Claiming Knowledge

Abstract

I highlight the tendency of all actors, regardless of the narrative they adhere to, to place central emphasis on the value of scientific evidence and the hopes of evidence-based policymaking in regard to this issue. I drill down in this chapter into how these actors claim knowledge. What I reveal challenges prevailing assumptions, prominent especially among critical policy scholars in general (and equally prominent among critical scholars of obesity in particular), that such an orientation serves to ‘depoliticise’ this issue and render it a matter for technocratic problem-solving. In contrast, I highlight that the apparent ‘fetish’ for evidence does not negate other sources of knowledge, and that actors actually weave together normative claims, cultural wisdom, and practical (especially professional) experience. I also show that these actors are highly reflexive about their use of science and about the limits to evidence-based policymaking. Yet I maintain that the emphasis on evidence retains an important but largely unheralded downside—chiefly that it subordinates the lived experience of this issue and mutes or numbs the emotional side of this issue. This, I foreshadow, is especially important in the context of the stalemate over the evidence and the tendency to mute and moderate knowledge claims as they approach empowered sites of decision-making, covered in the two chapters to come.