Institutionalised ignorance in policy and regulation

Contemporary governance heavily relies on scientific knowledge production, be it in regulating chemicals, addressing climate change, monitoring pollution, or public health surveillance. But as science and technology studies (STS) scholarship shows, there is another side to knowledge production, namely: non-knowledge and ignorance. Like knowledge production, this is not a straightforward process. Knowledge may be lacking, forgotten, or not-yet-produced; and some actors will gain from not knowing. In turn, this makes it challenging to hold accountable those who do not know or who ignore. This special issue demonstrates how ignorance and non-knowledge rely on but cannot be reduced to the doings and sayings of individual actors – be it of politicians, administrators, or scientific expert committees. Instead, we view ignorance as normalized, even as an everyday feature of governance. We seek to make visible what we term institutionalized forms of ignorance.

This analytical starting point differs from the current cultural narrative of post-truth. Such a narrative suggests that trust in institutions and their expertise is under threat, partly by promoting illegitimate knowledge sources (cf. Sheikh and Hoeyer, 2018, Bleicher, 2021, Parviainen et al., 2021). Socio-political instabilities and right-wing populism compound fears of lost institutional trust, aided by technological developments and interactions. In regard to the role of ignorance and non-knowledge, this post-truth framing has several limitations. First, it forgets the deep entanglements of modern ideas on knowledge and its institutions that have been ongoing since at least the second half of the twentieth century (cf. Rommetveit, 2022). Second, such fears focus on knowledge-claims that are demonstrably false (or at least rendered as such) but have been intentionally or accidentally promoted as if they were true. Conversely, non-knowledge as the absence of knowledge or information (rather than falsehood) in policymaking and regulation, has received little attention in political discourse and research on governance in knowledge societies (Innerarity, 2015).

Ignorance and non-knowledge are closely related analytical categories; they typically appear in conjunction with one another. At the same time, ignorance is often used as a broader category denoting the limits of knowing (see Gross, 2016, p. 68). Yet non-knowledge should not merely be understood ‘as unawareness or as the mere absence of knowledge, but rather as a specific kind of knowledge about what is not known’ (Gross, 2016, p. 388) – whether or not actors are aware of this. Addressing the function of ignorance and non-knowledge in governance is essential for holding policy actors accountable for their actions; likewise for highlighting wider institutional arrangements and developments that either legitimize, reject, or support information actors themselves may have produced (cf. Essén et al., 2022).

Institutionalized ignorance

This special issue focuses on institutionalized ignorance by asking: What role does ignorance play in governance, policy, and regulation? What implications does institutionalized ignorance have for public accountability?

Institutionalized ignorance warrants a definition: Such forms of ignorance and non-knowledge constitute normalized features of governance and thus often remain invisible. Also, institutionalized ignorance finds expression in governing practices, particularly in scientific areas, that are shaped by the historical trajectories of a given area of governance, such as environmental pollution or public health. In addition, institutionalization can take a variety of forms, be it established guidelines in organizations, legal regulations, or governance principles.

Consequently, this special issue focuses both on practices of how ignorance is made and how it remains in institutions. It is done against the background of growing research on ignorance and non-knowledge (as the natural flipside of knowledge) in several disciplines in the social sciences, humanities, and natural science fields, especially modeling. Besides this, an older tradition of studies in theology (cf. Duclow, 2006) as well as on secrecy and secret societies (Simmel, 1906), early research in the twentieth century focused on the social function of not knowing (Moore and Tumin, 1949; Schneider, 1962).

