Introduction

In Chapter 1, we described the problem with regulatory systems that self-referentially exclude ‘ordinary’ citizens from processes of decisionmaking. We suggested that regulatory systems needed to find ways to bring in ‘experts-by-experience’ to work alongside technocratic expertise. To produce regulatory systems that are human-centred, we need to find new ways of incorporating the expertise of citizens who experience being regulated on a daily basis, that is, we must work towards the co-design of such systems.

In this chapter, we discuss our experiments in shifting understandings of expertise and in co-producing research that formed the basis of the Productive Margins programme. Those experiments were structured as the Productive Communities Research Forum, a series of gatherings that included all active co-researchers and occurred every three to six months over the lifetime of the Productive Margins programme. Before we discuss this experimental method, we need to ask: who is the ‘we’ in this chapter? Co-production as a specific set of approaches to collaborative research involves diverse voices. In this chapter, we bring together the Productive Margins principal investigator, community lead, arts and humanities lead, and one of the co-investigators who worked as a link between two projects and the core management group. We have different research interests, forms of expertise, values and standpoints on collaborative working in communities.

Introduction

Regulation permeates everyday life and is yet almost invisible – a network of rules, procedures, bureaucracies and forms that must daily be navigated and negotiated. Regulation is understood as a central role of states – protecting citizens from the consequences of markets and competition – but is nevertheless highly contested. The financial crisis exposed the inability of states to control the financial sector, as has their subsequent lack of action to limit bank bailouts, excessive salaries, fraud and poor risk management. More recently, regulation has become a key target of the anti-statist, anti-expert political discourses witnessed in the ‘Leave’ campaign to take the UK out of the European Union and the 2016 US presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

Yet, activists and theorists have long argued and fought for an intensification of reforms through regulation: health and safety regulation in the interests of workers; rent and building standards to protect tenants; the regulation of hate speech to protect migrants; and controls on schooling to protect and further the interests of children. Furthermore, as more functions shift away from direct state control, we have seen the proliferation of calls for the extension of state-based regulation to secure justice and protect citizens. For example, the fire in the Grenfell Tower flats in London in 2017, which led to the deaths of 72 residents, stimulated public debate about who should be controlling construction standards, and how. Grenfell Tower exposed what happens when regulatory systems are unable (or unwilling) to listen to the concerns of those whose identities are not necessarily inscribed in bureaucratic power – the residents who could see, and had to live with, the dangers of regulatory failure.

Imagining Regulation Differently takes a bottom-up approach to rethinking regulation. Here, we are interested in how societies, not just government, regulate, and so our framing is more holistic and multi-vectored than many approaches to regulation. In this book, we recognise that the expertise of communities at the margins of power structures can produce different capabilities that we believe could transform the terrain and spaces of regulatory systems. In the chapters that follow, we explore experiences of regulation across diverse spheres in ways that aim to support policymakers and community organisations to develop new approaches, while, at the same time, challenging academic thinking.

Introduction

Regulation scholarship has typically been domain-specific, focusing on a particular industry (such as financial services) or a specific legislative domain (such as health and safety). Even when theorising at a general level, it has drawn its theoretical insights from domain-specific research. By contrast, the imaginative heart of each of the explorations laid out in the preceding chapters has been the holistic lived experience of diverse groups of citizens, many of whom described themselves as excluded from regulatory systems. In those experiential spaces, as this book has subsequently shown, multiple regulatory domains criss-cross, fragment and overlap. The specialised knowledges of each domain tend not to talk to each other, and even if they are linked through practices such as ‘joined-up policymaking’, these are often unintelligible to the citizens caught up in this regulatory web.

In generating exploration from the starting point of the lived realities of these citizens, it is fitting that ‘expertise-by-experience’ has been at the conceptual heart of the Productive Margins research programme. Correspondingly, the technocratic specialised expertise of specific regulatory domains has been more in the shadows, though this final chapter does seek to find points of fruitful dialogue with it. However, it is key to the findings of the whole research programme that expertiseby-experience is both sidelined and valuable. It is sidelined by current approaches to regulation, and it is valuable for redressing the limitations of those approaches documented in Chapter 1.

Two examples may bring to life the force of this general point. The first concerns the collectively written novel created by the research project Life Chances (see Chapter 6). This creative methodology involved participants developing characters from lived experience. This meant that it was possible to meld into one coherent narrative the everyday experience of negotiating with asylum and immigration officials, teachers, social workers, homelessness officers, and other regulatory officials. These multiple fields typically operate according to particular siloed logics, but by putting the experience embodied by relational subjects at the centre of the novel's narrative, this particularity moves into the background, melding into cross-cutting ripples of an individual life instead.

Introduction

In this chapter, one of the authors tells the story of when she was chief executive officer (CEO) of the Single Parent Action Network (SPAN) and became involved in an ambitious urban regeneration project in the early 2000s, a venture that then fell apart under the pressures of ‘austerity’. SPAN is now a partner in ‘Productive Margins: Regulating for Engagement’, a collaboration between two universities and nine community organisations that aims to co-produce a series of research projects, and is one of the largest single research programmes to be funded through ‘Connected Communities’.

This story illustrates the two different strands enmeshed in this book. In the urban policy context, it can be viewed as a ‘post-regeneration’ story, showing the ways in which changes in urban policy shape and interact with the lived reality of the organisations, people and social structures that the policy is focused upon. For the ‘Connected Communities’ programme, it illustrates why community organisations and academics must be concerned with the regulatory mechanisms that enmesh the everyday activities of communities at the margins if the programme is to engage with issues of social justice.

The experiences in the SPAN story are the experiences of many, and have led to the research question that guides the ‘Productive Margins’ programme: how can we explore ways in which the ‘creativity, passions and skills’ of communities at the margins are able to produce new ways of thinking and ‘new experiments in living’? The ‘Productive Margins’ partnership intends to explore new imaginings of social space, ways of ‘mobilising neighbourhoods’ and ways in which digital spaces can and have been harnessed to shift power relations. Perhaps most critically, we aim to both explore and produce ‘spaces of dissent’ in which to challenge dominant discourses of ‘austerity’ and ‘we’re all in it together’, discourses that are all too frequently used to regulate and control social space, negating dreams of equality, the celebration of difference and of living differently.

The authors of this chapter were both involved in the design of the ‘Productive Margins’ programme from the outset. One, an academic with research projects on social housing and third sector advice organisations, became the principal investigator responsible for bringing together the bid to the Economic and Social Research Council.