands of critical scholarship, such wider forces as political or economic capacity are often deemed determinative of institutional outcomes. Yet the expert remains central as mediator: to draw on Duncan Kennedy, such external constraints around the meaning of efficiency produce within them ‘the effect of necessity, the experience of legal compulsion’, leaving them with a sense, though not a ‘reality’, that ‘there is no alternative’.Footnote ²⁷ Background conditions and ideas are thus necessarily mediated by the modalities of expertise itself: its requirements of objectivity, independence, and rational analysis. It is through these modalities that expertise bears the descriptive power to reimagine the institution. While there may be a great many pressures and forces at play during experts’ efforts to reform an IO, how those pressures are assembled and articulated is part of the expert’s objective function.Footnote ²⁸ Taking the expert as a key unit of analysis, as other scholars have done,Footnote ²⁹ thus centres the specific descriptive and imaginative power of experts in IO reform settings.

To elaborate, experts largely rely on the traits of objectivity and the techniques of rational scientific analysis to establish themselves and their findings as authoritative.Footnote ³⁰ As Littoz-Monet acknowledges in this volume, there are multiple uses of expertise beyond its capacity to rationalise decision-making. Yet it is at least these rational claims of experts that necessitate a conceptual break or firewall between those proposing and overseeing reform and those carrying it out (never mind those experiencing its effects). This firewall is familiar not only from scholarship on expertise but also in the literature on the independence of IOs from their members,Footnote ³¹ or judicial independence from state interests.Footnote ³² Similarly, for reformers, their independence from states is deemed crucial for sound decision-making and the legitimacy of institutional processes. It was not for nothing that the ICC reform exercise was branded an independent expert review.

Nonetheless, claims to independence and objectivity have often been branded mere smokescreens for the hegemonic interests that remain hidden behind them.Footnote ³³ These are the dynamics that David Kennedy has described as ‘capture’, or the idea that ‘international policy-making will favour some policies and exclude others, and distribute resources from some groups to others, because the policy-making machinery has been captured by political forces committed to these results’.Footnote ³⁴ At the ICC, capture is often closely linked to global realpolitik, great powers, or global distributions of capital.Footnote ³⁵ Latent in the idea of capture is the assumption that, if kept non-ideological, ‘outcomes will be in some sense neutral or benign’.Footnote ³⁶ Yet to attend to the modalities of IO reform from within means acknowledging its own distributive potential.

This alludes to a second power of expertise, namely its constitutive power vis-à-vis the IO, emphasising the expert dimension of the independent review. Evidently, states parties and other stakeholders have an interest in the outcome of reform exercises given their potential effects on scrutiny of potential crimes as well as budget demands. However, these interests are not directly translatable to the organisational setup given the ‘objective’ expert vocabulary and techniques that exist quite apart from state control.Footnote ³⁷ Not only this, but states would find it difficult to control such reform processes in practice without being condemned by stakeholders for attempting to influence or politicise independent investigations. It is the same logic that has the court maintain such a strict division between its own objective legal functions and the political interests of its states parties, now applied to court governance as opposed to investigations.

At the ICC, states parties already play a large role in managing the court via the ASP and other internal bodies such as the Committee on Budget and Finance. Moreover, as Emma Palmer and Hannah Woolaver have shown, ‘in some instances States Parties have attempted to use the ASP to influence the exercise of judicial and prosecutorial functions in cases where their interests were implicated in ongoing proceedings’.Footnote ³⁸ Yet in reform settings, fears of such assertions of coercive power by states parties distract from the more subtle power of experts and their practices.Footnote ³⁹ As noted earlier, the meaning acquired by efficiency through the discourse of major donor states has placed a premium on reform proposals likely to make the court more cost-effective and therefore more accountable to certain stakeholders. This discourse has since become a central component of the way experts conduct themselves when analysing and offering recommendations, namely to take account of all relevant information as well as the wider realities and challenges facing the court, or in Martti Koskenniemi’s words, to ‘streamline, balance, optimize [and] calculate’.Footnote ⁴⁰ Taking account of such managerial factors is not to be captured by state interests, but to be a competent, pragmatic technocrat. In this way, reform work is itself capable of reconstituting and redistributing an organisation’s resources, values, and power differentials precisely as an act of objective expertise, rather than as a repudiation of it.

This point chimes with the international law literature on expertise. According to David Kennedy, ‘[g]enerating a common vision of a world to be governed is both a communicative and performative work of the imagination and a technical institutional project’.Footnote ⁴¹ This is particularly visible in the context of IO reform, where expert work meets complex bureaucratic machineries. Much of what it means to be an expert concerns the visions of governance that such expert work is capable of producing. International lawyers, diplomats, policymakers, NGOs, legal advocates, and activists produce knowledge as part of their job. Such knowledge constitutes in various ways: framing an organisational context, identifying its problems, establishing narratives of success and failure, establishing ‘realities’ constraining the organisation, and recommending solutions.

IO reformers such as the IER panel are similar to experts and such expert work, with some distinctions. First, given how many obstacles stand in the way of proposals being accepted and implemented, reformers’ recommendations and solutions may be among the least significant of their articulations as far as constituting the IO is concerned. Instead, and second, reformers are often uniquely mandated to make a diagnosis of the IO as a whole, rather than only one of its organs or as an official with a set of bounded tasks. This gives IO reformers a particularly unique opportunity to redefine the entire IO, relying on the ideas, materials, and practices assembled about them in the process without being accused of overstepping their mandate. To understand more concretely how this constitutive work works, I return to the panel’s interpretive device, the ‘three-layered governance model’, to reflect further on the kind of imaginaries experts perform.

