The conference ‘Epistemic Communities in Europe’ will focus on the contribution of a previously neglected non-governmental actor to transnational governance: epistemic communities. It wants to take up the current discourse within social sciences and other disciplines about the empirical, theoretical and analytical redefinition of the concept of epistemic communities. Different contributions have recently stressed the added value of the concept in order to grasp current developments in different policy areas within the European Union and other forms of European governance.

Three issues will be put in at the core of the conference:
- the internal structure of epistemic communities,
- the consequences of epistemic communities on local, national and European governance and
- the interactions between actors and institutions.

(1) With regard to the internal structure of epistemic communities the research mainly focused on communities of scientists and scientific expertise. Current research, however, assumes that epistemic communities can consist of people from different sectors such as the state, the civil society and the private sector. It goes beyond a strict separation between private and public actors and policy areas and thus enables us to analyse a broader range of relevant communities. It takes into account characteristics and condition of the internal structure of alleged heterogeneous actors, which were neglected so far. Although previous research points out implicitly the importance of factors like trust, close personal relations, solidarity or even friendship, these factors were hardly systematically examined.

(2) With regard to the consequences of epistemic communities’ activities on policy-making research has mainly focussed on their influence on state decision-makers. In the course of processes of privatisation and deregulation since the 1980s, however, more and more tasks were taken over by private actors and agencies, which increasingly regulate themselves. Therefore current research assumes that an epistemic community also impacts (in parts primarily) other nongovernmental actors. Thereby the relationship between epistemic communities and the addressee of the proposed regulations needs to be reassessed. In this context it will be asked, at which point in time epistemic communities will possess enough authority in order to be accepted as legitimated policy-makers or standard-setter.

(3) It can be assumed that manifold interactions between actors and institutions exist. The conference will, therefore, distinguish different institutional contexts in which epistemic communities interact. Especially the (mutual) interdependencies of institutional factors, the internal structure of the epistemic communities’, their individual members and their (policy) strategies were only rudimentarily examined by research.