Original Article Re-interpreting knowledge, expertise and EU governance: The cases of social policy and security research policy Emma Carmel Department of Social and Policy Sciences, University of Bath, Bath BA2 7AY, UK. E-mail: E.K.Carmel@bath.ac.uk Abstract This article examines how ideas about what is to be governed, how and by whom, are made sense of in European Union governance. It interrogates the complex relationships of knowledge generation, knowledge circulation, expertise and policy- making in two contrasting policy areas. In social policy, the emergence and later privileging of a discourse of the ‘social investment state’ are traced through the ‘linked ecologies’ (Abbott, 2005) of formal ‘European’ social science research, academic politicians and the Open Methods of Co-ordination. In security research policy, me ¯tis, or practical knowledge (Scott, 1998), has enabled major European corporations to assert a privileged discursive and political position in the ‘linked ecologies’ of formal sci- entific research, product development and EU policymaking. These two cases demon- strate the partial integration of elite discourses with scientific rationalities into EU governance. In each case, the generation of knowledge and expertise is articulated in governance practices in ways that generate politically specific and limited – but not the same – versions of ‘the’ EU to be governed. Comparative European Politics (2016). doi:10.1057/s41295-016-0079-1 Keywords: knowledge; expertise; security policy; social policy; EU governance Introduction This article 1 explores how European Union governance is conceptualized in the knowledge and expertise produced through or about the EU and argues that such conceptualizations are significant in explaining political and policy practices in the Union. It explains the ‘ideas used to govern Europe’ (Bevir and Phillips, this issue, p. xx) in two policy domains: social policy and security research policy. The ‘webs of belief’ which shape social and political action in these contrasting policy areas Ó 2016 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1472-4790 Comparative European Politics www.palgrave.com/journals