Expert Reform Work in Action: The ‘Three-Layered Governance Model’

Putting aside any suggestions of bias or capture, let’s imagine how nine independent experts might have inscribed efficiency – and thereby the preferences of major financial contributors – into the ICC’s organisational form simply by applying their legal knowledge and objective, technical expertise. From the beginning, the expert panel confronts a dilemma. Operating on the basis of their expansive mandate across governance, judiciary, and prosecutions, the panel must reckon with how to fulfil such a mandate despite the judicial and prosecutorial independence that underwrites two of the panel’s focus areas: ‘judiciary’ and ‘investigations and prosecutions’.

As shown earlier, the firewall of independence prevents the experts from simply overriding judicial and prosecutorial independence by assertion: their findings must, after all, satisfy both the requirements of expert objectivity and the expectations of stakeholders such as court officials, state representatives, and NGOs with an interest in upholding the fundamental principles of judicial and prosecutorial independence. Independence therefore becomes a fulcrum on which the panel’s framing of the IO turns. It is for this reason that the expert panel begins its final report by addressing precisely this dilemma. The report begins by recalling that ‘inherent in the structure of any international court or tribunal is the dual nature of the institution: the ICC is both a judicial entity (ICC/Court) and an international organisation (ICC/IO)’.Footnote ⁴² This duality corresponds to the underlying rationale of judicial independence on the ‘ICC/Court’ level and that of state party oversight and accountability on the ‘ICC/IO’ level.

As IO, the ICC ‘does not carry out judicial activity – it indirectly supports it’, with states parties playing a ‘key role’.Footnote ⁴³ As a court, though, the panel offers a further division ‘between justice and the administration of justice’.Footnote ⁴⁴ This further division is also connected to the question of independence. According to the experts, justice as ‘[j]udicial and prosecutorial work (e.g. judgments, deliberations by judges, the prosecutor’s decisions to initiate or pursue a case, investigations) require[s] absolute independence’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Yet this idea of ‘absolute independence’ already suggests its opposite. And indeed, the administration of justice is deemed ‘not [to] necessitate the same degree of independence’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Why? Because ‘the administration of justice is audited in national systems – the same should be the case for the ICC’.Footnote ⁴⁷ To reinforce the point, and the shrinking role of independence in the division of court functions, the panel avers that ‘confidentiality and independence should not be used as a way of deflecting accountability and preventing oversight’.Footnote ⁴⁸ Hence, efficiency, not independence, becomes the vehicle for assessing performance in relation to the administration of justice.

From this reframing emerges the ‘three-layered governance model’, in which each layer is subject to greater degrees of state oversight: a protected inner ‘core’ of judicial and prosecutorial activity, a ‘middle layer’ of partial accountability facilitated by performance indicators and a proposed Judicial Audit Committee, and an outermost layer of IO administration heavily influenced by state oversight. The model is backed up by reference to article 119 of the Rome Statute, as well as a decision of Pre-Trial Chamber II in Prosecutor v. Ali Kushayb, in which it states that ‘the Court’s statutory framework clearly distinguishes the role of the Court, as a judicial institution entrusted with the power to exercise its jurisdiction over persons for the most serious crimes of international concern; the position of the ASP, which is responsible for considering and deciding on the Court’s budget; and the duties of the judiciary and Chambers’.Footnote ⁴⁹ This is taken to affirm the three layers of ICC governance.

What are the experts doing by elaborating this model at the very outset of their report? While the model may be read consistently with the Rome Statute and its case law, those (two) sources say nothing of the efficiency rationale that now underpins the model. These ‘primary’ sources merely refer to a functional division of labour grounded in notions of judicial independence and state party control over budgetary matters. The panel’s reframing is thus facilitated by a professional internalisation of efficiency, after years of efficiency measures and austerity politics, fused to a familiar legal division between Court and IO and backed by the legal framework and its jurisprudence. Collectively, it allows – or demands – that court functions be judged according to an efficiency rather than an independence rationale, altering the power differentials within the court, especially as between the Prosecutor, judges, and states parties.

Yet this work is not the experts’ alone. Beyond the final report itself, this redescription of the ICC’s organisational form along efficiency lines is afforded by three ‘clusters’ of issues first proposed by the ASP in the IER Terms of Reference mentioned earlier, namely ‘(a) governance; (b) judiciary; and (c) investigations and prosecutions’, a triple division which appears to have been copy-and-pasted as the panel’s triple conceptualisation of the court.Footnote ⁵⁰ In keeping with the earlier discussion on the power of experts, a degree of interpretation and translation was required to make these issues commensurable and legible at an organisational level. Yet the Terms of Reference, as a document, directs us to the affordances of many different practices, concepts, ideas, and things in relation to one another.Footnote ⁵¹ It makes reform a much more worthy site of analysis to consider such heterogeneous elements as a Terms of Reference and the situated meaning of efficiency, as affording certain possibilities and impossibilities, rather than as the instruments of a hegemonic apparatus. This applies equally to the other crucial documents of the IER. One is the draft working paper of November 2019 that had already consolidated some issues under ‘clusters’ by posing certain objectives, possible actions, and useful instruments for experts to draw upon.Footnote ⁵² Another is the panel’s own interim report of June 2020 which did not yet offer the three-layered conceptualisation of the final report, but began to situate the work of reform in a longer institutional history of optimisation, creating a placeholder for the final report that would appear three months later.Footnote ⁵³ As Annelise Riles has argued elsewhere, ‘each document – the old and the new – lean on each other to take full effect’.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this way, one can sketch how experts and reformers knit together, both as expert and node, a network of interpretive and material associations.

