How knowledge practices shape outcomes in social movements: A Case study of the People’s Assembly 2013 in Estonia

Democratization of expertise and the “participatory turn” in knowledge production in decision-making is often based on the assumption to build trust in the society towards democratic institutions if its undermined. The lack of trust among decision-makers toward citizens often remains behind the focus. The case of People’s Assembly 2013 Rahvakogu, triggered by the legitimacy crisis of political representation in Estonia, is one of the rare empirical examples one can trace how the co-production of expertise with regular citizens, and deliberation with a representative sample of citizens, changed institutionally and technologically the ways how citizens can participate in political decision-making. To grasp the decade-long continuity of this social movement in Estonia, we take the knowledge-based approach to unfold conditions and the meaning of outcomes in society. This approach is inspired by the conceptual work of Donatella della Porta and Elena Pavan, on “repertoires of knowledge practices” – “that is, the set of practices that foster the coordination of disconnected, local, and highly personal experiences and rationalities within a shared cognitive system able to provide movements and their supporters with a common orientation for making claims and acting collectively to produce social, political, and cultural changes.“ (della Porta and Pavan 2017, 297) We argue that knowledge is the precondition for individual outcomes and a glue in the chain of outcomes. To unfold its role, we analyze three aspects of knowledge practices: First, which kind of knowledge was conditional for an outcome to occur; second, which kind of knowledge was produced by the outcome; third, what is the practice of knowledge transmission. The case study is based on the constructivist grounded theory approach. The data includes 12 in-depth interviews with the key actors involved in the People’s Assembly and its outcomes, as well as reflections of different stakeholders about the process in the media. In addition, policy analysis of political finance is applied to trace the effect of knowledge co-production for institutional change. From the methodological perspective, this paper also discusses the opportunities and limits grounded theory offers to study social movement outcomes.