Members of an epistemic community also share causal beliefs, which result from their analysis of practices that contribute to set of problems in their issue-area that then allow them to see the multiple links between policy and outcomes.
"[2]: 3 As discussed Haas's definitive text,[2] an epistemic community is made up of a diverse range of academic and professional experts, who are allied on the basis of four unifying characteristics: Thus, when viewed as an epistemic community, the overall enterprise of the expert members emerges as the product of a combination of shared beliefs and more subtle conformity pressures, rather than a direct drive for concurrence (Michael J. Mazarr).
Among these very notably are E. O. Wilson, as well as Ellen Dissanayake, an American historian of aesthetics who famously argued that almost all of our broadly shared conceptual metaphors centre on one basic idea of safety: that of "home".
Michel Foucault referred more elaborately to mathesis as a rigorous episteme suitable for enabling cohesion of a discourse and thus uniting a community of its followers.
The Columbia Basin Inter-Agency Committee was created by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt to coordinate the planning process.
However, it did not actually participate in the planning process, but rather, was the venue that the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation used to divide construction projects.
According to Robert Keohane they fill the absence of “a research program” [that shows] in particular studies that it can illuminate important issues in world politics,” (Adler/Haas 1992, 367).
Communities have indirect and direct roles in policy coordination by diffusing ideas and influencing the positions adopted.
Peter M. Haas argued “that epistemic communities help to explain the emergence and character of cooperation at the international level,” (Thomas 1997, 223).
This caused environmental decisions to go through the United Nations Environment Programme rather than through General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) who would normally dispute these issues.
An epistemic community helped identify issues and direct the parameters that provided outline for GATT and some free trade agreements.
In California, an ecological epistemic community succeeded in creating the Memorandum of Understanding Biological Diversity (MOU on Biodiversity).
[6] This affects their ability to define state interests and develop suitable solutions within cross-boundary environmental regulation.
[11] They can limit what would be preferable in terms of national interests, frame what issues are available for collective debate, and delimit the policy alternatives deemed possible.
[12] The epistemic community vision is institutionalised as a collective set of understandings reflected in any subsequent policy choices.
[2] Members of successful communities can become strong actors at the national and international level as decision-makers attach responsibility to their advice.
[6] Transboundary environmental problems require a unified response rather than patchwork policy efforts, but this is problematic due to enduring differences of state interest and concerns over reciprocity.
International cooperation is further facilitated if powerful states are involved, as a quasi-structure is created containing the reasons, expectations and arguments for coordination.
[12] Also, if epistemic community members have developed authoritative bureaucratic reputations in various countries, they are likely to participate in the creation and running of national and international institutions that directly pursue international policy coordination, for example, a regulatory agency, think tank or governmental research body.
Indeed, the solutions proposed by expert groups which are eventually adopted by policy makers are one but many that have been formulated by the scientific community.
For instance, the G7 "experts" would in fact be civil servants from the member-states of the organization, who therefore cannot claim the scientific legitimacy of researchers.
The experts are restricted to the limit of the tolerable in their own national context, which is also crucial in the adoption of the solutions they propose at the local level.