With this expanded understanding of what such assemblages afford, other important conditions, including time and global events, re-emerge as relevant considerations for why the IER came out as it did. Although approaching the question of legal interpretation from a phenomenological perspective, Duncan Kennedy considers the role of ‘resources, time and skill’ in lawyers’ efforts to make their interpretations stick.Footnote ⁵⁵ Applied to the IER, it was already noted that the panel operated within a tight timeframe of nine months: how would a process twice this length have changed or potentially undermined the chosen governance model? Moreover, their resources, though extensive and well-connected to important figures within the court, were somewhat inhibited by the COVID-19 pandemic and the constraints associated with relying on many online rather than in-person meetings. The materiality – including meeting constraints and technological possibilities – afforded by physical meetings may have caused the governance model to be discounted altogether: a circular room populated by a bank of NGO officials may be somewhat more persuasive than the appearance of individual video profiles isolated from themselves and their colleagues;Footnote ⁵⁶ gaps in connectivity may cause an interruption of conversation and a return to the basic premise of judicial independence without its sub-division into judicial and administration of justice mandates. Lastly, the nine-member panel comprised experienced lawyers and institution-builders within other international criminal tribunals. They did not seek to offer a sociological, economic, or anthropological analysis, but an expertise cognisant of the legal frameworks and constraints of IO reform. This may also have affected the kinds of stakeholders the panel consulted with – court managers and transnational NGOs rather than those directly affected by the court’s work. A lens that is attuned to a wider range of materials and actors, and what these collectively afford, helps to make sense of IO reform beyond theories of rational science and structural determinacy.

Work Effects: Redistributing the ICC

The discussion until now has focused largely on the sociologically enriching potential latent in approaching IO reform exercises through the notion of expert reform work: the constitutive role of experts, but also the assemblages that form them and which they re-form in turn. However, the earlier discussion on efficiency and its meaning-making potential for the ICC also hints at the wider range of distributive effects that can be surveyed when acknowledging the work of reform. This points to the wider stakes of expert reform work. The IER panel was clear about the functional intent of their governance model. Their first recommendation to the court was that ‘the Three-Layered Governance Model should be used as a tool to ensure effective and efficient governance, clarify reporting lines, and improve cooperation among stakeholders’.Footnote ⁵⁷ This narrow reading of the model’s effects as relating only to the specific organisational purposes and components for which it was intended is consistent with the mainstream view of expertise as concerned only with functional effectiveness.Footnote ⁵⁸

The IER complicates this narrow reading of the model’s effects by considering both its unintended consequences and the broader redistributions of meaning, influence, and resources it is capable of effecting across the ICC. These redistributions relate to the context, problems, priorities, and future possibilities of the organisation and are discussed in turn.Footnote ⁵⁹

Context: While experts are often said to operate within a context – ‘the “drivers” that decision makers are said to ignore at their peril: technological, historical, social, economic, or political “realities”’Footnote ⁶⁰ – these realities are also expert articulations that narrate a particular social milieu within which the IO is said to exist, and to which it should be directly responsive. The context of the IER was already outlined by the ex-Presidents, and the expert panel, as they diagnosed the judicial and administrative ‘deficiencies’ of the court and the need to remain efficient and effective in an unstable political landscape. The official context therefore knits together a sense of declining multilateralism with isolated court problems and the scarce resources of an austerity-prone donor community. This (and subsequent organisational imperatives) may have differed had the ex-Presidents and the panel referred to alternative contexts, such as the African Union’s hostility towards the court or the tangibility of justice for victim communities.

Problems: From this context emerges a more tangible set of problems than the ex-Presidents’ references to ‘management deficiencies’. Kennedy reminds us that ‘the idea of a “global problem” is a complex work of imagination’.Footnote ⁶¹ Within IOs, the rendering of an organisational problem is no different, although as we have seen, the remit for expert imagination here may also be conditioned by experts’ mandate, experiences, and time. Indeed, it is part of the power of framing a problem as organisational that it directs concern towards internal structures, workflow issues, personnel, fragmentation, and underperformance. Framing the problem differently, as a problem inherent in the tensions between different visions of global justice, would demand a different analysis and alternative recommendations.Footnote ⁶² So too would framing the problem in terms of leadership, the court’s constituencies, racial bias, or transnational capitalism.Footnote ⁶³ As it happened, these problem frames remained unused.

Priorities: Operating in a fragile global ‘context’ and having identified corresponding organisational ‘problems’, certain activities (and solutions) are prioritised. As a result of the three-layered governance model, those measures that were most likely to deliver efficiencies for the court were prioritised. The increased oversight this model afforded to states also allowed their concerns, specifically those on whom the court financially relies, to take on greater importance. This was already acknowledged at the 1998 Rome Conference, when the conference secretary stressed that ‘to secure the financial health of the Court, the support of major financial contributors was crucial and hence the concerns of the major contributors should be looked at more sympathetically’.Footnote ⁶⁴ The issue becomes more acute when value-for-money concerns begin to funnel resources into constructing a managerial apparatus to oversee the court’s administration of justice functions, including a Judicial Audit Committee and data-collection for performance indicators. These all necessitate the allocation of resources towards some concerns and away from others, including those not seen as real concerns in the first place.

Possibilities: Lastly, the cumulative effect of such contextualising, problematisation, and prioritisation is to further shape the ICC’s conditions of possibility and the very institutional imaginaries that produce the court.Footnote ⁶⁵ Much as Martti Koskenniemi denoted that ‘[t]he concepts and structures of international law… are the conditions of possibility for the existence of something like a sphere of the international’, so too do expert articulations form the conditions of possibility for the organisational sphere.Footnote ⁶⁶ Considering what is easier or more difficult to articulate before and after a reform exercise such as the IER may be a fruitful way of assessing the effects of this discursive work. Although the ICC itself pushed back against some of the panel’s findings, including parts of its model framing, it will certainly be easier for states parties to argue in favour of greater oversight over administration of justice matters given the panel’s reasoning that these are audited nationally. The ICC itself pointed out in its response to the IER final report that the model’s three layers are ‘inextricably linked’ not hermetically closed, meaning that states and other interested actors may become more strategic in seeking to exert influence. For example, efficiency savings in the recruitment and retention of staff may disproportionately advantage those already familiar with the court’s work in the Global North, shaping the types of prosecutorial and judicial activity the court undertakes in the long term.Footnote ⁶⁷ Under such circumstances, it becomes more difficult to justify reforms based on non-efficiency rationales, such as the fairness of proceedings or the court’s practical effect on victims. Together, reform work points to these subterranean effects on the court’s present and future activities.

