Lived experience as evidence in anti-poverty policy making

A Governance-Driven Perspective

Bibliographic Data

ID6326600
AuthorsClementine Hill O’connor (0000-0003-1693-1697, University of Glasgow), Hayley Bennett (0000-0003-0659-4033, University of Edinburgh)
Year2025
Pages1-22
Publication date2025-08-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenuePolicy & Politics (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0305-5736 • E-ISSN: 1470-8442
PublisherBristol University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1332/03055736y2025d000000078
OpenAlexW4413209763
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited40

A participatory turn has occurred in recent years that claims to centre citizens’ voices in knowledge production and policy-making processes. This includes an increasing emphasis on ‘lived experience’ – experiential knowledge of particular social or policy issues – within policy making. This article draws on participatory governance literature to consider the different drivers of the move towards the use of lived experience in policy making, as well as to offer terminology to make sense of different approaches to generating and using lived experience. We find that, although lived experience is often considered as a democracy-driven and campaigning movement that challenges traditional forms of expertise and power, it is also driven by state-led processes of participation and thus could be considered an example of governance-driven democratisation. We explore governance-driven democratisation and the use of lived experience in the context of Scottish anti-poverty policy making. We show that, while the language of participation and deliberation feature in the rationale, these ideas are squeezed out as institutional needs and norms take precedent. We argue that this illustrates the ways that policy ‘elites’ are required to design processes that serve specific policy needs and that these needs are often related to producing and using specific forms of evidence. In this way, this research makes an important contribution to existing literatures on ‘evidence-use’ and participatory governance that consider how types of evidence are perceived and utilised in policy-making processes

Citizen journalism · Context (archaeology · Corporate governance · Deliberation · Deliberative democracy · Democracy · Democratization · Economics · Evidence-based policy · Experiential learning · Management · Political science · Politics · Public relations · Sociology · Terminology · Foucault, Power, and Ethics · Gender Politics and Representation · Law · Public Administration · Social Policy and Reform Studies

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