As the starting point of this scholarship, ignorance is not merely a consequence of our limited capacities as knowers or an innate state of not-yet-knowing. Nor is ignorance merely an absence of knowledge or a by-product of knowledge practices (Smithson, 1985). These classical views support the observation that institutional decision-making often happens under varying degrees of not knowing. This position also departs from the still commonly held view (e.g. Proctor and Schiebinger, 2008) known as agnotology or the study of non-knowledge, in which non-knowledge is seen as inherently negative and detrimental, albeit structurally and even purposefully produced. As Frickel and Edwards (2014) put it, agnotology tends to rely on ‘a conspiratorial logic that ties the production of ignorance to the specific political, economic, or professional interests of powerful organizations and individuals’ intent on keeping certain research results private’ (2014, p. 216). The interdisciplinary field of ignorance studies challenges the implicit assumption of many agnotologists that ignorance should always be eliminated since it results from wrong practices or is deliberately misconstrued. Instead, scholars of ignorance point to the regularity and even orderliness of using knowledge gaps in any decision-making process (McGoey, 2012, Gross and Bleicher, 2013, Knudsen and Kishik, 2022).

Thus understood, knowledge and non-knowledge should not be conceptualized as competing perspectives. Nor should they be understood as the respective end points of optimistic versus pessimistic variants of social analysis. Instead, non-knowledge needs to be seen as a normal institutional feature on the same basis as knowledge (Paul & Haddad 2019, 2023). Ignorance studies understand ignorance in a non-pejorative way and potentially as a productive force in society. In the same way that knowledge can be a source of power and action (good or bad), ignorance can be a source of possibility, fostering new types of enlightenment, especially when uncertainty becomes acknowledged – thus spurring new forms of inquiry. One of the key insights of ignorance studies is that not-knowing should not be maligned as an epistemological deficit per se (cf. Gross and McGoey, 2023). This approach has been followed through in a number of empirical studies. As these have shown, people who know how to specify and include ignorance in their decision-making can be better equipped in negotiations, which is most evident through institutions.

As a challenge here, it is often impossible to attribute ignorance to individual, clearly definable decisions in institutional settings in policy and regulation. Indeed, it makes little sense to frame many of the institutionalized problems of today’s societies (ranging from war, pollution, pandemics or terrorist attacks) as a result of decisions by individual decision-makers. Instead, they can be considered as the result of complex processes and ongoing interactions between socio-economic and cultural practices in and outside of institutional settings.

For example, Vanderslott (2021) argues, through the case of tropical diseases, that this policy problem has been constructed through shifting attitudes reflecting changing knowledge practices of health and disease. For coming to grips with knowledge and non-knowledge one can analytically divide active non-knowledge from passive non-knowledge. The former is to be understood as a readily known and specified form of ignorance, an awareness of certain issues that are unknown but are used for further planning and activity. The latter, by contrast, points to forms of the unknown that may be known and specified but that are either rendered unimportant or are perhaps even dangerous for the pursuit of new knowledge. In short, this points to strategies that can be distinguished in terms of the desirability and non-desirability of accepting, reacting or adapting to not knowing in the context of institutional practices and decision-making (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Ignorance and non-knowledge as institutional strategies.

Knowledge, ignorance, and institutions

From the above starting points, this special issue brings together papers that focus on institutionalized forms of ignorance in policy and regulation. To be sure, institutions and practices of institutionalization take shape differently across regulatory contexts, featuring different degrees of intent, temporality, and practices of accountability. With this interest in variation in mind, the papers address forms of ignorance in distinct ways, along four axes: (i) the political strategies of institutionalized ignorance as part of how institutions operate, contingent on their goals and agencies, (ii) the temporality of ignorance, (iii) the scale of enquiry to view institutionalized ignorance, and (iv) their stakes for public accountability.

Political strategies

First, regarding institutionalized ignorance as political strategies, the articles encompass a considerable spectrum of intention and agency that speak to a wider body of scholarship. STS has traditionally been interested in knowledge-claims, how these are used to justify action and inaction, and how these claims compete with and contradict each other. Long-standing sociological research on uncertainty and its framing has generated a host of case studies, ranging from the production of uncertainty through artifacts of not-knowing for Papua New Guinean biomedicine (Street, 2011) to the framing of uncertainty for nanotechnology (Arnaldi and Muratorio, 2013). Uncertainty always implies non-knowledge that is rendered unfortunate, dangerous or otherwise negative. By contrast, ignorance can also be connected to a state that is protective, safe, and even cushioning (see Gross 2016).