Conclusion

It perhaps misses the point of re-imagining IO law to spend a chapter on one relatively obscure reform exercise. There are far more pressing issues confronting the ICC than the outworkings of its latest technical tweaking. Yet through this managerial example, I have sought to perform a double take on IO reform as an important site for studying not only how institutions change but via what modalities and materials, by what interpretive devices, and with what redistributive effects institutions like the ICC remain in a perpetual state of becoming. The IER’s contribution was not only to offer a sound, rational basis for court optimisation, nor to act as handmaiden to powerful states. Rather, it was to carry out expert reform work in ways that re-formed the ICC anew by baking efficiency rationales into the division of its judicial and administrative functions.

The notion of expert reform work attends both to the forms of expert knowledge required to carry it out and the additional epistemic labour required to put abstract expectations, constraints, and mandates into organisational action. It offers an account of expert reform beyond positivist ideas of functional optimisation and more structuralist accounts of embedded and instrumentalised hegemony.Footnote ⁶⁸ This also opens up the concept of work to dynamics not limited to experts and their agentic manoeuvring of materials, but also the entanglement of people, ideas, norms, and documents and what these ‘nodes’ afford to one another as part of organisational (re)assembly. Expanding the analytic thus does not negate but enriches the discussion on reform’s distributional effects: the IER having demonstrated how organisational tools, devices, documents, and ideas reshaped the context, problems, priorities, and possibilities of the ICC as an IO. Attending to the granular and the banal is perhaps where alternative IO scholarship will find new modes of engagement and new questions to ask of IOs, offering ‘wonderfully detailed, active, partial ways of organizing worlds’ beyond the imaginaries supplied by ICC ex-Presidents and expert reform panels.Footnote ⁶⁹

Introduction

In the shifting context of global policy-making, International Organizations (IOs) have become powerful sources of expert authority and central sites for the exercise of power in global governance. While we have a clear understanding of how IOs deploy expertise, there has been relatively little effort among legal scholarship and International Relations (IR) to critically examine the processes by which such institutions produce and validate knowledge claims about governance objects and, in doing so, authorize certain solutions as the only ones “viable.” This chapter examines the way in which the World Health Organization (WHO), Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) acted as central vehicles in defining the contours of “hidden hunger” as a “matter of fact” – or as a medicalized and economized object of governance. It shows how this problematization largely authorized the prioritization of short-term responses and easily measurable programs such as food fortificationFootnote ¹ and vitamin supplementation in Global South countries. Rather than addressing the underlying socio-economic determinants of the problem, such responses acted as political analgesics providing temporarily relief. In highlighting how IOs’ “ways of seeing” are connected to the practice of governing, the chapter sheds light on the everyday politics of rule-making.

This chapter examines how IO’s knowledge practices stabilize certain “ways of seeing” and acting upon global governance objects. Looking at how IOs delineate the contours of objects allows us to move beyond “problem-solving” perspectives, according to which institutions’ main role is to enable global cooperation and find solutions to global challenges.Footnote ² The work of IOs is profoundly political. They make certain issues knowable and governable and, in doing so, define the world in such a way as to confer authority on some categories, actions, and actors rather than others.Footnote ³ This is especially patent at a time when, in order to make claims valid across jurisdictions, IOs rely on the acquisition and deployment of certain forms of expertise.

International legal scholarship has largely focused on analyzing the formalistic and institutional dimensions of objects of governance, be they climate change, pollution, or health.Footnote ⁴ From such perspectives, objects of governance are exogenous entities to be addressed and regulated through laws, conventions, and standards. However, adhering strictly to a formalistic and legal account of objects fails to capture how given visions and ways of acting upon gain traction at the expense of others. For that, we need a more textured examination of the socio-political processes that shape such objects. I propose to do so by analyzing how IOs define objects as “matters of fact,” to draw on Latour’s term, and how, in turn, this problematization narrows down the possible range of policy solutions.Footnote ⁵ In contrast to “matters of concern,” which are marked by dispute and situatedness, matters of fact appear as ahistorical realities. Nonetheless, matters of fact are just as political as matters of concern; the distinction lies in how institutions approach them and how they are publicly perceived.

Empirically, I focus on the field of global food governance, more particularly on the case of “hidden” hunger, which has been defined and addressed by the international community as a form of undernutrition primarily stemming from vitamin and mineral deficiency. Such forms of hunger are qualified as “hidden” because there are no visible warning signs, so that individuals who suffer from it are not often aware of it. I explore how hidden hunger was problematized as a medicalized problem stemming from “a deficit” of nutrient consumption in Global South countries. Despite being a complex socio-economic and political issue directly linked to factors such as access to food, inequalities, and dominant agroindustrial models, efforts to address hidden hunger have predominantly relied on what I refer to as “political palliatives,” such as food fortification and vitamin supplementation.Footnote ⁶ The chapter mainly focuses on the work of three particular agencies, also known as the bureaucratic machineryFootnote ⁷ of food and agriculture: the FAO, WHO, and UNICEF.Footnote ⁸ While the activities of these agencies were certainly key in mobilizing resources and bringing public attention, this chapter wants to highlight the politics inherent in their knowledge-making practices and highlight that ways of seeing problems always come at the expense of marginalizing others.

