Contestation and Contingency in Advisory Governance

This chapter offers an alternative to functional accounts of randomised control trials (RCTs) that dominate public administration and its academic literature. By decentring advisory governance, we the acknowledge indeterminacy and contingency of the claims RCTs can make to producing policy-relevant knowledge. Micro-level analysis of the advisory governance of bovine tuberculosis (BTB) in England demonstrates that the policy relevance of knowledge technologies cannot be reduced to a set of conditions that may be, or should be, present or absent. Relevance is made and re-made through narrative contests. RCTs, we suggest, may be especially vulnerable to such de-construction.