Citizen experts in participatory governance: Democratic and epistemic assets of service user involvement, local knowledge and citizen science

2021

Initiatives that attribute expert status to ‘ordinary citizens’ proliferate in a range of societal realms and are generally celebrated for ‘democratising expertise’. By tapping new sources of knowledge and participation simultaneously, such ‘citizen expertise’ practices seem to provide responses to the contemporary decline of trust in political elites and traditional experts that seriously challenges the legitimacy of democratic policy-making. This study distinguishes between three quintessential types of citizen expertise (‘local knowledge’, ‘service user involvement’ and ‘citizen science’) and, from an integrated perspective, critically discusses the value of citizen expertise for public…