The remainder of the chapter proceeds as follows: The first section of the chapter discusses different perspectives that have scrutinized the work of IOs as machineries of social and political ordering. The second section of the chapter introduces the analytical framework of the paper, namely how IOs’ problematization of objects of governance as “maters of fact” restricts the range of possible solutions and political interventions. Sections three to five delve into the empirics by unpacking how WHO, UNICEF, and the FAO delineated the contours of hidden hunger in highly exclusionary ways. On the one hand, they show how, through quantification techniques, laboratory exercises, and statistical instruments, IOs assembled a body of knowledge that defined hidden hunger in medicalized and economized terms, portraying it as an indisputable matter of fact. On the other hand, the empirical sections explore how this problematization marginalized some knowledge forms while simultaneously enabling short-term forms of political action, mainly targeting individuals in the Global South.

The article relies on an in-depth case study. Through immersion in details of the case, I explore the ways in which IOs produced and validated knowledge claims about hidden hunger as an object worthy of global collective attention with consequences for legal outcomes. This was done through an extensive textual analysis of policy documents, reports, and websites from these IOs, as well as of academic publications in nutrition and health journals. I also conducted semi-structured interviews with policy makers and statisticians from the WHO, FAO, and UNICEF, as well as from civil society organizations.

IOs as Machines for Social and Political Ordering

The discipline of IR and some strands of legal scholarship have treated international institutions as “solvers” of different problems, such as international cooperation and information asymmetries, among others.Footnote ⁹ In an attempt to reintroduce the “social” into the analysis, sociological-oriented scholarship has questioned some of these premises by exploring the ways in which IOs do politics.Footnote ¹⁰ These accounts are highly attentive to the role of IOs in shaping intersubjective understandings. Barnett and Finnemore, for example, highlight that IOs are autonomous actors that “both regulate and constitute the world.”Footnote ¹¹ Other accounts have highlighted the different ways in which IOs, as purposeful actors, assemble or mobilize knowledge to achieve certain goals such as expanding their mandate into new areas,Footnote ¹² enacting depoliticization,Footnote ¹³ or becoming policy relevant actors in a given field.Footnote ¹⁴ Approaching IOs as real fields of ethnographic inquiry, scholars have conceptualized them as circuits of power “where normative frameworks are produced and globally diffused, resources are distributed and knowledge circulated through transnational expert networks.”Footnote ¹⁵ Similar claims have been made by international legal scholars, who have examined IOs’ activities and workings in their contingent and historically situated dynamics.Footnote ¹⁶

Following this research tradition, this chapter explores a concrete aspect of the politics of IOs object-making: the knowledge-making practices that they set up in order to problematize objects of governance, and thus govern them. Following Foucauldian-inspired scholarship in international law and IR, I seek to understand how certain practices and modes of treatment are attributed to problems.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet, rather than focusing on how certain issues enter the domain of “thought,” I am interested in exploring how, more concretely, IOs actively participate in exclusionary processes of social and political ordering in the field of global food policy.Footnote ¹⁸

Studying how IOs participate in object-making in the domain of global food governance is of relevance to international law scholarship in two main ways. On the one hand, food governance is an area that is treated as an appendix of trade regimes and where there is a high deference to expert knowledge. Analysis of “technical standards” and trade negotiations tends to overshadow the politics of norm-making.Footnote ¹⁹ As a result, international legal scholarship has often taken food governance standards at face value, ignoring the knowledge that underpins them.Footnote ²⁰ On the other hand, thinking about object-making and its links to knowledge also makes it possible to understand that that “universal” definitions of dietary standards or notions such as hunger often rest in uncertain and elusive grounds, thus indicating that expertise is a space of instability and constant challenge.

IOs’ Power: Knowing and Acting upon Objects of Governance

In global governance, where there is an absence of democratic forms of legitimation, the recourse to knowledge constitutes one of the most advanced sources of authority.Footnote ²¹ Governing, indeed, increasingly takes place “outside the arena of legislative deliberation and democratic decision making”Footnote ²² and relies on claims to expertise rather than those of collective identity value and interest.Footnote ²³ The consolidation of evidence-based modes of decision-making, for example, attests to the fact that governing increasingly rests on claims of efficiency and instrumental rationality rather than those of collective identity value and interest.Footnote ²⁴ This broader turn towards rationalized forms of governance and, more broadly, the scientization of politics is particularly pronounced in policy-making transcending nation states.

In this context, IOs solidify their authority by depicting objects of governance as exogenous entities that are knowable and actionable.Footnote ²⁵ Through the production of global indicators, metrics, rankings, and datasets, or by hiring bodies of experts, IOs strive to insulate themselves from partisan squabbles and processes of political contestation.Footnote ²⁶ This often leads some IOs to simplify complex social activities into simple “scores,” economized “facts,” or ratings.Footnote ²⁷ This process resonates with what Latour has termed “matters of fact,” which are entities that are presented as uncontestable truths, fostering a perception of naturalness and inevitability.Footnote ²⁸ Problematizing issues such as pollution, crime, or migration as matters of “fact,” detached from their socio-economic and political determinants, indeed allows IOs to act as powerful global governors.Footnote ²⁹

Representing social problems as matters of fact requires significant effort. It is indeed intrinsically related to the availability of technologies, infrastructures, and different instruments, which translate the complexities of economic, social, and political contexts into a stabilized reality capable of orienting action. However, despite their aura of universality, “matters of fact” are just one exclusionary particular way of defining and thinking about global objects. Attempts to scientize often result in the exclusion and erasure of subjects and of those voices that do not conform to logics of instrumental rationality.

Similarly, presenting objects as matters of fact is not devoid of political implications. In the following section, I show how such a problematization narrows down the scope of possible solutions, limiting them to approaches that align with standardizable rationales and quantifiable results. Responses to matters of facts often come in the form of technical fixes that are perceived as straightforward and easily implementable. Such responses become favored due to their perceived feasibility and their capacity to demonstrate measurable impact and “results.” These responses, however, act as what I refer to as powerful “political palliatives,” which provide surface-level and temporary relief, while overlooking responses that address the social, political, and economic root causes of problems.

