Politics of knowledge use: epistemic governance in marine spatial planning

We examined the application of knowledge in land-use planning as epistemic governance and explored how actors wield institutional power while legitimising the use of knowledge. By applying a neo-institutionalist analytical framework of epistemic governance to discourse analysis, we investigated how actors invoke institutions of science and law while constructing a legitimate rationality. Specifically, we asked how new knowledge of underwater marine areas was invited into a marine spatial planning pilot in Finland. We determined that, while legitimising the use of new marine-life knowledge, the actors invoked law and science by granting the new knowledge various and intermingled meanings that disambiguated and depoliticised nature values into tangible measures. Moreover, uncertainties about the new knowledge spurred doubts which facilitated a stronger political approach that applied precautions. We suggest that in the regulative context of planning there is an institutional demand for techno-legal rationality in which the institutional appropriateness of knowledge is crucial. The lack of legitimate ontological authority allows for a political yet institutionally fit-for-purpose interpretation of reality. Thus, our study contributes to the literature on planning as governance and provides insights of the politics of knowledge use in planning as something not necessarily strategic and conscious, but also routine and institutional.