The Once and Future Role of Policy Advice for Health Regulation by Experts and Advisory Committees

In many counties, there is a loose ecosystem of advisory committees, experts, lobbyists and interested groups that are variously used to provide governments with expert advice and input on matters of policy. This chapter focuses on how governments make use of expertise to inform health regulation, where the expertise comes from sources connected to, but somewhat on the periphery of, the formal processes of policy development through legislation or judicial review. Two examples are drawn upon from direct experience (and are therefore somewhat subjective): (1) the use of expert panels supported by scholarly academies that are organised to provide input to government; and (2) advisory committees established by government with a focus on the former US National Bioethics Advisory Commission. Both types play particular roles in the ecosystem of a country’s policy advice regime but have different features. There is a both a rich scholarly literature and a grey literature on other structures and examples. The main emphasis is that expert advice in its many iterations forms part of the regulatory apparatus that governments do make use of in developing regulation and other policy. However, these are often underappreciated and therefore difficult to assess with respect to impact.