Problematizing Hidden Hunger as a Matter of Fact: Science and Economics

I focus on the case of hidden hunger to show how different UN agencies characterized hidden hunger as a “matter of fact,” portraying it as a medicalized problem of nutrient deficiencies mainly in the Global South, to be solved through programs such as adding nutrients to food or delivering vitamin capsules. In a first step, I examine how IOs produced a “cartography of nutritional deficiencies,”Footnote ³⁰ by amassing a body of biochemical and statistical knowledge produced through quantification processes. In doing so, IOs perpetuated Global-North–Global-South asymmetries, wherein countries in Africa, South America, and Asia are characterized by their “deficiencies” and framed as in need of “correction” and assistance.Footnote ³¹ In a second step, I show how such problematization of hidden hunger subtly authorized technical responses and short-term forms of political action that largely neglected the root causes of the problem.

Until the 1980s, hidden hunger did not garner significant global attention. The focus of global discourse in the field was primarily on what was termed the “protein era,” characterized by a widespread belief that a “protein gap” was the primary cause of malnutrition and hunger worldwide. However, by the 1970s, it became evident that the deficiency in protein was not the predominant nutritional issue globally.Footnote ³² Consequently, there was a shift in focus towards the role of “micronutrients,” or tiny substances and particles such as vitamins and minerals, which started receiving increasing attention from the international community.Footnote ³³

In fact, at the time, the connection between these tiny nutrients and health was primarily the subject of scientific and academic inquiry. During this era, studies conducted on a national scale began to unveil the extent of “hidden hunger,” its clinical manifestations and its ramifications for health.Footnote ³⁴ However, in 1986, a publication by Alfred Sommer of an article on Vitamin A in the Lancet played a pivotal role in elevating what was considered solely a “health” issue into a matter of greater social and political significance. Sommer’s study not only confirmed Vitamin A’s role in severe clinical conditions, as previously documented, but also highlighted its correlation with elevated childhood mortality rates.Footnote ³⁵

Given the relevant and potential social implications of the topic, various UN agencies convened major international conferences to advance the understanding of the impacts of nutritional deficiencies and elevate political conversations. As early as in 1974, Sommer was invited to a WHO-sponsored meeting in Indonesia to discuss his work on Vitamin A. He was also in charge of writing the 1995 WHO report on Vitamin A deficiency and its consequences, and of chairing different scientific advisory committees at the WHO and UNICEF.Footnote ³⁶

The 1990 Summit of Children took the issue very seriously and promised the virtual elimination of Vitamin A deficiency by the year 2000.Footnote ³⁷ After the summit, several conferences and summits were held. One significant event was the Conference on Ending Hidden Hunger in 1991, held in Montreal. The primary objective of this conference was to garner “political support at the highest level for ending hidden hunger.”Footnote ³⁸ A similar acknowledgment took place one year later, in 1992, at the first FAO/WHO International Conference on Nutrition in Rome, where it was recognized that hidden hunger was a “matter of major public health concern.”Footnote ³⁹

However, much more than a shift in discourse, the construction of hidden hunger as an object of governance entailed the deployment of tools, instruments, and technologies to make it actionable. In the context of increasing awareness and interest, IOs started to produce and assemble a significant body of knowledge that served to delineate the object as an incontrovertible scientific fact. “Accurate” knowledge of the vitamin content of foods, food consumption at the household level, and anthropometric indicators of nutritional deficiencies were fundamental in that regard.Footnote ⁴⁰

At the time, the WHO expressed concerns about the incommensurability of hidden hunger. The UN agency pointed to a “lack of consistency” of existing nutrition standards, in particular due to a lack of homogenization of “methods of analysis and presentation of survey results.”Footnote ⁴¹ Up until that point, nutrition surveys often employed diverse methods, reporting systems, and reference values.Footnote ⁴² A similar issue of incommensurability existed regarding food consumption data, which is also crucial for making the object of hidden hunger actionable. As pointed out in a WHO Bulletin: “data on global patterns of dietary habits, as well as differences by population characteristics are not well established.”Footnote ⁴³ Such discrepancies and lack of homogeneity in measures and methods was largely seen by IOs as an obstacle to validating knowledge about hidden hunger across jurisdictions.

In response to the perceived lack of uniformization, IOs undertook different activities to universalize standards on diets and food intake. In 1949, the FAO/WHO Expert Committee on Nutrition was established to set references for nutritional politics and health standards.Footnote ⁴⁴ Although the committee was set up to provide technical advice to FAO/WHO secretariat, it also played a key role in insulating these two UN agencies from the politics of their member countries. From the very beginning the Joint Expert Committee expressed its wish to introduce an international codex of analytical methods that would assist scientists to ensure the generation of “uniform and comparable” data regarding the vitamin content of foods and diets.Footnote ⁴⁵ Nowadays, the overarching framework governing FAO/WHO stipulates that all experts chosen must demonstrate impartiality and objectivity in their assessment.Footnote ⁴⁶ Furthermore, a core tenet guiding joint WHO/FAO expert committees on nutrition is the principle of “neutrality,” with their guidance mandated to be grounded solely in scientific evidence.Footnote ⁴⁷

During the same period, the WHO launched efforts to assemble a Global Database on Child Growth and Malnutrition with the aim of collecting, standardizing, and sharing child anthropometric data (indicators typically pertain to individuals’ height and weight). The FAO also launched its Global Database on Food Consumption to standardize the number and proportion of people in each country who consume “insufficient” dietary energy.Footnote ⁴⁸ Although FAO had been publishing “World Food Surveys” and “Food Balance Sheets,” there was a need to further “strengthen micronutrient surveillance capabilities and activities by devising indicators to monitor strategies for achieving national goals related to coverage, compliance and effectiveness in targeted populations.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Among the efforts to quantify food consumption and nutrient intake was UNICEF’s Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS), a set of surveys that provided “internationally comparable and statistical data” compiled in more than 200 indicators on children and women.Footnote ⁵⁰ According to UNICEF, MICS has become the “largest source of statistically sound and international comparable data on children and women worldwide.”Footnote ⁵¹ By standardizing data collection, providing internationally comparable statistics, and strengthening surveillance capabilities to monitor strategies aimed at addressing malnutrition and dietary deficiencies globally, these initiatives were crucial in problematizing hidden hunger as something detached from specific social contexts.