Studies on the role of ignorance in bureaucracy (Best, 2012; Boswell & Badenhoop, 2021; Paul & Haddad 2019), secrecies in marketing (Hall et al., 2015), and regulation (McGoey, 2012) address the cultivation of strategic unknowns as a resource both for maintaining and coping with power relations. These strategic unknowns can function to deflect certain forms of knowledge, obscuring and concealing some, while magnifying others, and thus increasing the scope of what remains unintelligible (McGoey, 2012). Deliberate creation of uncertainty and ambiguity about (side-) effects from tobacco use, and certain pharmaceutical products are often-cited examples. However, the strategic use of ignorance also includes practices of information or data, such as refusing the collection or systematic use of data (eg Leonelli et al., 2017; Lee, 2022), where disclosure would increase individual vulnerability, e.g. concerning sexual orientation or medical history.

Temporality

Second, beyond the question on whether ignorance is actively used and the question of intentionality or non-intentionality of not knowing, the contributions to this special issue vary in their findings regarding the temporality of not knowing, that is assessments of whether the unknowns are provisional, not yet known, or whether it may be impossible to eliminate them within a foreseeable period. Institutionalized ignorance can appear as unknowns that either are not explored further because they cannot be coped with within a certain time frame or are rendered dangerous or forbidden knowledge in Kempner’s terms (Kempner and Boske, 2011). This will have long-term implications for how institutions cope with the limits of knowledge and will therefore also limit the kind of political and regulatory action that can be taken (or not) in particular policy areas.

Scale of enquiry

Third, and as a result of these varying assumptions of the intention behind ignorance, we find different levels or scales of enquiry towards or by institutions. McGoey (2009) distinguishes between ignorance as individual acts of ignoring and their responses, such as with resistance against institutions, and ideological positions or policy perspectives. In philosophy, ignorance as a matter of individual reasoning is an established research tradition in logic, a subfield of philosophy (Rescher, 2009). Organization studies and critical management studies, on the other hand, have highlighted how organizations are seen to produce ignorance through compartmentalization and structural secrecy (Croissant, 2014; van Portfliet & Fanchini, forthcoming).

Other research areas concentrate on broad scales, at economic, political, cultural, and ideological levels, finding contributions from postcolonial studies and critical race theory. Ignorance is seen here to produce epistemic injustice (Fricker, 2007) wherever knowledge of members of oppressed groups is ignored or denied and to the specific kinds of systemic ignorance perpetuating racial inequality (Sullivan & Tuana, 2007; Mills, 2015) and gender-based discrimination (Flear, 2020).

Public accountability

Finally, this special issue sheds new light on the outcomes of institutionalized ignorance on public accountability. While accountability is a contested concept, we use it here as a normative term that pertains to the need to assess ‘the state of affairs or the performance of an actor’ (Bovens, 2007) based on values (…) (and) social norms about what is considered good conduct or acceptable performance (Sinclair, 1995). In contemporary democracies, accountability is not merely a feature of institutional design, but a practice, too.

Research on institutionalized ignorance can help hold regulators accountable for knowing and doing, and for not knowing and not doing. In this way, our special issue departs from the predominant focus on ignorance as a resource for industry and non-governmental actors. Instead, we direct attention to various forms of ignorance in governance, policy, and public administration. As Best has found, ‘bureaucracies seek not only to contain ambiguity through various forms of quantification and standardization, but also to foster it’ (Best, 2012, p. 84; Paul & Haddad 2019).

This perspective resonates with and adds to the emphasis that interpretive policy analysis (Dodge & Metze, 2017) has put on uncertainty as a distinct feature of governance that can inspire creativity and new forms of participation, therefore enhancing accountability. But it is also important not to foreclose action when forms of knowledge become forgotten, forbidden, or archived. Overall, this special issue makes clear that institutionalized ignorance is a frequent and often invisible feature of governance that can be just as harmful as the ignorance we find in industry practices.

