Chaire de recherche du Canada en ÉPI
Team
Cynthia Couette is doing a PhD in cotutelle in Political Science at Laval University and in Regulation and Governance at the Australian National University under the supervision of Prof Jean-Frédéric Morin and Dr Nicholas Frank, respectively.
Her research interests revolve around the role of nonstate actors in the global governance of common goods, focusing on the global governance of health and space. Through her thesis, she looks at the expansion of the roles of public-private partnerships in global health responses. Through her other work, she studies questions in space governance around hybrid organizations, space debris governance, and interactions between the space infrastructure and planetary health equity.
Outside her PhD positions, Cynthia has been working for the chair's project The Polycentric Governance of the Earth's Orbital Space since 2021. She was first responsible for doing interviews before she undertook the coordination of the graphic visualization and analysis team. From March to October 2024, she also worked as Research Officer for the Australian Centre for Space Governance, where she was in charge of cleaning and analyzing data. Cynthia is also a researcher at the Australian Centre for Health Equity, a fellow of the Future Leaders Program of the Planetary Health Equity Hothouse, and a member of the Working Group on Earth-Space Governance from the Earth System Governance organization.
Before that, she completed her master's degree with research in International Studies (profile International Relations) at the Graduate School of International Studies, at Laval University. She also has a bachelor's degree in International Studies and Modern Languages, profile International Development.
Research interest
Global Governance
International Political Economy
Non-State Actors
Common Goods
Planetary Health Equity
Governance Networks
Teaching
Teaching Assistant for the course POL-1005 International Relations and the Challenges of Globalization
Peer-reviewed articles
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Beaumier, G., C. Couette & JF Morin (2024) "Hybrid organisations and governance systems: the case of the European Space Agency," Journal of European Public Policy, DOI: 10.1080/13501763.2024.2325647
The constitutive organisations of governance systems tend to multiply and diversify over time. In parallel, a tendency toward homophily favours the creation of clusters of homogeneous organisations. Yet, few systems drift to the point of disconnection or dislocation. Several remain sufficiently cohesive to allow adaptation and other complex properties to emerge. To maintain equilibrium between order and chaos, some organisations must create bridges between otherwise homogeneous groups. This paper argues that hybrid organisations are ideally suited for this role. By their nature, hybrids share characteristics with different types of organisations in global governance, allowing them to overcome strict homophily and create bridges across clusters. Hybrids benefit from acting as brokers and in doing so, they facilitate the exchange of material and ideational resources across the governance system. Even if it is not their intention, they contribute to holding governance systems together and counterbalance the effect of homophily. We illustrate this argument by examining the space governance system and the hybrid nature, bridging activities, and brokerage role of the European Space Agency.
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Couette, C. (2024) Epistemic competition in global governance: The case of pharmaceutical patents. Global Policy, 00, 1–12. Available from: https://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.13342
Expert consensus helps policymakers solve complex problems by identifying and legitimizing policy solutions. Yet, persistent hesitation remains among policymakers regarding the technically adequate policy solution despite the existence and mobilization of epistemic communities. This paper contends that more attention should be given to studying the epistemic competition that may arise when multiple epistemic communities grapple with the same problem but have divergent understandings of its technical nature and its adequate policy solutions. Building on Science and Technology Studies and on the literature on polarization, this paper suggests that two social dynamics, namely the mobilization of resources and increased polarization, may complexify the technical disagreement among experts. In turn, these dynamics may lead to a deadlock in the debates, negatively impacting the institutional context where they take place. To illustrate this, this paper analyzes the case of the pharmaceutical innovation system, which has been prone to tensions between experts arguing for strong patent protection and experts arguing for greater flexibility to meet public health needs. This paper builds on a mixed method combining a social network analysis of experts invited to provide their expertise in the WHO-WTO-WIPO Trilateral Cooperation events and on semi-structured interviews with 24 of these experts.