Efforts to delineate hidden hunger as a matter of fact also involved the deployment of a wide array of technologies as well as the provision of training assistance, particularly in laboratory capacity to measure the recommended indicators.Footnote ⁵² In order to collect biochemical data on nutritional deficiencies, infrastructures such as laboratories that allow for the storage of specimens were essential. Similarly, the availability of instruments such as rapid test kits, used during face-to-face interviews in different household surveys, were key for “testing” the bioavailability and food composition.Footnote ⁵³ Additionally, analyzing vitamins in bodily fluids was another assessment method, which employed a spectrum of physical, chemical, and biological testing techniques to evaluate foodstuffs and ascertain their physiological effects and nutritional value of foods as sources of vitamins for human consumption.Footnote ⁵⁴

A final aspect that contributed to consolidating hidden hunger as a matter of fact involved its redefinition as a measurable economic concern. The link between economic competitiveness and hidden hunger was operated through the publication of studies that highlighted the impacts of hidden hunger on cognitive functioning, work capacity, and productivity, largely echoing dominant assumptions about development at the time.Footnote ⁵⁵ For micronutrient malnutrition to be quantified in economic terms, it needed to be turned into indicators that could be specified numerically. The most tangible exemplification of this “economized” definition of hidden hunger is known as the WHO disability-adjusted life year (DALY).Footnote ⁵⁶ DALY is a time-based statistical measure that combines years of life lost due to premature mortality and years of life lost due to time lived in states of less than full health, or years of healthy life lost due to disability.Footnote ⁵⁷ The study identified malnutrition as “the risk factor responsible for the greatest loss of DALYs.”Footnote ⁵⁸

Through the use of datasets, surveys, and numerical tools, IOs problematized hidden hunger in scientized and economized terms, or as an indisputable “matter of fact,” that could be known through objective and universally applicable markers that could travel beyond nation states. Backed by estimates of validity and reliability, hidden hunger appeared thus as an objective reality.Footnote ⁵⁹

Omissions and Erasures

Problematizing hidden hunger as an exogenous object to be measured and apprehended through quantification is far from being a neutral exercise. As any “universalizing” attempt, it comes with its own erasures. A statistician working for UNICEF highlighted the significant challenges associated with collecting data on hidden hunger, especially in countries located in Africa, Asia, and certain parts of Latin America.Footnote ⁶⁰ Due to the lack of available national surveys in these regions, statisticians tasked with modeling the data make inferences about these regions based on data from neighboring countries where such information is accessible. This is necessary to generate “reliable global estimates” that transcend national borders, despite the fact that data from Global South regions is excluded. On some other occasions, the problem does not come from the lack of data but from what IO staff refer to as “bad quality data” that countries, mainly from the Global South, provide to the IOs’ secretariats.Footnote ⁶¹ As the UNICEF statistician added, in such scenarios, this data cannot be included in the statistical models as it does not fit the criteria for quality.Footnote ⁶² This statement shows that the numbers and data aggregated, mainly from the Global North, thus become the authoritative account of “the food problem” and of what the Global South “lacks.” A peasant from a grassroots organization in Mexico also pointed out:

Additionally, defining hidden hunger as a matter of fact always entails drawing a sharp boundary between those with the capacity to diagnose, evaluate, and solve deficiencies and those who are the target of interventions. This echoes what Grotluschen and Buddeberg call “southering” – which means defining Global South countries in terms of what they lack while exposing them to a pronounced deficit perspective.Footnote ⁶⁴ Within the dominant approach to hidden hunger people credentialed as experts such as IO staff and statisticians – and not the women who are responsible for feeding families or those who suffer from hunger – are the ones who “know” the problem and hence can prescribe solutions for the malnourished.Footnote ⁶⁵ This narrow conception also evades a social view of hunger and malnutrition that would include macroeconomic and political issues of poverty, inequality, and marginality. For decades, agroecology movements, peasants, and grassroots organizations have emphasized the connections between industrial food production methods and the increasing levels of hunger worldwide.Footnote ⁶⁶ While some of the most prominent multilateral institutions at the global level recognize the importance of such perspectives, they have largely remained at the margins.Footnote ⁶⁷

Therefore, addressing hidden hunger through a scientific account of “missing” nutrients evades a social view.Footnote ⁶⁸ Hidden hunger, understood a matter of fact, de-roots food not only from its cultural richness and its sensual and practical dimensions but also from the broader contexts in which it is produced.Footnote ⁶⁹

Acting upon Hidden Hunger: Political Palliatives?

Nowadays hunger (including hidden hunger) is treated as a scientific matter, mainly concerned with diet quality and objectively measurable nutrient/caloric intake, a paradigm that historians have also referred to as “nutritionism”.Footnote ⁷⁰ When hunger is predominantly addressed by focusing on the nutrient content of food, only certain “magic bullet” solutions become viable.Footnote ⁷¹ Although there is a widespread consensus that acknowledges that interventions focusing on “food systems” could be long-term solutions to hidden hunger, those seems to have received the least attention in the past decades.Footnote ⁷² The rationale behind these asymmetries often stems from an argument about knowledge, attributing the marginalization of socio-economic interventions to the purported “lack” of data or evidence.Footnote ⁷³

Currently, food fortification or vitamin supplementation are the most celebrated way of addressing hidden hunger, despite the fact that many other longer-term strategies are also available.Footnote ⁷⁴ For example, the World Bank has, in many iterations, emphasized the potential of food fortification, stating that “no other technology offers as large an opportunity to improve lives at such low cost and in such a short time.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Other influential actors of the global food and nutrition community, such as the Consultative Group for Agricultural Research and its “Micronutrients Project,” have echoed the sentiment that such interventions are efficient as they have the advantage of treating “the symptoms rather than the underlying causes of micronutrient deficiencies.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Biofortification as a solution to the problem of hidden hunger, therefore, allows the international community to address malnutrition without having to completely rethink the real roots causes of hunger.