To conclude, in instances where institutional ignorance becomes explicit and part of a normative political orientation, it can serve the greater good, such as when the precautionary principle becomes invoked or when it is used as a coping mechanism for information overload. In such cases, it can offer room for creativity and problem-solving (Smithson, 2008). Institutionalized ignorance, on the other hand, is less explicit, often invisible, and affects accountability (e.g. Boudia & Jas, 2014). The papers we outline below make both conceptual and empirical contributions to understanding institutionalized ignorance and its implications.

Understanding institutionalized ignorance: empirical case studies

Our agenda in presenting the articles that follow is two-fold: First, contributions aim to reveal the politico-administrative results of institutionalized ignorance and their implications for how stakeholders can gain accountability, and the kind of action and inaction that is enabled by strategic ignorance in governmental agencies and bureaucracies. While knowledge is presented as a compelling reason for action, inaction too can be pursued through ignorance, and ignorance a strategy for inaction and the avoidance of accountability. As the collection shows, intentionality and willfulness is at times indiscernible from historical path dependency of politico-administrative practices that produce ignorance. Second, the articles inform the current discourse on the opportunities and pitfalls (with related promissory discourses) of data practices and evidence claims, in accounting, recording, quantifying, and standardizing, with a keen eye on social and political processes that involve active or passive ignorance. In the past, STS has added to our understanding of the relation between knowledge-claims, action, and competition. Yet institutionalized forms of ignorance in policy and regulation have not been a focus of attention. The papers in this special issue highlight the specificities of institutionalized ignorance across organizations, regulatory areas, and countries.

Aarden’s (2022) original focus was not ignorance, but he shows the process through which ignorance becomes invisible once it is institutionalized. His analysis addresses the case of the Million Death Study (MDS), a major effort in India to improve representative national mortality statistics and thus knowledge as to causes of death across the population. MDS serves as a model for reducing global ignorance on causes of death and this case demonstrates how ignorance can provide an analytical lens to understand data-centric and evidence-based global health. Different forms of ignorance come to matter along the entire pathway of the MDS in its institutional architecture and practices, where diagnostic accuracy ultimately gives way to actionability and the aim to improve health policy. Aarden’s study moreover points to the influence of global health actors in co-shaping what knowledge becomes valuable or not.

Dedieu’s (2022) analysis differs in its scale as it focusses on an organization, rather than a scientific study. He uses the sociology of organizations to help understand the institutionalization of secrecy as a particular form of ignorance. In his case study of French pesticide regulation, institutionalization takes place in complex inter-organizational practices involving various actors, ranging from regulators to their subjects, to private actors, who do not directly collude with one another but can potentially produce different forms of secrecy. This study of French pesticide regulation demonstrates that the main regulator, the French Food Safety Agency (Agence nationale de sécurité sanitaire de l'alimentation, ANSES), users of pesticides, and farmers, develop their own subcultures of secrecy to create ignorance and conceal information about their practices. They do so for different reasons: the regulatory agency aims to control information to preserve its scientific reputation and does so by making their scientific opinions seem indisputable. Farmers, in turn, conceal regulatory fraud to protect their own economic interests and, in this way, regulatory and industry actors support each other tacitly. Ignorance, here, is then clearly more intentional than in other cases and finds expression in historically established institutional practices. In this sense, the paper furthermore adds to our understanding of the temporal dimension of institutionalized ignorance.

