Maurice Strong as a distinct epistemic actor: a new perspective on his international influence
A Working Paper written by Sabine Selchow | 2026
Maurice Strong was an important international actor of the second half of the 20th and first decade of the 21st century. His role in the development of international environmental governance through the 1972 Stockholm Conference, UNEP and the Rio Earth Summit is well documented. Scholarship has explained his influence through his political and organisational skills, his extensive networks and his capacity to mobilise people and resources across institutional worlds. More recent work has drawn attention to Strong’s role in the production of environmental imaginaries and the symbolic construction of the international world. I add another dimension to this picture. I argue that part of Strong’s significance as an international actor lies in the particular kind of epistemic actor he was. Grounded in a study of his self-understanding as an international actor, I show that Strong privileged experience, observation, practical judgement and demonstrated capacity over formal education, professional credentials and specialised expertise as grounds for authoritative international knowledge. His epistemic stance also gave particular value to the capacity to connect knowledge gained across different institutional worlds. Business, development, diplomacy, environmental politics and international organisations were, for Strong, interconnected sites of knowledge rather than separate domains of expertise. Yet, Strong was not anti-elitist or anti-intellectual; his epistemic stance was anti-credentialist. The epistemic position of international actors generally matters because epistemic authority is a crucial part of international world-making; ideas about what counts as legitimate knowledge shape who is legitimate to define problems and solutions and exercise judgement over them. In the case of Strong we see the relevance of this insight when we look at his ideas of the ‘new UN’. Reading these ideas through my provided lens makes us aware that his epistemic stance shaped his institutional vision. Given that, in 1997, Strong was appointed by Kofi Annan as the executive coordinator for UN reform, this is worth understanding.
Selchow, Sabine Ulrike, Maurice Strong as a distinct epistemic actor: a new perspective on his international influence, EUI, HEC, Working Paper, 2026/08, ECOINT - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/96477
