Politicising Expertise: Experts by Experience in Finnish Participatory Governance

The recent participatory practices that invite citizens to participate as ‘lay experts’ in policy-making has been received with ambiguity by democratic theorists. On the one hand, the increased civic participation and reach thereof has been embraced as a process of democratization by some scholars of participatory democracy. On the other, the engagement of citizens as experts has caused concerns of ‘de-politicisation’, particularly among post-structuralist democratic theorists (Laclau & Mouffe 2014, Rancière 1999, Griggs, Norval & Wagenaar 2014, Blaug 2002). Expertisation and ‘rendering technical’ (Li 2007) have been branded as practices through which the political playing field is reduced. As matters under discussion are re-framed as administrative issues, solvable through the acquisition of enough relevant knowledge, it appears both rational and necessary to limit the right to participate to only those citizens who possess ‘relevant expertise’ on the matter, subsequently contributing to the devouring of democratic participation by administrative practices. This article is interested in how this de-politicisation might happen on a grassroot-level. It studies an engagement practice in the Finnish social welfare sector, where people with various problematic experiences are invited to act as experts-by-experience in social welfare organisations and social policy. Drawing on post-structuralist democratic theory, the article illuminates the strategic use of the projects’ key vocabulary, namely the notions of expertise and knowledge. Through this, the article illustrates how the newly crafted expert-role is employed to curb and steer experience-based action into collaborative and constructing “co-creation” of solutions for pre-defined problems. Through this grassroots-perspective, the article also problematizes the simplistic understanding of de-politicisation as a unidirectional process. By drawing on pragmatist theorizing of critique (Celikates 2018), the article suggests that this turn to expertise can, at the same time, enable politicising the concepts of knowledge and expertise. This finding contributes to the emerging discussion on the possibilities to put agonistic ideals of democracy to practice, and to our understanding of the possibilities of critique as a social practice. At the same time, it urges us to consider the possible boundaries and implications of the politicization of expertise.