What do Experts-by-Experience Know? Struggles over and for Experience-Based Knowledge in Finnish Service User Involvement Initiatives

The increasingly popular service user involvement schemes sit at the intersection of several current governance trends. The service users’ ‘lived knowledge’ is emphasized as a means to more ‘evidence-based’ policy-making, as well as a key component in building more effective governance networks in service co-production, and in ‘empowering’ the service users. As a result, experience, alongside scientific facts, has become an increasingly powerful source of authority (Blencowe, Brigstocke, and Dawney 2013; Demszky and Nassehi 2012). Despite its popularity, previous studies have indicated that the form and role of the participants’ knowledge remains a somewhat hidden site of political struggle (Krick 2016; Smith-Merry 2012). The service users’ knowledge is often referred to as ‘second’ or ‘alternative’ knowledge (Barnes and Cotterell 2012), and while the participants are invited to take part based on their experience-based knowledge, they are required to transcend it in order for their participation to be considered legitimate (Lehoux, Daudelin, and Abelson 2012; Neveu 2011). This paper seeks to develop this discussion by investigating how experience-based knowledge is defined and distinguished from other forms of knowledge in service user involvement initiatives in Finland. Drawing on my ethnographic research on seven initiatives introducing ‘experts-by-experience’ into Finnish social welfare, the paper interrogates the construction of experience-based knowledge as a distinct knowledge category, and the struggles involved in this boundary work. Through a micro-level approach, it seeks to demonstrate how negotiations on the forms and role of knowledge function as key sites where power in present-day network forms of governance is manifest.