Similarly, for Boullier and Henry (2022), their ethnographic study of expert panels charged with assessing chemicals is a paradigmatic instance of institutionalized ignorance. They find that regulatory science tends to favor industry-sponsored studies, obscuring alternative forms of knowledge that could have been useful for regulation. The regulatory science game, as they call it, and its implicit rules limit experts’ capacity to challenge the dominant rules of expertise and the relevance of data. The paper weaves together agnotology, the political economy of science and the social study of toxins. Looking at two expert panels charged with implementing the EU REACH (Registration, Evaluation, Authorization of Chemicals) guidelines, the authors lay out the concept of toxic ignorance, providing a fruitful way of exploring how ignorance is enacted in the public assessment of chemicals. Here, ignorance is maintained in concrete scientific advisory practices and facilitated by a path-dependent institutional setup. Like Aarden’s contribution, their focus sheds light on the intricate role of evidentiary data practices in the production of institutional ignorance. In addition, the study highlights that intention cannot be understood in a binary fashion – i.e. ignorance being willfully produced or not. Instead, we find a broad spectrum of institutionalized practices with varying degrees of intentionality. The scale of analysis used in this contribution – the focus on scientific committees – points to the value of studying practices as representative of more general institutionalized ignorance.

Papers in this special issue also add to our understanding of the implications of institutionalized ignorance for public accountability in cases where such ignorance leads to non-action. Through the case of fenceline communities in the United States (US), Ottinger explores how those living next to petrochemical facilities have conducted and advocated for air monitoring since the 1990s, highlighting gaps in environmental regulators’ monitoring programs. Citizen science is a valuable source of data for filling such gaps, but it also reveals regulators’ hermeneutic ignorance, in a lack of appropriate concepts, categories, and metrics for understanding the temporality of air pollution as experienced by communities. As Ottinger (2022) argues, citizen science could play a crucial role in addressing this ignorance by providing more adequate epistemic resources to understand environmental harms, the immediacy of air pollution and the chronic nature of unpredictable spikes in pollution. Therefore, regulators need to not just see communities as providers of data but as being able to challenge the very fundamental ways the regulators think about what to measure and how to measure. Beyond the paper’s contribution to the role of evidentiary practices, it adds nuance to our understanding of how different actors co-determine what counts as good enough knowledge – or what counts as knowledge gaps to be filled, for that matter.

The paper by Fonseca et al. (2022) is more explicit in its understanding of intention and agency. The authors shed light on how ‘Bolsonarism’, the political movement supporting right-wing populist Jair Bolsonaro, unfolds on digital platforms in Brazil. The paper engages with everyday production of institutionalized ignorance in the context of COVID-19 on digital platforms that are operated by Bolsonaro’s supporters – employing boundary work as an orienting concept to explain institutionalized ignorance through an active, even willful, exclusion of uncomfortable knowledge. Through a collection of posts in favor of Hydroxychloroquine, the widely discredited COVID-19 treatment, they explore the emergence of what they call ‘patriotic science’. Patriotic science is an alternative model of science and knowledge production to that of mainstream science – which purports to privilege caring and first-hand experience rather more standard ways of evidence adjudication, such as through clinical trials. They argue that such patriotic science seeks to legitimize the president’s approach to managing COVID-19 and is both a cause and effect of a broader phenomenon of institutionalized ignorance.

Conclusions and further issues

Together, the contributions to this special issue identify a range of examples of how cultures of non-knowledge in institutions affect or limit institutional accountability. How institutions portray ignorance as ‘evidence’ or as the absence of evidence, and how this was publicly discussed and contested, was central. What the authors uncovered was a diversity of (non-)knowledge practices contingent on regulatory context, regulatory field, and stakes that actors hold (e.g. being affected personally or affected economically and so on). There were some activities in these papers, such as citizen science for soil contamination or any kind of pollution that is not typically connected with regulation. Here, there is potential for the inclusion of activists or DIY scientists to counter institutionalized ignorance. Yet they may resist institutionalization from fear of becoming co-opted.

Therefore, this special issue shows the value and utility of analyzing the processes by which ignorance is hidden or made invisible in processes of institutionalization, which has diverse expressions. It remains a challenge – certainly from an interpretive, constructivist perspective – to empirically grasp actors’ awareness of and intentions behind their practices. For instance, why do French regulators continue to favor industry-sponsored research? What explains US regulators’ neglect of community-based citizen science? First, we propose, much of these behaviors are due to institutional inertia and the symbolic, political, and financial costs of innovating established knowledge practices. Ambiguity holds value for administrators and decision-makers in that it legitimates inaction (Best, 2012). State actors, as Boswell and Badenhoop (2021) point out, are reluctant to produce knowledge on policy issues that they are unlikely to solve.