Over the past decades, IOs have undertaken numerous projects based on fortifying food with isolated nutrients. Under the “Brighter Futures” initiative, a program funded by the Gates Foundation, UNICEF has conducted large-scale fortification projects in several countries.Footnote ⁷⁷ Similarly, the WHO has also provided extensive guidance to countries on the use of micronutrient powders, which are single‐dose packets containing multiple vitamins and minerals that can be sprinkled onto semi‐solid food. Such powders have been promoted as a “proven” strategy to combat this form of undernutrition.Footnote ⁷⁸ Other organizations working in close partnerships with IOs have also been established to conduct large-scale fortification programs in several countries. One of such initiative is the Micronutrient Initiative (later renamed Nutrition International), which since its inception in the 1992 Montreal Hidden Hunger summit has emphasized the provision of market-based interventions through the delivery of isolated nutrients such as vitamins and minerals.Footnote ⁷⁹ According to its website, the organization works to “deliver the greatest nutrition impact at the lowest cost.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In 2008, Nutrition International supported the WHO Department of Nutrition for Health and Development in enhancing its capacity to provide “evidence-based” nutrition interventions.Footnote ⁸¹ For that purpose, Nutrition International facilitated the meetings of the WHO’s Nutrition Guidance Expert Advisory Group and its activities related to fortification.Footnote ⁸² Similarly, Nutrition International was part of the “core group” that significantly influenced the policy-making process that resulted in the publication of one of the most important WHO/FAO fortification guidelines.Footnote ⁸³

While some of these programs have been key to addressing hunger and malnutrition, scholars argue that “top-down nutrient-specific” interventions alone do not “solve” the problem of hidden hunger, as they claim.Footnote ⁸⁴ Some researchers have found that food fortification programs often tend to overestimate the magnitude of the problem in Global South countries. When such programs are implemented by IOs on a large scale, they also tend to ignore the eco-social specificities of countries as well as the socio-economic determinants of hunger and malnutrition.Footnote ⁸⁵ In Colombia, for example, micronutrient powder supplementation was not the most adequate way of tackling hidden hunger.Footnote ⁸⁶ Another challenge is that, because fortified foods are more costly, they may be beyond the reach of people who are at the greatest risk of deficiencies and, instead, tend to most benefit the people who need them least.Footnote ⁸⁷

Despite the acknowledgment in recent years that food fortification and supplementation fail to address the root causes of hunger, the international community continues to portray them as some of the only “evidence-based” solutions. This was the case during the 2021 United Nations Foods Systems Summit, where “scaling up” biofortified crops was heralded as a “game-changing solution.” The summit emphasized that, in order to deploy large-scale fortification programs, “market forces will be harnessed and leveraged” to ensure the success of this “cost-effective” intervention mostly in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The tendency to understand nutrition as a medical problem mainly stemming from a lack of nutrients consumption has several implications. On the one hand, when food is mainly seen as a chemical compound, it can easily be treated as a commodity that is sold and consumed, a frame that has largely served the commercial interests of industries based in Global North countries, which market food as a commodity delivering health promises.Footnote ⁸⁸ At the global level, the agroindustrial and pharmaceutical complex have indeed largely benefited from this narrow meaning attributed to hunger and have used nutritional “deficits” as a goldmine offering ample market opportunities.Footnote ⁸⁹

More generally, such a reductive problematization of hidden hunger, and food in general, puts increasing pressure on individuals to take charge of their health.Footnote ⁹⁰ Several programs are now being conducted in countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, or Bangladesh to address hidden hunger and malnutrition in children through the selling of “Sprinkles,” a manufactured package of micronutrients delivered through markets.Footnote ⁹¹ When hunger is construed as an individual concern, with all attention directed towards the consumer phase of the issue, the responsibility for “solving” it falls upon individuals. Through the purchase of nutrient-enriched food, or vitamins, individuals are tasked with bearing the responsibility of addressing unprecedented levels of global hunger.

Conclusion

In this chapter, I explored the ways in which different UN agencies, the WHO, the FAO, and UNICEF have problematized hidden hunger as an indisputable “matter of fact.” By assembling a significant body of biochemical knowledge about malnutrition these institutions gave the object an aura of naturalness and objectivity. On the one hand, through data aggregation, surveys, and technologies, hidden hunger was defined as a problem stemming from a “deficit” in nutrient consumption in Global South countries. On the other hand, hidden hunger was defined by UN agencies in a highly economized way, placing emphasis on its measurable impact on economic competitiveness and the productivity of nations.

However, akin to any universalizing endeavor, this way of approaching hunger was not only exclusionary but also restricted the spectrum of possible responses and policy options. The chapter elucidated how the dominant problematization of hidden hunger as a problem of missing nutrients has largely authorized and validated short-term political actions, such as food fortification and vitamin supplementation. These responses functioned more as political palliatives than as transformative solutions addressing the root causes of hunger such as inequality, trade regimes, lack of access, environmental degradation, and industrial agriculture.

This chapter has highlighted that the ways in which IOs know and address problems is therefore never functional. Producing knowledge about a given issue and stressing how to “best” approach it is always an exclusionary practice that prioritizes certain voices at the expense of others. This brings a subtle but profound change in the ways in which we think about IOs’ daily work and their power to shape governance practices. As this chapter has emphasized, it is by studying knowledge-making processes behind global problems that one can better understand who has authority to govern and why, and how boundaries and hierarchies are established, maintained, and potentially transformed.