Second, we find that ignorance is, in fact, a normal feature of institutions to some extent and thus an inescapable part of modernization processes. Bureaucracies are often technocratic in nature: note-taking, recording, and filing are practices which are necessarily designed for curating, remembering, and using knowledge. Yet these same practices can also enable forgetting, shelving, and (selective) archiving of knowledge. Note-taking does not necessarily entail taking note. Although bureaucratic practices may not be apolitical, the technical practices of archiving knowledge often lead to the non-use of knowledge. This non-use can become so normalized that its political nature becomes invisible (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Noteworthy knowledge: Recording, shelving, and archiving as political practices.

Third, although ignorance is often systematic rather than accidental, this need not mean that it is purely intentional. Thus, institutional design matters for how knowledge practices can contribute to accountability or lack thereof. For example, environmental scientists have learnt to work with and not only against non-knowledge and uncertainty. Forecasting and modeling is often based on thin data and uncertainty, but for scientists to say so is risky and implies reputational and political costs. Can scientists then be held accountable for not problematizing their non-knowledge? What role can publics play in holding scientists and decision-makers accountable? Understanding ignorance as a normal(ized) feature of scientific and politico-administrative institutions may help address this impasse and create a level-playing field for scientists, affected communities, and decision-makers to address the key issues of the current era, ranging from human-made climate change to public health emergencies.

In light of our focus on institutionalized forms of ignorance, however, we do not want to overemphasize continuity and path dependency (Pierson, 2004). To highlight change and contestation, future research could address more acute projects of (non-)knowledge making that emerge in recent appeals to evidence-based policymaking (Straßheim & Kettunnen, 2014) and dissecting data measurement practices (Adams, 2016). These appeals are no longer merely technocratic projects. Instead, we are now witnessing calls for action from both affected communities (such as sufferers of what has become known as long COVID) and scientists (such as members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change).

But we argue that such actions should be based on evidence from below, evidence that takes uncertainty into account, and evidence that should work in the interest of a global community, rather than in the interest of established institutions. For the study of ignorance, this means a wider purview of what sorts of actors engage in knowledge practices (e.g. patient activists, newly emerging communities, and groups of scientists), what methods they use in doing so (e.g. social media activism and modeling climate change, respectively), and with what effect on accountability. In this sense, accountability has become a less formal feature of regulatory institutions. Rather it is a networked, interactive, and at times only loosely coordinated, emerging set of practices that warrants scholarly attention in STS.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) [Elise Richter Grant V561] and builds on a workshop organized by Katharina Paul at the University of Vienna in November 2018. Open access funded by FWF-Austrian Science Fund. We thank Gwen Ottinger and the editors of this journal for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this introductory paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katharina T. Paul

Katharina T. Paul is Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science, University of Vienna. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Amsterdam and joined the University of Vienna in 2013. In 2021, she was awarded a START prize by the FWF – Austrian Science Fund and is currently PI in a six-year FWF-funded project titled “Valuing Vaccination: A multi-sited policy valuography”.

Samantha Vanderslott

Samantha Vanderslott is a health sociologist. She is a University Research Lecturer and leads the Vaccines and Society Unit hosted by Oxford Vaccine Group at the University of Oxford. She holds a PhD from UCL (University College London) and researches public attitudes and decisions on vaccination, along with public policy and media representation of vaccines, across countries and historically.

Matthias Gross

Matthias Gross is a sociologist and science studies scholar. He is Professor at the Institute of Sociology at Friedrich Schiller University Jena and at Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) in Leipzig, where he is also head of the Department of Urban and Environmental Sociology. Together with Linsey McGoey he is editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Ignorance Studies (second edition, 2023).